Background and career
Dorothy Faye Dunaway (born January 14, 1941) 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 (1968), the romantic drama The Arrangement (1969), the revisionist Western Little Big Man (1970), a two-part adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas classic The Three Musketeers (1973, with The Four Musketeers following in 1974), the neo-noir mystery Chinatown (1974) for which she earned her second Oscar nomination, the action-drama disaster The Towering Inferno (1974), the political thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975), the satire Network (1976) for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), and the sports drama The Champ (1979). 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 (1984), Barfly (1987), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Arizona Dream (1994), Don Juan DeMarco (1995), The Twilight of the Golds (1997), Gia (1998) and The Rules of Attraction (2002). Dunaway has also performed on stage in several plays, including A Man for All Seasons (1961–63), After the Fall (1964), Hogan's Goat (1965–67), and A Streetcar Named Desire (1973). She was awarded the Sarah Siddons Award for her portrayal of opera singer Maria Callas in Master Class (1996). 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.
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."
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).
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 (somewhat to my surprise) 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."
That movie touched the core of my being. Never have I felt so close to a character as I felt to Bonnie. She was a yearning, edgy, ambitious southern girl who wanted to get out of wherever she was. I knew everything about wanting to get out, and the getting out doesn't come easy. But with Bonnie there was a real tragic irony. She got out only to see that she was heading nowhere and that the end was death. Dunaway followed the success with another hit, The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), in which she played Vicki Anderson, an insurance investigator who becomes involved with Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen), 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.
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. Neither Doc nor The Deadly Trap had generated much attention, either critically or financially, so Dunaway accepted an offer to star in a movie for television, The Woman I Love (1972), in which she portrayed Wallis Simpson. She returned to film in 1973 with Stanley Kramer's drama, Oklahoma Crude, opposite George C. Scott. It was an ambitious project in which Dunaway had to play another complex character, "a woman who is caught between her ambition and her femininity. When the film opens, she is as tough as nails, a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later woman. Along the way, she slowly opens herself up to her estranged father and a lover. I understood that dilemma well, the conflict between ambition and love, the fear of trusting someone else with your love." The film was a modest success, but Dunaway received good notices for her performance. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert noted how she had never topped the work she did in Bonnie and Clyde, and said that her career had been "rather absentminded" ever since. He praised her performance in Oklahoma Crude, saying that she played the role with "a great deal of style," while adding, "Perhaps she has decided to get back to acting." In 1972, following the filming of Oklahoma Crude, Dunaway returned to the stage in an adaptation of Harold Pinter's Old Times. She found the stage more challenging than film. "Old Times affected me in a lot of very complex ways. The play itself reminded me during a difficult point in my life that there are a million facets to life. There is never just one answer. Professionally, if I hadn't taken that step to go back to the stage, in a serious way, I think I would have suffered for it." The following year, Dunaway portrayed Blanche DuBois in a Los Angeles stage production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. "It was a fun performance for me, but hard, very draining. At the height of the madness each night, I would go from standing straight up to falling to my knees, in one swift move." Williams himself praised Dunaway for her performance, "He told me later that he thought I was brave and adorable and reminded him of a precocious child, and that my performance ranked with the very best. It was high praise indeed coming from him." Also in 1973, Dunaway appeared as the villainous Milady de Winter in Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers, based on Alexandre Dumas's novel of the same name, co-starring Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Charlton Heston. Eventually, producers decided to split the film into two parts: The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers (released in 1974). Critics and audiences alike praised the film for its action and its comic tone, and it was the first in a line of successful projects for Dunaway.
