Faye Dunaway’s stunningly tense and absorbing performances brought her international fame. This incredible actress, whom many consider Hollywood royalty, made her stage debut in the 1960s and captivated audiences from the very moment she broke through on film in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967.
Throughout her career, she has earned an Oscar, several Golden Globes, an Emmy, and a BAFTA, cementing her place in the world of film.
Faye Dunaway was born in Florida in 1941 to a life without privilege.
It’s hard to believe that Faye Dunaway originally planned to become a teacher. She entered the University of Florida on a teaching scholarship, but the pull of the stage proved stronger. She transferred to Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts and graduated with a degree in theater in 1962. Not long after, she was already building serious momentum. She earned acclaim in the play Hogan’s Goat, making her television debut, and stepping into films in 1967 with The Happening and Hurry Sundown.
Just months later, Bonnie and Clyde came along, and suddenly she was sharing the screen with Warren Beatty. As Bonnie Parker, Dunaway was impossible to ignore. She was rebellious, glamorous, and just a little dangerous. The film made her a star almost overnight and landed her first Academy Award nomination.
“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,” she wrote in her 1995 memoir Looking For Gatsby: My Life.
“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…it would also turn me into a star.”
After that, it felt like she was everywhere. She went head-to-head with Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair, gave a haunting performance in Chinatown, and won an Oscar for Network. And then came Mommie Dearest, the cult classic where her Joan Crawford became the stuff of movie legend.
The 1981 film Mommie Dearest is a dramatized version of Christina Crawford’s memoir, telling the story of her turbulent upbringing under her adoptive mother, Hollywood legend Joan Crawford.
In her unsettling take on Crawford, Faye Dunaway blurred the line between performance and reality, bringing Joan Crawford back to life both on and off set. She became so immersed in the role that she later told a Hollywood biographer, “I want to climb inside her skin.”
Whether it was intense method acting or something closer to obsession, even Dunaway seemed aware of how far she’d gone. In her autobiography, Looking for Gatsby, she recalled someone telling her, “It was like seeing Joan herself come back from the dead.”
The transformation was so convincing that rumors began to swirl. Some media outlets even suggested Dunaway was being haunted by Crawford. The Los Angeles Times famously remarked that Dunaway’s voice sounded as if she had borrowed it “for 12 weeks from the ghost of Joan Crawford.”
“I think it turned my career in a direction where people would irretrievably have the wrong impression of me–and that’s an awful hard thing to beat,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “I should have known better, but sometimes you’re vulnerable and you don’t realize what you’re getting into.”
Speaking of working alongside some of the hottest actors Hollywood has ever seen, Dunaway said, “There were certain attractions to a couple of people – not too many, but maybe Jack (Nicholson) and Warren (Beatty). Warren at the time was in full bachelorhood, but Steve (McQueen) was happily devoted to somebody and I wouldn’t mess around with something like that even if it were offered, but it wasn’t.”
“You just don’t” she said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “I have a rule: You know it’s going to ruin the performance and ruin the movie, so you don’t do that.”
During the filming of A Place for Lovers, where Dunaway played a fashion designer who has an affair with a race-car driver, portrayed by actor Marcello Mastroianni, the two took their affair off screen. In fact, their affair lasted for three years, but they eventually called it quits after he refused to leave his wife for her.
“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,” she wrote in her memoir.
“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 an interview with People, Dunaway said, “I was deeply in love with him. He was a man like no one I’d ever met before, and he made me feel deeply protected.”
Dunaway married musician Peter Wolf, the lead singer of The J. Geils Band, but their marriage only lasted for a year. According to a 2017 piece in Marie Claire, she was unhappy in her marriage. She went on to have an affair with Terry O’Neill; they married in 1983, had a son, and divorced four years later.
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Dunaway has been called a pandering diva, difficult and erratic to co-stars, crews, and hotel staff. In 2019, after creating a “hostile” and “dangerous” environment, she was fired from Tea at Five; in 1994, she was dropped by Andrew Lloyd Webber in Sunset Boulevard.
Jack Nicholson nicknamed her the “gossamer grenade,” and in 1988, when Johnny Carson asked, “who’s one of the worst people you know in Hollywood?” Bette Davis answered, “Faye Dunaway and everybody you can put in this chair would tell you exactly the same thing…she’s just uncooperative. Miss Dunaway is for Miss Dunaway.”
In 1997, she was ranked by People on its list of 50 Most Beautiful People, and in 1996, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Today, at the age of 85, Dunaway is single but open to dating. “I’m very much a loner,” she told . “I always think I would like to have a partner in life, and I would–if I could find the right person, I think.”
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