Ali MacGraw

Elizabeth Alice MacGraw was born on April 1, 1939, in Manhattan, New York City, and grew up in Pound Ridge, New York. Her parents, Frances and Richard MacGraw, were both commercial artists. Her mother was of Hungarian-Jewish descent, the daughter of emigrants from Budapest, while her father had Scottish ancestry and had spent his childhood in an orphanage before running away to sea at sixteen and later studying art in Munich. MacGraw has one brother, Dick, also an artist. She attended Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut, and earned a degree from Wellesley College in 1960.

Following her graduation, MacGraw spent six years at Harper's Bazaar as a photographic assistant to Diana Vreeland, and also worked at Vogue as a fashion model and photographer's stylist. She appeared in a Chanel advertisement in 1966 and began her acting career in television commercials, including spots for the Polaroid Swinger camera and International Paper.

MacGraw's film career gained momentum with Goodbye, Columbus (1969), her first leading role, for which she received a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Her next film, Love Story (1970), opposite Ryan O'Neal, became one of the highest-grossing films in U.S. history and earned her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. By 1972, after appearing in just three films, MacGraw was voted the top female film star in the world and had her handprints, footprints, and autograph engraved at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. That same year she starred opposite Steve McQueen in The Getaway, one of the year's top ten box office performers. After a five-year hiatus from acting, she returned in the box office hit Convoy (1978) with Kris Kristofferson, followed by Players (1979) and Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), the latter directed by Sidney Lumet. In 1983, she starred in the television miniseries The Winds of War, and in 1985 joined the ABC prime-time series Dynasty for fourteen episodes before her character was killed off in the Moldavian Massacre cliffhanger. MacGraw later acknowledged in a 2011 interview that she took the Dynasty role for the money. In February 2021, she and O'Neal were honored with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, fifty years after the release of Love Story.

MacGraw made her Broadway debut in 2006 in Festen, playing a dysfunctional matriarch in the drama. Her Broadway work continued through 2014, during which she also appeared in Love Letters, A.R. Gurney's two-hander in which she reunited with Ryan O'Neal. A staging of Love Letters toured the United States and United Kingdom through 2017.

In 1991, MacGraw published her autobiography, Moving Pictures, which addressed her struggles with alcohol and sex addiction, including treatment at the Betty Ford Center. That same year, People magazine named her one of its fifty most beautiful people in the world. In 2008, GQ included her in its list of the twenty-five sexiest women in film.

MacGraw became a devoted practitioner of Hatha Yoga in her early fifties and produced a yoga video with instructor Erich Schiffmann titled Ali MacGraw Yoga Mind and Body. In June 2007, Vanity Fair credited her as one of the figures responsible for the practice's growing popularity in the United States.

Animal welfare has been a sustained focus of MacGraw's public life. In 2006 she filmed a public service announcement for PETA urging people to evacuate with their pets during wildfires, and in 2007 she advocated for a ban on cockfighting in New Mexico. She wrote the foreword to Pawprints of Katrina (2008) by Cathy Scott, a book documenting the largest pet rescue in U.S. history. MacGraw serves as a U.S. Ambassador for the animal welfare organization Animals Asia and received the Humane Education Award from Animal Protection of New Mexico. She has lived in Tesuque, New Mexico, since 1994, after the Malibu house she rented was destroyed by fire.

MacGraw has been married three times. She married banker Robert Hoen on October 29, 1960; they divorced in July 1962. On October 24, 1969, she married film producer Robert Evans, with whom she had a son, Josh Evans, born January 16, 1971, an actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. That marriage ended in divorce finalized on June 7, 1973. On July 12, 1973, MacGraw married Steve McQueen in Cheyenne, Wyoming; they divorced in August 1978. She has not remarried in the decades since. After Evans died in 2019, MacGraw told The Hollywood Reporter that she and their son Joshua would miss him tremendously and were proud of his contribution to the film industry.