Faye Dunaway
Dorothy Faye Dunaway is an American actress. She is the recipient of many accolades, including an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a BAFTA Award.
Her career began in the early 1960s on Broadway. She made her screen debut in 1967 in The Happening, the same year she made Hurry Sundown with an all-star cast, and rose to fame with her portrayal of outlaw Bonnie Parker in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination. Her most notable films include the crime caper The Thomas Crown Affair, the romantic drama The Arrangement, the revisionist Western Little Big Man, a two-part adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas classic The Three Musketeers, the neo-noir mystery Chinatown for which she earned her second Oscar nomination, the action-drama disaster The Towering Inferno, the political thriller Three Days of the Condor, the satire Network for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars, and the sports drama The Champ.
Her career evolved to more mature character roles in subsequent years, often in independent features, beginning with her controversial portrayal of Joan Crawford in the 1981 biopic Mommie Dearest. Her later films include Supergirl, Barfly, The Handmaid's Tale, Arizona Dream, Don Juan DeMarco, The Twilight of the Golds, Gia and The Rules of Attraction. Dunaway has also performed on stage in several plays, including A Man for All Seasons, After the Fall, Hogan's Goat, and A Streetcar Named Desire. She was awarded the Sarah Siddons Award for her portrayal of opera singer Maria Callas in Master Class.
Protective of her private life, she rarely gives interviews and makes very few public appearances. After romantic relationships with Jerry Schatzberg and Marcello Mastroianni, Dunaway married twice, first to singer Peter Wolf and then to photographer Terry O'Neill, with whom she had a son, Liam.
Early life and education
Dunaway was born in Bascom, Florida, the daughter of Grace April, 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, 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, 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. 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.
File:Faye Dunaway.jpg|thumb|Dunaway as Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde
The film was controversial on its original release for its supposed glorification of murderers and level of graphic violence, which was unprecedented at the time. It performed well at the box office and elevated Dunaway to stardom. Roger Ebert gave the film a rave review and wrote, "The performances throughout are flawless. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, in the title roles, surpass anything they have done on the screen before, and establish themselves as major actors." The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Dunaway received her first nomination for Best Actress. Her performance earned her a BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer and a David di Donatello for Best Foreign Actress, and she was now among the most bankable actresses in Hollywood, as she later recalled. "It put me firmly in the ranks of actresses that would do work that was art. There are those who elevate the craft of acting to the art of acting, and now I would be among them. I was the golden girl at that time. One of those women who was going to be nominated year after year for an Oscar and would win at least one. The movie established the quality of my work. Bonnie and Clyde would also turn me into a star."
Dunaway followed the success with another hit, The Thomas Crown Affair, in which she played Vicki Anderson, an insurance investigator who becomes involved with Thomas Crown, a millionaire who attempts to pull off the perfect crime. Norman Jewison hired Dunaway after he saw scenes from Bonnie and Clyde before its release. As Arthur Penn had needed to persuade Warren Beatty to cast Dunaway, Jewison had to convince McQueen that she was right for the part. The film emphasized Dunaway's sensuality and elegance with a character who has remained an influential style icon. The role was complex requiring over 29 costume changes. "Vicki's dilemma was, at the time, a newly emerging phenomenon for women: How does one do all of this in a man's world and not sacrifice one's emotional and personal life in the process?" Despite his original reluctance to work with her, McQueen later called Dunaway the best actress he ever worked with. Dunaway was also very fond of McQueen. "It was really my first time to play opposite someone who was a great big old movie star, and that's exactly what Steve was. He was one of the best-loved actors around, one whose talent more than equaled his sizable commercial appeal." The film was immensely popular and was famed for a scene where Dunaway and McQueen play a chess game and silently engage in a seduction of each other across the board.