Faye Dunaway

Early life and education

Dunaway was born in Bascom, Florida, the daughter of Grace April (née Smith), a housewife, and John MacDowell Dunaway Jr., a career non-commissioned officer in the United States Army. Her parents married as teenagers in 1939 and they divorced in 1955. She has a younger brother, lawyer Mac Simmion Dunaway. She is of Ulster Scottish, Irish, and German descent. She spent her childhood traveling throughout the United States and Europe, including lengthy stays in Mannheim, Germany, and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.

Dunaway took ballet, tap, piano, and singing lessons while she was growing up and she graduated from Leon High School in Tallahassee, Florida. She then studied at Florida State University and the University of Florida. Later, she graduated from Boston University with a degree in theatre.

She spent the summer before her senior year in a summer-stock company at Harvard's Loeb Drama Center, where one of her co-players was Jane Alexander, an actress and future head of the National Endowment for the Arts. During her senior year, she worked with director Lloyd Richards on a BU production of a new version of The Crucible, where Arthur Miller saw her perform. Following graduation in 1962, at the age of 21, she took acting classes at the American National Theater and Academy, and was recommended to director Elia Kazan, who was in search of young talent for his Lincoln Center Repertory Company. She also studied acting at HB Studio in New York City.

Shortly after she graduated from Boston University, Dunaway appeared on Broadway as a replacement in Robert Bolt's drama A Man for All Seasons. She subsequently appeared in Arthur Miller's After the Fall and the award-winning Hogan's Goat by Harvard professor William Alfred, who became her mentor and spiritual advisor. In her 1995 autobiography, Dunaway said of him: "With the exception of my mother, my brother, and my beloved son, Bill Alfred has been without question the most important single figure in my lifetime. A teacher, a mentor, and I suppose the father I never had, the parent and companion I would always have wanted, if that choice had been mine. He has taught me so much about the virtue of a simple life, about spirituality, about the purity of real beauty, and how to go at this messy business of life."

Career

1967–1968: Early films and breakthrough

Dunaway's first screen role was in the comedy crime film The Happening (1967), which starred Anthony Quinn. Her performance earned her good notices from critics; however, Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times panned the performance, saying that she "exhibits a real neat trick of resting her cheek on the back of her hand." That same year, she had a supporting role in Otto Preminger's drama Hurry Sundown, opposite Michael Caine and Jane Fonda. Filming proved to be difficult for Dunaway, as she clashed with Preminger, who she felt did not know "anything at all about the process of acting." She later described this experience as a "psychodrama that left me feeling damaged at the end of each day." Dunaway had signed a six-picture deal with Preminger, but decided during the filming to get her contract back. "As much as it cost me to get out of the deal with Otto, if I'd had to do those movies with him, then I wouldn't have done Bonnie and Clyde, or The Thomas Crown Affair, or any of the movies I was suddenly in a position to choose to do. Beyond the movies I might have missed, it would have been a kind of Chinese water torture to have been stuck in five more terrible movies. It's impossible to assess the damage that might have done to me that early on in my career." Preminger's film did not meet critical or box office success, but Dunaway retained notice enough to earn a Golden Globe Award nomination for New Star of the Year.

Dunaway had tried to get an interview with director Arthur Penn when he was directing The Chase (1966), but was rebuffed by a casting director who did not think that she had the right face for the movies. When Penn saw her scenes from The Happening before its release, he decided to let her read for the role of the bank robber Bonnie Parker for his upcoming film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Casting for the role of Bonnie had proved to be difficult, and many actresses had been considered for the role, including Jane Fonda, Tuesday Weld, Ann-Margret, Carol Lynley, Leslie Caron, and Natalie Wood. Penn loved Dunaway and managed to convince actor and producer Warren Beatty, who played Clyde Barrow in the film, that she was right for the part. Besides Dunaway's being a comparative unknown, Beatty's concern was her "extraordinary bone structure," which he thought might be inappropriate for Bonnie Parker, a local girl trying to look innocent while she held up small-town Texas banks. He changed his mind, though, after seeing some photographs of Dunaway taken by Curtis Hanson on the beach: "She could hit the ball across the net, and she had an intelligence and a strength that made her both powerful and romantic." Dunaway only had a few weeks to prepare for the role, and when she was asked to lose weight to give her character a Depression-era look, she went on a starvation diet, stopped eating, and dropped 30 pounds (14 kg).

1969–1973: Career setbacks

Following the completion of The Thomas Crown Affair, Dunaway leapfrogged France's new wave directors to begin filming in Italy Vittorio de Sica's romantic drama, A Place for Lovers (1968). This film was with Marcello Mastroianni, in which she played a terminally ill American fashion designer in Venice who has a whirlwind affair with a race-car driver. Although Dunaway had always wanted to avoid romances with her co-stars, she began a love affair with Mastroianni that lasted for two years. The film was an artistic disappointment and a commercial failure. In 1969, Dunaway appeared in The Arrangement, a drama directed by Elia Kazan, based upon his novel of the same title, opposite Kirk Douglas. The film did poorly at the box office, receiving mostly negative reviews, although Dunaway was praised, with Roger Ebert writing that her acting "is not only the equal of in Bonnie and Clyde, but is, indeed, the only good acting she has done since". Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that she was "looking so cool and elegant that the sight of her almost pinches the optic nerves". Also in 1969, The Extraordinary Seaman, a comedy adventure directed by John Frankenheimer and also starring David Niven that she shot right after Bonnie and Clyde, was released to poor reviews and proved to be a commercial failure. Despite protests from her agent, Dunaway turned down many high-profile projects to spend time with Mastroianni.

In 1969, Dunaway took a supporting role as a favor to Arthur Penn in his Western, Little Big Man. In a rare comic role, Dunaway played the sexually repressed wife of a minister who helps raise and seduce a boy raised by Native Americans, played by Dustin Hoffman. The film was widely praised by critics and was one of Dunaway's few commercial successes at this point. That same year, she appeared in the lead role in Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), an experimental drama directed by Jerry Schatzberg and inspired by the life of model Anne St. Marie. The film failed to generate commercial interest, though it earned for Dunaway a second Golden Globe nomination, for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama. The film remained in obscurity over 40 years, until it was revived at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival in honor of Dunaway. Involved in domestic issues in Italy with Mastroianni, after some months away from the industry, she finally found her next role in the Western Doc (1971), which tells the story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and of one of its protagonists, Doc Holliday. During the filming, Dunaway realized how much she had missed working. That same year, she went on to make the French thriller The Deadly Trap with her Lincoln Center compatriot Frank Langella. Rather than working with a director from the already crested new wave, Jean-Luc Godard, who had originally made contributions to the first script of Bonnie and Clyde, she worked with the French postwar director, who was held in the highest respect, René Clément. Only five months after the first day of shooting, the film was screened at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival but was not entered into the main competition.

1974–1981: Resurgence and acclaim

Director Roman Polanski offered Dunaway the lead role of Evelyn Mulwray in his mystery neo-noir Chinatown (1974). Although its producer, Robert Evans, wanted Polanski to consider Jane Fonda for the role, arguing that Dunaway had a reputation for temperament, Polanski insisted on using Dunaway. She accepted the challenging and complex role of Mulwray, a shadowy femme fatale who knows more than she is willing to let Detective J.J. Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) know. Dunaway got along well with Nicholson, describing him later as a "soul mate", but she clashed with Polanski, who had a reputation for being dictatorial and controlling on a set. "Roman was very much an autocrat, always forcing things. It ranged from the physical to the mental. He was very domineering and abrasive, and made it clear he wanted to manipulate the performance. That approach has never worked with me."

Two weeks after the filming started, the two had a confrontation that became notorious. Polanski pulled one of Dunaway's hairs out of her head, without telling her, because it was catching the light. Dunaway was offended, describing his act as "sadistic" and left the set furious. "It was not the hair, it was the incessant cruelty that I felt, the constant sarcasm, the never-ending need to humiliate me." Years later, both shared their admiration for each other, with Polanski saying that their feud was not important – "It's the result that counts. And she was formidable," while Dunaway admitted that "it was way too much made out of it," added that she enjoyed working with Polanski, calling him "a great director," and stated, Chinatown was "possibly the best film I ever made."

Despite the complications on the set, the film was finished, released to glowing reviews, and ultimately became a classic. It made back its budget almost five times, and received 11 Academy Award nominations. Dunaway received a second Best Actress nomination, and also received a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA nomination. Upon the release of the film, producer Robert Evans was full of praise for Dunaway. "She has everything—beauty, talent, neurosis. She's one of the great strange ones. When the lights go out and that face comes out of the dark and she looks at you with those big mysterious eyes, I tell you, it's a very compelling thing. She has something we haven't seen on the screen for a long time. She has witchery. She's a femme fatale."

That same year, Dunaway appeared in a television adaptation of After the Fall with Christopher Plummer. She played the lead role, which was for her "like a dream come true. As with Bonnie, I knew the territory well. Maggie (her character) was a completely wounded soul, a girl who had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks." She next played Paul Newman's fiancée, who is trapped in a burning skyscraper along with several hundred other people in the all-star disaster epic, The Towering Inferno (1974). The film became the highest-grossing film of the year, further cementing Dunaway as a top actress in Hollywood. Also in 1974, Dunaway married Peter Wolf, the lead singer of the rock group The J. Geils Band. At this time, she felt "exhausted from the constant and intense pressures of the work," and at the last moment pulled out of The Wind and the Lion (1975), in which she was to costar with Sean Connery, to concentrate on her married life.

1982–1999: Film, television, and theatre work

In 1982, Dunaway appeared in a television adaptation of Clifford Odets's dramatic play The Country Girl as the wife of a washed-up alcoholic singer played by Dick Van Dyke, whom she later described as "one of the sweetest and funniest men in the world", but admitted "Though it was a valiant effort on all our parts, and there were moments I thought were good and true, the remake fell short of our hopes and certainly of the original. But doing it helped remind of that I do love this business of acting, something the Crawford movie had come close to making me forget." That same year, she returned to the New York stage with William Alfred's second theatre project for her, The Curse of an Aching Heart. In her role, she later felt she had been miscast, "It was a little bit too star-heavy with me in it. The play would have been better with just the simplest of women." Despite her mixed feelings about it, her performance earned her good reviews from the critics, with Frank Rich writing for The New York Times that "Miss Dunaway's absence from the theater has not dimmed her stage technique. She's usually in command."

During this time, Dunaway moved to England with her partner Terry O'Neill, whom she married in 1982; being more interested in her married life, she only took on work that was convenient for her. That same year, she returned to the screen in Michael Winner's period melodrama The Wicked Lady, in which she played a 17th-century highway robber. The film proved to be a critical and commercial failure. "Though I loved making The Wicked Lady, in the end, it just didn't have the juice it needed to be a hit. It seemed to never quite decide whether to be a farce or a drama, and so it failed by being neither."

In 1984, Dunaway played the lead villain in the superhero movie Supergirl. She felt that "the film was really just a send-up, a spoof, and I had a lot of fun with Selena (her character)", but later admitted she was furious with the director Jeannot Szwarc, "Every time I tried to do something funny, he wouldn't let me. He said, "you have to be the straight person". I always wanted to do comedy, but it's daunting when you've not done it before." Also in 1984, Dunaway appeared in a television miniseries, Ellis Island, which earned her a second Golden Globe Award, for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film. The following year, she starred in the miniseries, Christopher Columbus. She also appeared in two Agatha Christie adaptations, Ordeal by Innocence and Thirteen at Dinner (which was made for television). Though the work was involving, Dunaway struggled to find artistically fulfilling roles during this period in England. "I missed doing movies. The television scripts I was getting were thin. There is no comparison between those and a Chinatown script." "Though I had worked steadily in England, it felt as if I had disappeared completely. I was rapidly becoming invisible. I felt increasingly that my career was being limited to, and limited by, the projects that were being mounted there." Following her divorce from O'Neill in 1987, Dunaway returned to the United States and attempted to rebuild her career by appearing in several independent dramas.

2000–2015: Independent films and hiatus

In 2000, Dunaway appeared in director James Gray’s crime film The Yards as Charlize Theron's mother. Although failing to do well at the box office, the film was received with positive reviews. That same year, she turned down an opportunity to play a drug addict in Requiem for a Dream and the role went to Ellen Burstyn, who received an Academy Award nomination for her performance. In 2001, Dunaway's role in Running Mates earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries, or Television Film. In 2002, she played Ian Somerhalder's rich Xanax-popping mother in Roger Avary's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' novel, The Rules of Attraction. She served as a judge on the 2005 reality show The Starlet, which sought the next young actress with the potential to become a major star. In 2006, Dunaway guest-starred in "Kiss Kiss, Bye Bye", an episode of the crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation because she was a huge fan of the show. She also appeared on Touched by an Angel, Alias, and Grey's Anatomy. In 2008, Dunaway agreed to star in a low-budget Welsh horror film, Flick, for a fraction of her usual $1 million fee after falling in love with the script. She called the writer and director David Howard personally to accept the part of a one-armed American detective, saying it was "a really original story". The film premiered at the Raindance Film Festival. That same year, she criticized Hollywood's treatment of older women, saying: "I am furious that they think I'm too old to play the love interest of guys like Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood. Why should I play sisters and mothers while guys like Jack and Clint, who are older than me, have on-screen lovers half their age?"

In 2009, Dunaway began shooting a film version of the McNally play Master Class as Maria Callas, also starring Al Pacino (as Aristotle Onassis), Val Kilmer, Alan Cumming, her son Liam Dunaway O'Neill, and lyric soprano Danielle de Niese (the latter two as opera students). As film roles became more difficult to find, Dunaway bought the rights to the play after the 1997 tour, and announced her intention of writing, directing, and starring in the film. The production, however, was a disaster and financing the project was one of the many obstacles. "I want to do it my way. I'm not going to sell it out to a studio. You have to raise money. You have to get private investors, and it takes a long time to get it right. It takes 10 years. People hear Faye Dunaway and think she has a lot of money, but I don't because I've spent a lot. Not tonnes. I spent what I want to spend on this movie and you have to have skin in this game. You have to take risks." In 2013, she confirmed that she had completed the first half of the film and planned to shoot the rest soon after. However, it was announced in June 2014 that after nearly 20 years of owning the film rights, Dunaway had decided to withdraw from the project.

2016–present: Return to film and theatre

In 2016, Dunaway made a rare public appearance at the TCM Classic Film Festival, in which she hosted a screening of Network and also joined in conversation with Ben Mankiewicz for a Q&A session in which she discussed her decades-spanning career. Although she stated in a 2013 interview she felt her acting career was "pretty much over", Dunaway told Mankiewicz she had no intention to retire: "We live for work. We live for what we do. I just want to keep working. It's where I'm happiest." That same year, she was cast in a supporting role in the second season of Hand of God, but was ultimately replaced by Linda Gray due to "some scheduling conflicts and some other issues" according to Ben Watkins, creator of the show. Also in 2016, Dunaway guest-starred as herself in the season-two finale of the mockumentary series Documentary Now!. In 2017, Dunaway returned to acting with a cameo role in the horror-thriller The Bye Bye Man, a small part in the Christian drama The Case for Christ, and a supporting role in the psychological thriller Inconceivable, which also starred Nicolas Cage and Gina Gershon. Critic Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter found it "distressing that Dunaway can't find more dignified projects at this point in her estimable career".

Also in 2017, Dunaway reunited with her Bonnie and Clyde co-star Warren Beatty at the 89th Academy Awards, in celebration of the film's 50th anniversary. After being introduced by Jimmy Kimmel, they were given a standing ovation as they walked out onto the stage to present the Best Picture Award. They were given the wrong envelope and Dunaway incorrectly announced La La Land as Best Picture, instead of the actual winner, Moonlight. This became a social-media sensation, trending all over the world. Dunaway was left "completely stunned" when Oscars crew members came on stage to explain that there had been a mistake and later said she felt "very guilty" about the incident, describing it as "one of the worst moments I've ever had". That same year, Dunaway was honored at the Dallas International Film Festival where she was presented with the Dallas Star Award. In 2018, Dunaway and Beatty returned to present Best Picture at the 90th Academy Awards, earning a standing ovation upon their entrance, making jokes about the previous year's flub. Also that year, Dunaway became the face of Gucci's Sylvie 2018 campaign.

In 2019, more than 30 years since her performance in The Curse of the Aching Heart, Dunaway planned to return to Broadway with an updated version of Matthew Lombardo's one-woman play Tea at Five, which was first performed at Hartford Stage in 2002. She would portray Katharine Hepburn, being particularly drawn to the complexities of the play and the character, saying, "Hepburn was a brilliant actress. Her aura on screen was unique. That, coupled with the wide array of roles she played, made her an inspiration to me and many others. She had a lot of class, too, and the innate ability to project intelligence, both on and off screen. You can't help but want to explore that and learn more about her." The three week try-out in Boston met with critical appreciation. Patti Hartigan of The Boston Globe felt that Dunaway gave a "bravura performance" and wrote that she "inhabits the role and goes beyond mere mimicry. Of course, she captures the Voice – waspy, reedy, patrician – but she also brings a mix of fragility and strength to the role, maintaining the straight spine, but also letting that stiff upper lip quiver ever so slightly when grief overtakes her." Christopher Caggiano of The Arts Fuse gave the play a mixed review, but praised Dunaway, writing that she "does manage to remind us why, despite her relative absence from the stage and the screen in the last 30 years, she remains a Hollywood legend. She has a palpable emotional intensity, and gives you the sense that entire scenes are playing out behind her eyes as part of her backstory. She's a legend for a reason."

Legacy and reputation

Dunaway is regarded as one of the greatest and most beautiful actresses of her generation, as well as a powerful emblem of the New Hollywood. Director John Huston, who played Dunaway's father in Chinatown, stated in a 1985 interview that he found her to be "quite extraordinary". Robert Evans, who produced Chinatown, also described her as "extraordinary", and affirmed that "no one could've played her part as well". Stephen Rebello of Movieline wrote in a 2002 article, "Though fiercely modern, an ideal female analog for screen machos like Steve McQueen and the young Jack Nicholson, she also radiated the stuff vintage movie stars are made of. Any actress today would be lucky to have a fraction of her films on her resume."

Cannes Film Festival artistic director Thierry Fremaux said, "She has one of the most wonderful filmographies of any actress. Look at her movies from the '70s for example – she only made good choices. She's had an incredible career." Through her career, Dunaway worked with many of the 20th century's greatest directors—Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, Roman Polanski, Sydney Pollack, and Emir Kusturica among them, and several of the films she starred in became classics. In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, and Network on their list of the 100 best American movies ever made. Her roles as Bonnie Parker and Joan Crawford were respectively named 32nd and 41st on the AFI's list of the fifty greatest screen characters in the villain category. Elizabeth Snead wrote in her review for USA Today of Dunaway's memoirs that she was "the epitome of a modern, mature, sexy woman" and Mark Harris of Entertainment Weekly felt that "Faye Dunaway is a rarity in the land of stars (and star bios) – a tough, smart, committed pro". In 1994, Dunaway was ranked 27th by People magazine on a list of the 50 most beautiful people and in 1997 she was ranked 65th by Empire on a list of the 100 top stars in film history.

Famously demanding, with an attention to detail that sometimes drove co-stars and directors mad, Dunaway believed that she was often mistaken as being as cold and calculating as some of the women she portrayed. Her clashes with Roman Polanski on the set of Chinatown earned her a reputation for being difficult to work with. Upon the release of the film, Polanski told a reporter for Rolling Stone that he considered Dunaway "a gigantic pain in the ass", but added that he had "never known an actress to take work as seriously as she does. I tell you, she is a maniac." Bette Davis described Dunaway as the worst person she had ever worked with in an interview with Johnny Carson in 1988, calling her "totally impossible", "uncooperative", and "very unprofessional". Dunaway denied Davis' claims in her autobiography, writing "Watching her, all I could think of was that she seemed like someone caught in a death throe, a final scream against a fate over which no one has control. I was just the target of her blind rage at the one sin Hollywood never forgives in its leading ladies: growing old."

Personal life

In 1962, Dunaway started a romance with stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. That relationship lasted a year. She was engaged to photographer Jerry Schatzberg from 1967 to 1968. The two remain friends, and Dunaway later starred in his directorial debut, Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970). During the filming of A Place for Lovers (1968), Dunaway fell in love with her co-star, Marcello Mastroianni. The couple had a two-year live-in relationship. Dunaway wanted to marry and have children, but Mastroianni, still legally married, could not bear to hurt his estranged wife and refused, despite protests from his teenaged daughter Barbara and his close friend Federico Fellini. Dunaway decided to leave him and told a reporter at the time that she "gave too much. I gave things I have to save for my work." She later recalled in her 1995 autobiography:

There are days when I look back on those years with Marcello and have moments of real regret. There is that one piece of me that thinks that had we married, we might be married still. It was one of our fantasies, that we would grow old together. He thought we would be like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, a love kept secret for a lifetime. Private and only belonging to the two of us.

In 1987, Mastroianni told People magazine that he never got over the breakup. "She was the woman I loved the most," he said. "I'll always be sorry to have lost her. I was whole with her for the first time in my life."

Dunaway dated her Doc co-star Harris Yulin from 1970 to 1972, after which she was briefly involved with producer Andrew Braunsberg. In 1974, she married Peter Wolf, the lead singer of the rock group The J. Geils Band. Their career commitments caused frequent separations, and the two divorced in 1979. She met her second husband, British photographer Terry O'Neill, when he was assigned by People magazine to take pictures of Peter Wolf and her in 1977. They married in 1982, and Dunaway credited O'Neill with being "the one person responsible for helping me grow up to womanhood and a healthy sense of myself". Their child, Liam Dunaway O'Neill, was born in 1980. In 2003, despite Dunaway's earlier indications that she had given birth to Liam, Terry O'Neill revealed that their son was adopted.

After her divorce from O'Neill in 1987, Dunaway was linked to author Frederick Forsyth. She then had a three-year relationship with Warren Lieberfarb, Home Video president of Warner Bros., before going on to date Steve "Hook" Herrera, a blues harmonica player with the band 'Hook and the Hitchhikers'. Her most recent publicized romantic attachment was with French TV host Bernard Montiel in the mid-1990s. In a rare interview for Harper's Bazaar in 2016, Dunaway said she felt that "it's important to have a partner, probably," but she described herself as "a loner" and added, "I kind of like to be alone and do my work and, you know, be focused on my own things."

Credits and accolades

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