Faye Dunaway

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. 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. 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 (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." 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." Director Sidney Lumet stated that it was "a brilliant, an extraordinary performance. The courage of that evil that she brings to it, I think that's just major acting." Although the film became a cult classic as well as one of her most famous characters, Dunaway expressed her regrets for playing Crawford, as she felt "it was meant to be a window into a tortured soul. But it was made into camp." and the series was cancelled after only four episodes. Around that time, she was contacted by NBC, who wanted her to take on the role of a female sleuth, more in the vein of Columbo than Murder, She Wrote. As the prospective series was being developed, Dunaway contacted Columbo star Peter Falk, wanting his advice on how to approach playing the sleuth character. While discussing the role, Falk told Dunaway about a Columbo script that he had written himself. ''It's All in the Game'' featured a seductive woman who plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Lt. Columbo in the midst of a murder. Falk had written the script some years prior, saying that he could not find the right actress to take on the role. He offered it to her, and Dunaway accepted immediately. The 1993 TV movie proved a success and was nominated for several Golden Globe and Emmy Awards. Dunaway was recognized with the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series, saying it was at that moment when she felt like she was truly home. "I was overwhelmed by the generosity of spirit my colleagues extended me that night. It was like being wrapped up in a warm embrace. Though this is more often than not a town of grand illusions and transitory friendships, the moment seemed heartfelt, and touched me deeply." With the prospective detective show not working out, Dunaway became interested in returning to the stage. She auditioned to replace Glenn Close in the musical Sunset Boulevard, a stage version of the 1950 film of the same name. Composer and producer Andrew Lloyd Webber cast Dunaway in the famed role of Norma Desmond, and Dunaway began rehearsing to take over the LA engagement when Close moved the show to Broadway. 2016–present: Return to film and theatre In 2016, Dunaway made a rare public appearance at the TCM Classic Film Festival, in which she hosted a screening of Network and also joined in conversation with Ben Mankiewicz for a Q&A session in which she discussed her decades-spanning career. Also that year, Dunaway became the face of Gucci's Sylvie 2018 campaign. In 2019, more than 30 years since her performance in The Curse of the Aching Heart, Dunaway planned to return to Broadway with an updated version of Matthew Lombardo's one-woman play Tea at Five, which was first performed at Hartford Stage in 2002. Dunaway reunited with Kevin Spacey in 2022's The Man Who Drew God, co-starring and directed by Franco Nero. Faye, a documentary about Dunaway, directed and produced by Laurent Bouzereau, premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and can be seen on HBO and Max. She was to next appear in the supernatural love story, Fate, opposite Harvey Keitel. On October 3, 2024, Dunaway was announced as starring in the coming-of-age supernatural thriller, The Evilry. On January 14, 2026, it was announced that she had been cast in the drama film Prima. ==Legacy and reputation==

Dunaway is regarded as one of the greatest and most beautiful actresses of her generation, as well as a powerful emblem of the New Hollywood. Director John Huston, who played Dunaway's father in Chinatown, stated in a 1985 interview that he found her to be "quite extraordinary". Robert Evans, who produced Chinatown, also described her as "extraordinary", and affirmed that "no one could've played her part as well". Stephen Rebello of Movieline wrote in a 2002 article, "Though fiercely modern, an ideal female analog for screen machos like Steve McQueen and the young Jack Nicholson, she also radiated the stuff vintage movie stars are made of. Any actress today would be lucky to have a fraction of her films on her resume." Cannes Film Festival artistic director Thierry Fremaux said, "She has one of the most wonderful filmographies of any actress. Look at her movies from the '70s for example – she only made good choices. She's had an incredible career." Through her career, Dunaway worked with many of the 20th century's greatest directors—Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, Roman Polanski, Sydney Pollack, and Emir Kusturica among them, and several of the films she starred in became classics. In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, and Network on their list of the 100 best American movies ever made. Her roles as Bonnie Parker and Joan Crawford were respectively named 32nd and 41st on the AFI's list of the fifty greatest screen characters in the villain category. Elizabeth Snead wrote in her review for USA Today of Dunaway's memoirs that she was "the epitome of a modern, mature, sexy woman" and Mark Harris of Entertainment Weekly felt that "Faye Dunaway is a rarity in the land of stars (and star bios) – a tough, smart, committed pro". In 1994, Dunaway was ranked 27th by People magazine on a list of the 50 most beautiful people and in 1997 she was ranked 65th by Empire on a list of the 100 top stars in film history. Famously demanding, with an attention to detail that sometimes drove co-stars and directors mad, Dunaway believed that she was often mistaken as being as cold and calculating as some of the women she portrayed. Her clashes with Roman Polanski on the set of Chinatown earned her a reputation for being difficult to work with. Upon the release of the film, Polanski told a reporter for Rolling Stone that he considered Dunaway "a gigantic pain in the ass", but added that he had "never known an actress to take work as seriously as she does. I tell you, she is a maniac." Bette Davis described Dunaway as the worst person she had ever worked with in an interview with Johnny Carson in 1988, calling her "totally impossible", "uncooperative", and "very unprofessional". Dunaway denied Davis' claims in her autobiography, writing "Watching her, all I could think of was that she seemed like someone caught in a death throe, a final scream against a fate over which no one has control. I was just the target of her blind rage at the one sin Hollywood never forgives in its leading ladies: growing old." In his 1996 book Making Movies, Sidney Lumet slammed Dunaway's reputation for being difficult as "totally untrue", and called her a "selfless, devoted, and wonderful actress". Director Elia Kazan described Dunaway as "a supremely endowed, hungry, curious, bright young talent", and added, "Faye is a brilliant actress and a shy, highly strung woman. She is intelligent, and she is strong-willed." Like Lumet, Kazan felt she was not difficult, but a perfectionist who was never satisfied. "The artist is rarely, if ever, satisfied. The artist is frequently grateful and intermittently amazed, but he or she is never satisfied. That Faye is unlikely to be satisfied with her efforts—or those with whom she works—is not a caprice; it is not the willful misbehavior of a spoiled actress: This is how artists operate." Johnny Depp, who co-starred with Dunaway in Arizona Dream and Don Juan deMarco, called her a misunderstood artist. "She's just uncompromising as an actress, and I think that's a positive thing." Maria Elena Fernandez of the Los Angeles Times wrote in a 2005 article about Dunaway that "in her case, the behavior many call 'difficult' seems clearly linked more to passions than to ego". In her autobiography Looking for Gatsby, Dunaway confronted this reputation and described herself as a "perfectionist": ==Personal life==

In 1962, Dunaway started a romance with stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. That relationship lasted a year. She was engaged to photographer Jerry Schatzberg from 1967 to 1968. The two remain friends, and Dunaway later starred in his directorial debut, Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970). During the filming of A Place for Lovers (1968), Dunaway fell in love with her co-star, Marcello Mastroianni. The couple had a two-year live-in relationship. Dunaway wanted to marry and have children, but Mastroianni, still legally married, could not bear to hurt his estranged wife and refused, despite protests from his teenaged daughter Barbara and his close friend Federico Fellini. In 1974, she married Peter Wolf, the lead singer of the rock group The J. Geils Band. Their career commitments caused frequent separations, and the two divorced in 1979. Their child, Liam Dunaway O'Neill, was born in 1980. In 2003, despite Dunaway's earlier indications that she had given birth to Liam, Terry O'Neill revealed that their son was adopted. She then had a three-year relationship with Warren Lieberfarb, Home Video president of Warner Bros., before going on to date Hook Herrera, a blues harpist with the band Hook and the Hitchhikers. Her most recent publicized romantic attachment was with French TV host in the mid-1990s. In a rare interview for ''Harper's Bazaar'' in 2016, Dunaway said she felt that "it's important to have a partner, probably," but she described herself as "a loner" and added, "I kind of like to be alone and do my work and, you know, be focused on my own things." == Credits and accolades ==

Select filmography Select theatre roles: == Bibliography ==