Faye Dunaway
Dorothy Faye Dunaway (born January 14, 1941)[1] 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. In 2011, the government of France made her an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Faye Dunaway
Actress
1962–present
1
Her career began in the early 1960s on Broadway. She made her screen debut in the 1967 film 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 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, and the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (1978).
Her career evolved to more mature character roles in subsequent years often in independent films, beginning with her controversial portrayal of Joan Crawford in the 1981 film Mommie Dearest. Other notable 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.
Early life and education[edit]
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.[2] Her parents married in 1939 and divorced in 1954. She had one younger brother, lawyer Mac Simmion Dunaway.[3] She is of Ulster Scottish, Irish, and German descent.[4][5][6] She spent her childhood traveling throughout the United States and Europe, including lengthy stays in Mannheim, Germany, and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.[7]
Dunaway took ballet, tap, piano and singing lessons, while growing up and graduated from Leon High School in Tallahassee, Florida. She then studied at Florida State University and the University of Florida, later graduating from Boston University with a degree in theatre.[8]
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, the actress and future head of the National Endowment for the Arts.[9] 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.[8] 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.[4] She also studied acting at HB Studio[10] in New York City.
Shortly after graduating 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."[11]
Career[edit]
1967–1968: Early films and breakthrough[edit]
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."[12] 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 didn't know "anything at all about the process of acting."[13] She later described this experience as a "psychodrama that left me feeling damaged at the end of each day."[14] 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."[15] 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.