Search Dumb.com:

Dumb.com » » Celebrity Biographies » » Ali Mcgraw

  Ali Mcgraw Biography

This section contains Ali Mcgraw Biography


Golden Globe winning and Academy Award nominated actress Ali McGraw was born Alice MacGraw in Pound Ridge, New York on April 1, 1938. Ali was born from an Irish-American father and Jewish mother. Despite her self described violent father she had a normal childhood with one brother and was able to graduate from Wellesley College. After graduation she worked in a series of jobs in fashion magazines. She started as a photo assistant at Harper’s Bazaar, and then became assistant to Diana Vreelad in Vogue. This was then followed by her career as a fashion model.

She was first noticed in Goodbye, Columbus but her star rose to stardom in Love Story in 1970. She had her own style which became famous across the country and around the globe that her own sense of style was celebrated by Time Magazine. This style is minimalist, emphasizing healthy skin without excessive use of make up, long glowing hair pulled simply in the back and her trade mark “Ali Cap”, a brimless wool hat.

She starred in many films including Convoy, Just Tell Me What You Want and Players. She also appeared in the miniseries China Rose and the critically and commercially loved The Winds of War. She was also seen as Lady Ashley Mitchell in one of TV’s most successful soap opera, Dynasty in 1985. And in 1991 People Magazine named her as one of its 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. In 2006 she first appeared in Broadway as a socially dysfunctional matriarch in Festen (The Celebration).

Ali wrote Moving Pictures, an autobiography where she narrated in many details her struggles with alcoholism and her dependence to men. Despite the success of the book she later described it as “not well written”. Her alcohol abuse problem forced her to seek treatment at the Betty Ford Center.

After moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico she became a Hatha Yoga devotee. Then in her fifties she made a Yoga video with Erich Schiffmann the Amreican Yoga Master. The video became an instant hit for over a decade that in 2007 Vanity Fair named her as one of the people responsible for Yoga’s success in the United States. In 2003 she then followed the success of the video with a documentary on Yoga entitled The Fire of Yoga. Again this was well received and rekindled people’s interest in Yoga.

She married producer director Robert Evans in October of 1969 and had a son with him named Josh Evans who is now an actor and a producer. She divorced Robert in 1972 after her much publicized involvement with Steve McQueen in The Gateway. She then married him in August of 1973 but they divorced later on in 1978.