Epiphany Contributor Ali MacGraw on Oprah! October 11, 2010

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Yes, that Ali MacGraw – the Love Story award-winning actress, one of the original “It-girls” (as Oprah says), activist, philanthropist, author and best-selling yoga DVD creator, mother and so many other things (I’ll put her bio from the book below) is appearing on Oprah tomorrow!

I read about Ali in Vanity Fair on a plane flight home in March and knew I had to try to interview her.  She was a good friend of my friend, Stephen Bruton, who is on my website and was the first person I officially interviewed on camera for Epiphany.  I knew that but had never met Ali and she had no idea who I was.  She said via her publicist that she loved the whole concept but she needed time to make sure she knew what hers would be – that it was something important to really be thought out.  We almost couldn’t believe it when she actually agreed to do the interview!  (It was one of the times that my assistant and I did one of our victory dances in the office which includes actual dancing with some screaming, jumping up and down and maybe even, cringe, a high five.) When Ali and I spoke on the phone about her epiphany, she is just as wonderful and warm as everyone from Stephen and other friends of hers and the article in Vanity Fair says. She is extremely down-to-earth, passionate, cool and hip and has accomplished so much but is still always working on herself.  I often think about her insights about relinquishing control and having true acceptance and faith, and she had a lot to say about epiphanies themselves that I found so interesting and insightful, we left it all in her interview in the book.  I’ve pasted her bio below because I honestly had no idea the breadth of her accomplishments before I interviewed her (ie: her yoga video was one of the first, was an instant best-seller and is still selling over a decade later).

Also, since Epiphany became this sort of study of serendipity and interconnectedness and those themes play a big role in the whole Epiphany landscape – here’s an example of some serendipitous trivia: she was married and has a son with Robert Evans and one of the people in the book, Orian Williams, has Robert Evans as the central figure in his hilarious, amazing Epiphany story … I can’t wait for Ali to read it.  Set your DVR for Oprah Tomorrow!

“Every one of us has to pick our own way through the land mines of life – no one can or should do it for us.  Sometimes the most extravagant pain is the gateway to something incandescent.”

– Ali MacGraw

“…Epiphanies, at least in my case, are one of the most astonishing gifts. They are lifechanging, insofar as they transform our private worlds and our values.  They aren’t casual things that just slide across our consciousness.  They stop us cold in our tracks and we have to examine them.  What’s inherent in understanding these moments is the concept of hope — hope, solution, direction, and then on a deeper level, some peace of mind.”

Ali MacGraw is an internationally known award-winning actress, author, and activist.  She starred in the critically-acclaimed and international blockbuster hit films, Goodbye Columbus, The Getaway, and Love Story (for which she received a Golden Globe award and an Academy Award nomination), the epic mini-series The Winds of War, and the popular ABC-TV series, Dynasty, amongst many others. Her autobiography, Moving Pictures was an international bestseller, and her yoga video Ali MacGraw Yoga Mind and Body was a bestseller upon release and is still popular more than a decade later.  Ali is the mother of filmmaker Joshua Evans and currently lives in New Mexico. She travels extensively, appearing in documentaries and working on behalf of numerous social, animal and environmental causes. In 2008, she received the Luminaria Award from the Santa Fe Community Foundation, and New Mexico’s Governor’s Award for Contribution to the Arts.