How Ali MacGraw Found Inner Peace

Just as it doesn’t seem possible that MacGraw is 78, it’s hard to believe that she and Ryan O’Neal built that snowman together 47 years ago in the film that fans still want to talk about today. “I am probably more shocked than anyone at the [enduring] response,” she says. “I have traveled to all corners of the world, and it is something of an American classic by now.” After the high-grossing blockbuster, MacGraw went on to make just six more movies and two television miniseries before retiring.

Fresh-faced beauty that she was, MacGraw actually began her acting career rather late, at 31, having worked at fashion magazines and as a photographer’s assistant in New York City after graduating from Wellesley College. But if fear and a kind of impostor syndrome contributed to the shortness of her career, so too, says MacGraw , did her marriage to Steve McQueen, her third husband.

They met on the set of The Getaway in 1972, and MacGraw says that McQueen, who’d survived a difficult and scarring childhood, longed for what he saw as a “normal” life. “At the time he was the biggest movie star in the world and he didn’t want me to work, so I essentially quit making movies and took care of my child,” she says of her five years at home with McQueen and her son, Josh, who was born during her first marriage to Hollywood producer Robert Evans.

Ali MacGraw in a recent photo shoot for Ibu, a garments and goods company that employees women artisans from around the world.

Rob Brinson/Ibu

The couple divorced after five tumultuous years, and McQueen died just a couple years later, in 1980. The next several years, says MacGraw , felt like a constant struggle to feel comfortable in her own skin. As she chronicles in her autobiography Moving Pictures, drinking and a series of destructive love affairs were other personal challenges of the time. Entering the Betty Ford Center in 1986, MacGraw says, turned out to be her salvation.

“My stay there was the most terrifying and life-changing experience I’ve ever had,” she says. “The single biggest thing that happened to me was my newfound certainty that there is a higher power. And I began to feel an underlying peace and sense of order that I had yearned for forever.”

Today  MacGraw has no intention of going back to making movies or acting on stage, although she and O’Neal crisscrossed the country performing in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters last year. “It was heaven to be reunited with Ryan, but I have no desire to make acting a part of my life again.”

What does fill her days, she says, is living “in a community that is small and with many causes that need help.” MacGraw moved to New Mexico to her “little cottage” in Santa Fe about 25 years ago — after she interpreted a fire at her Malibu house in 1993 as a sign that a more physical exodus from Hollywood was necessary — and devotes much of her time to volunteering for animal welfare causes. “I have to restrain myself from bringing home any more strays,” she notes. She also fosters close social ties nearby. “I love it because there are grownup women — women who don’t strut around in the latest fashion and aren’t afraid to let their hair go gray.”

A perfect day in her quiet Southwestern life, she says, begins at 5:30 a.m., when she’s awakened by her animals, and might include a Pilates or yoga class in town, followed by an evening at home. What’s almost always on tap, she says, is a daily walk, which — like much in her life today — she approaches with a sense of purpose. “Walking is my meditation,” she says. “Forty-five minutes of gratitude for all I have been given.” And at this point, she says, if there’s “a piece missing” (the grand love affair ... the person to grow older with ... the artistic breakthrough?), she has made peace with it. “I have wonderful people in my life, and I feel incredibly blessed.”