Ronan Farrow

Mia Farrow along with Ronan and her other children, relocated to rural Connecticut, in Frog Hollow, her home after Woody Allen lost guardianship of the children in 1992.

Both Ronan and his mother are no longer on talking terms with Allen as he besmirched the family name by entering into an incestuous relationship with an adopted child of Mia Farrow. Mia Farrow and Woody Allen made a total of 13 films over a ten year period but never married.

Mia Farrow lived in New York’s Central Park with her 12 children—eight of whom were adopted from orphanages in faraway countries—and the rest biological.

Ronan was born on 19th December 1987, in New York City, to celebrity parents, Woody Allen, a renowned film director and producer, and actress Mia Farrow. He is the only biological offspring amongst all the issues of his parents.

Mia Farrow, once revealed in an interview to ‘Vanity Fair’ that Frank Sinatra, her ex-husband, could be Ronan’s father. Ronan’s two middle names ‘Satchel’ and ‘O’ Sullivan’ were adopted from Satchel Page, Hall of Fame baseball pitcher, and maternal grandmother Maureen O’Sullivan respectively.

In 1999, he took on the moniker ‘Seamus’ while studying biology and Latin at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Soon after, he started attending classes at Bard College, excelling in literature in his sophomore year. Elizabeth Frank, a biographer who taught literature, was hugely impressed by his writing skills.

Later on, he qualified to study at Yale Law School when he was just 16 and received his degree in 2009. He was granted a Rhodes scholarship in 2011 to conduct doctoral research in international relations at Oxford University. His law degree made him eligible to become a New York bar member.

Around the time he was at Yale Law School, he was appointed spokesman for Youth by UNICEF, and served in that position from 2001 to 2009. As a spokesperson, he visited Darfur in Sudan, advocating for the rights of women and children, unsuspectingly embroiled in the civil war.

Ronan also accompanied his mother, Mia Farrow, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, on trips to Sudan’s Darfur region, to press for the security of Darfuri refugees. He was apprenticed to ‘Davis Pollock & Wardwell’ a law firm and at the office of United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs while he was at Yale.

He served as a ‘Special Adviser for Humanitarian and NGO affairs’ under the bureau of the ‘Special Representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan’ in the Obama government from 2009. From 2009-11, he supervised the US Government’s rapport with NGOs and civil society in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Secretary of State in the Obama administration, Ms. Hillary Clinton, appointed Farrow as her Special Advisor and Director of Global Youth Issues under the State Department office. Hillary had appointed a multiyear grouping on an ad-hoc basis for assessing the country’s social and economic guidelines on youth issues and the bureau was instituted for streamlining the tasks.

Ronan was appointed as the co-chairman of the task force for global youth issues starting from 2010 along with David Barth, a veteran USAID (United States Agency for International Development). Ronan’s principal responsibility as a special advisor was to frame guidelines for youth programs with the overarching objective of making the young more proactive.

Ronan Farrow received the Refugees International’s McCall-PierPaoli Humanitarian Award in 2008 for his ‘extraordinary service to refugees and displaced people’.

In 2012, Forbes magazine in its section on “30 under 30” Most Influential People, placed him on the top in ‘Law and Policy’ category. Dominican University of California awarded him an honorary Doctorate in 2012.

He won the 3rd Cronkite Award from ‘Reach the World’ in 2014 for “Excellence in Exploration and Journalism”. The award was given to him for his contributions as an UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth since 2001.