Ali MacGraw arrived in Hollywood carrying the kind of natural, unmanufactured beauty and the kind of quietly intelligent screen presence that the industry spends decades trying to cultivate artificially and almost never achieves — the young woman from Pound Ridge, New York who became one of the most recognizable faces on the planet almost overnight with Love Story in 1970, whose performance as Jenny Cavilleri made an entire generation understand what it felt like to love someone completely and to lose them, and whose ascent to the very top of Hollywood’s most-wanted list happened with a speed that left the industry scrambling to understand what it had found.

She was the most bankable actress in America. She had everything the industry defines as everything. And then she met Steve McQueen on the set of The Getaway in 1972 — and the affair that followed, conducted while she was still married to producer Robert Evans, the man whose belief in her had given her the career she had, cost her in ways that the box office and the magazine covers and the critical acclaim had given her no preparation to calculate and no framework to survive. The affair ended her marriage to Evans. The marriage to McQueen that followed was beautiful and violent and consuming in equal measure — a relationship that took the rest of what the Evans marriage had left intact and remade it in the specific image of a man whose charisma and whose damage were so completely intertwined that separating them was not something Ali MacGraw was able to do until the cost of not doing it had become higher than she could continue paying. At 85, looking back at the affair that started the chain of losses — the career that narrowed, the marriage that ended, the years spent inside a relationship that took more than it gave — Ali MacGraw has finally said what all of it cost her with the honesty and the absence of self-pity that has always been the most defining thing about her.