6 Lovely Facts About ‘Love Story’ Star Ali MacGraw
It was no fluke when Ali MacGraw, who turns 86 today, earned a 1970 Golden Globe win for Most Promising Newcomer. She returned to the Golden Globes stage the following year to accept another trophy, this one her performance in the smash-hit romance film Love Story, only her second film credit. A year after that, after she had made only three films, she was voted the most popular female movie star in the world in a Reuters poll, and she left her handprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
In the years that followed, she had a public romance with her The Getaway costar Steve McQueen (while still not quite divorced from her second husband, Hollywood super-producer Robert Evans), took a five-year break from acting in which she married and divorced McQueen, returned to film with the 1978 Kris Kristofferson hit Convoy, and had mostly retired from the big screen by the end of the ’80s, while still remaining an icon of effortless cool and natural beauty — she landed on People‘s “50 Most Beautiful People” list in 1991.
Suffice it to say, MacGraw has left her mark — not just on Hollywood Boulevard, but in the hearts of moviegoers everywhere. Read on for fun facts about MacGraw.
1 Ali MacGraw got her start as a fashion assistant and stylist
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Before her big break, MacGraw worked as an assistant to Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland and a stylist for photographer Melvin Sokolsky.
In her memoir, Moving Pictures (via Vanity Fair), MacGraw described Vreeland as an overbearing boss: “One day, as I struggled on the carpet to arrange violet snakeskin shoes for a photo shoot, Mrs. Vreeland swept dramatically by me, throwing her heavy Mainbocher overcoat at me, and I involuntarily chucked it right back at her. ‘That is the rudest girl I have ever known!’ Oh, she was tough.”
2 She had a surreal experience with Salvador Dalí
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Elsewhere in her memoir, MacGraw recalled the time she posed nude for Salvador Dalí — until, that is, the Surrealist painter crawled under the table between them.
“Suddenly, down on the floor, out of my sight, I felt him begin to suck my toes,” she wrote. “I managed to mutter something about having to leave to walk the dog and, after throwing on all my clothes, slid out of there without betraying that I found this at all out of the ordinary.”
3 She was once roommates with Gloria Steinem
Lifetime Television/Courtesy Everett Collection
MacGraw roomed with Gloria Steinem in New York City when the feminist icon was a freelancer writing for Glamour, as that magazine reported in 2011 when it named Steinem its Woman of the Year.
“Gloria was a beautiful creature with so much substance and kindness and — this is important — not a bit of phony charm,” MacGraw said in an interview for Steinem’s Woman of the Year profile. “She never sold herself out, never — and that’s decades of ‘never.’ … She had a consistent core. Inside and outside, Gloria today is the same principled person I roomed with 50 years ago.”
4 She did Dynasty for the money
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“One or two things I did for the money,” MacGraw admitted to The Wall Street Journal in 2011. “Dynasty would be one of them; I definitely did that for the money.”
MacGraw played Lady Ashley Mitchell primetime soap in 1985, until her 13-episode run came to a bloody end in the show’s infamous Moldavian massacre. It wasn’t until MacGraw shot the scene that she knew Ashley’s fate.
“I did not know whether I was meant to close my eyes and lie still, or stare like a Keane painting at the ceiling,” she wrote in her memoir. “Between takes I asked the associate producer, who, in a rapture of theatrical pleasure, had grabbed a plastic bottle of false blood from the makeup man and was squirting it all over us. ‘Closed, stupid,’ she said. ‘You’re dead.’”
5 She reunited with Ryan O’Neal on stage 45 years after Love Story
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In 2015, MacGraw and Love Story leading man Ryan O’Neal reunited for a touring production of the A.R. Gurney play Love Letters. “It’s so comforting with Ryan, because we’ve known each other for years and years, and we know we’re on each other’s side,” MacGraw told The Boston Globe.
O’Neal, meanwhile, said that though he and MacGraw never had a real-life love story, it wasn’t for lack of trying. “I was always pounding on her door in the middle of the night,” he revealed. “She never opened it. … I’m not done yet.”
6 She almost had a Breaking Bad cameo
Cathy Kanavy/AMC/Courtesy Everett Collection
The script for Breaking Bad‘s fifth episode “Gray Matter” shows that MacGraw — a longtime resident of New Mexico, the show’s setting — was supposed to have a nonspeaking cameo as herself, “glowing with Hollywood glamour,” at a party Walt (Bryan Cranston) and Skyler (Anna Gunn) attend. IMDb trivia indicates MacGraw actually filmed that cameo but got dropped from the final cut.
Remind 
1972
January 2022
1972 was a year packed with everything from “American Pie” to Ziggy Stardust What’s not to love?
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