Even among the most famous women of the 20th century, Ali MacGraw remains in rarefied air. Still a household name at 87, MacGraw hasn’t had a leading role in a film since 1980, and while she acted intermittently on television in the 1980s and early-1990s—perhaps most notably in the miniseries The Winds of War and on 14 episodes of Dynasty—she hasn’t acted at all since 1997’s Glam, directed by her son Joshua Evans, and 1999’s Get Bruce, a Bruce Villanch comedy where she makes a cameo as herself.
Maybe MacGraw isn’t as famous as, say, Taylor Swift, but Sydney Sweeney? Zendaya? All those other girls on Euphoria? On the one hand, icons of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s have endured into the 2020s in large part because of the pop cultural stagnation that started early in the Obama administration; but even then, people as famous as Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Corgan, Madonna, Paul Thomas Anderson, and many more have to keep playing the game as it evolves, whether it’s from talk show to podcast or from bleeding heart to “the audience doesn’t want to be lectured.” MacGraw hasn’t had to do any of that. She dutifully appeared in documentaries about her famous films, the famous people she worked with (and married), and still shows up for retrospective screenings and events in Los Angeles.
MacGraw made her film debut in 1968’s A Lovely Way to Die, a strange Kirk Douglas spy spoof with a killer theme song. It’s a nothing role, but she has a line or two. The next year, she was the female lead in Larry Peerce’s adaptation of Goodbye Columbus, a fine showcase for a young Richard Benjamin, an actor I never really liked until I saw this movie. MacGraw, on the other hand, how can you not like her from the moment you see her? Not only is she gorgeous, she has a strong, rich voice, and the camera loves her. She has “it”—whatever ineffable charisma and magnetism the most famous movie stars of all time had, oh, she has it in spades. No wonder she’s remained so well-known for so few films.
Goodbye Columbus did what it was supposed to do, and MacGraw and Benjamin were noted as rising stars. But 1970’s Love Story, directed by Arthur Hiller and co-starring Ryan O’Neal, exceeded all expectations, making $174 million against a budget of $2 million and spawning a line so iconic and so loathed it was still referenced and parodied when I was a kid in the early-2000s. The first time I heard “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” I assumed it was a slogan, or simply another stupid cliché. Peter Bogdanovich had Barbra Streisand bat her eyelashes at Ryan O’Neal and say the line just two years later in his farce What’s Up, Doc?, another massive hit for O’Neal. Indeed, O’Neal’s is one of the few careers of the 1970s you can compare to MacGraw’s, but he faded so much faster than she did, despite all the ancillary attention he got in the late-2000s for being married to Farrah Fawcett as she succumbed to cancer. I mean, this guy starred in a fucking Kubrick movie. You ask someone on the street “Who’s Ryan O’Neal?” And you get nowhere. “Ali MacGraw,” on the other hand—well, maybe they can’t name the movies anymore, but they know the name.
Besides “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” MacGraw primarily became known as a model-wife-turned-actress who couldn’t act. She got the same treatment as Yoko Ono and Cybill Shepherd in the 1970s, and I never understood it until I saw her first two films. You’ve got to understand that MacGraw only made six films in the prime of her career: after Love Story, she starred in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway with instant husband Steve McQueen, and then took a six-year break before returning to do Convoy for Peckinpah, when the director was much further down the deteriorating line all addicts follow. Just before McQueen died an early-death from cancer, MacGraw starred in 1979’s Players, a tennis romance that has nothing to do with the 1979 Don DeLillo novel of the same name, and Just Tell Me What You Want, an interminable “comedy” by Sidney Lumet where she co-stars alongside Alan King, who’s as much of a dead fish as she’s a blazing star.
Players, never released on DVD and only available on VHS, is a sober sports drama/romance in the vein of Personal Best, Chariots of Fire, and even a little Breaking Away. Besides the Peckinpah films, it’s MacGraw’s best work, long after she shed the amateur tics and habits that marred her first two films and garnered her enduring reputation as a “bad actress.”
Some of those bad habits: in her first two films, MacGraw doesn’t know how to cry. When Richard Benjamin confronts her at a friend’s wedding, MacGraw’s jaw starts swinging in the wind, as if she just inhaled an invisible eight ball. In fact, she’s trying to look like she’s “about to cry.” She pulls the same move again and again in Love Story, including that famous line that’ll no doubt be at the top of all other obituaries. Shivering and covered in snot on the steps to the library, MacGraw’s jaw grinds away, desperately in need of a drink or a downer to even out; she reminds O’Neal that “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” an admittedly catchy slogan fit for Hallmark or Coca-Cola that O’Neal gets to use on his emotionally-disconnected father (Ray Milland) at the end of the film, just after MacGraw’s character has died of an unnamed blood disease.
Love Story was an important movie, if critically reviled and thoroughly uncool from the moment of its release. 1970 was apocalyptic in Hollywood, with 20th Century Fox forced to sell off their soundstages—big enough to create an entire new neighborhood in Los Angeles called Century City. The titans of the New Hollywood—Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Spielberg, Lucas, Bogdanovich—had all made films, but were still a few years away from their breakthrough work. Older directors like Peckinpah, Altman, and Kubrick were fresh off epochal films like The Wild Bunch, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and M*A*S*H, but a handful of masterpieces made by difficult auteurs is no way to sustain an industry that, just a decade prior, had a robust studio system that kept actors and technicians under contract and developed the kind of talent over generations that gives you flawless focus pulling and divine lighting schemes.
The movies need people like Peckinpah, Altman, and Kubrick to expand the possibilities of the medium just as much as they need corn like Love Story to keep theaters open and keep millions of people going. As a film fan, you can only be so sniffy when it comes to romcom hits like Anyone But You and It Ends With Us, because they keep the idea of “the movies,” and they protect film from becoming closed off from the outside world like academia or… opera… and ballet…
MacGraw was 30 when she made Love Story, and already a mother. She had extensive experience as a model, but no training as an actor, and struggled once she started working with Peckinpah and McQueen. In 1992, she said that she liked Peckinpah “immediately,” but she never caught up on the set: “I arrived as ‘the girl from Love Story’ to this very, very macho, male-dominated scene. The set, the energy, the ideas, the definition of ‘woman,’ and I don’t recall having much input at all. I was sort of ‘wind me up and hope for the best.’” She admitted her lack of training was a detriment, and once she was happily married to McQueen, why bother working? You know, you’ve got a kid, a new husband, you’re well off—does acting in another movie and getting called a lousy actress by every columnist in the world sound like fun? No.
In Just Tell Me What You Want, MacGraw tells Alan King to, “STOP TREATING ME LIKE PUSSY—YOU DON’T HAVE TO PAY FOR MY ABORTIONS!” She was getting the hang of it—acting—by the time she worked with Sidney Lumet, but the film was a bust and that was that. Although they divorced shortly before he died, MacGraw never remarried after McQueen and still says he was the “love of her life.” MacGraw didn’t need to act that much again because she was fulfilled: she’d already been to the top of the entertainment mountain and gotten all you can from it, a family. Otherwise, there’s nothing there, and she’s lucky to have discovered that relatively early in life, and at such a peak.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM
