By Erin Free
WHO? Sleekly brilliant actress who hit her glory days in the late sixties and seventies, and made a blisteringly entertaining habit of playing neurotic, seriously screwed up women with an axe to grind. Dunaway is still most famous for her incendiary performance in Bonnie & Clyde, where she threw sparks off Warren Beatty and made violence and mayhem truly sexy. She’s now a true Grand Dame of the American cinema…and even stirred up a little controversy in her autumnal years courtesy of that now infamous balls-up at the Oscars.
FAYE DUNAWAY’S BEST Where do you start? She gave Steve McQueen a run for his money in The Thomas Crown Affair; swashed and buckled in The Three Musketeers; got slapped around by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown; stood above the star studded pack in The Towering Inferno; romanced an on-the-run Robert Redford in Three Days Of The Condor; screwed and swore her way to an Oscar win in the media satire Network; threw out all the wire hangers as a deliriously insane Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest; whipped a female rival naked in The Wicked Lady; made a goose of herself in Supergirl; hit the piss with Mickey Rourke in Barfly; charmed Marlon Brando in Don Juan De Marco; struck steely and composed in Kevin Spacey’s hostage drama Albino Alligator; held her own against up-and-comers Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in The Yards; and guzzled booze and scared the kiddies in the anarchic teen miasma, The Rules Of Attraction.
WHAT MAKES HER SO SPECIAL: She’s mad…or at least does a good impression of being mad. She seethes with a dangerous, slightly unbalanced quality, and represents a time when Hollywood royalty seemed bigger and more imposing. She claims she got down with iconic comedian Lenny Bruce, which is unassailably cool, and is rumoured to have thrown a cup of piss at Roman Polanski when he rubbed her the wrong way on Chinatown.
LIP SERVICE: “If you have a vision, the only way to protect it is to fight body and soul, to go to the mat time and again. You have to deal with all your wits and everything that you are. It’s to go through brick walls. It’s intense determination. It’s what I learned at my mother’s knee and it’s what I’m still practicing.”
“A lot of actresses at my age are fat … I could be, but somehow I’ve found a way of living that keeps me fit and looking good.”
“Sex isn’t everything. Love isn’t everything. Nothing can be everything.”
“I’m still the little southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks who really didn’t feel like she belonged.”
Joan Crawford: “Of all the actresses …to me, only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage it takes to make a real star.”
Elia Kazan: “Faye carries a cloud of drama round with her…there is something in her at hazard.”
Roman Polanski: “She was a gigantic pain in the ass. She demonstrated certifiable proof of insanity.”
THE LAST WORD: A 20th century Diva…with a capital D. In the best possible way…
