A Snow-Covered Volcano: Faye Dunaway’s Explosive Artistry

“When I look beyond Faye Dunaway now, I can see a brown-haired, barefoot girl standing in the middle of a dirt road that runs through a small southern town,” Dunaway writes in Looking for Gatsby, her 1995 autobiography.

This quaint image seems worlds away from the sophisticated, broodingly electric star of legendary films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Thomas Crown Affair, Network, and Three Days of the Condor. She has long been a subject of fascination; this month, she’s also appearing in a new documentary, Faye, where she opens up about her struggles and bipolar disorder.

Gossip about Dunaway’s erratic nature has floated around Hollywood for decades, with the equally formidable Bette Davis once referring to her as “the most impossible star I’ve ever worked with.” While Dunaway refutes Davis’s allegations with a mixture of understanding, snark, and pity, Looking for Gatsby makes clear that its writer does have quite the flair for drama.

While Dunaway’s deadly serious musings can be pretentious (talk about “the work” of acting feels like it takes up over half of the book), her writing reveals her to be an admittedly fearful perfectionist, an intellectual loner who feels too deeply. She frequently recounts getting compliments about her work from everyone from Tennessee Williams to Debra Winger, and has kind words for many of her peers in the industry: Sharon Stone, David Niven, Jane Fonda, and Dick Van Dyke. Dunaway is at her most touchingly human when she’s discussing relationships with her family, lovers, and son, Liam. All too often, though, she falls back into artistic contemplation.

“I never thought of being anything but the best, no matter how long it took to achieve it,” Dunaway writes. “The deal my mother made with me was that if I tried hard enough and worked hard enough, I would achieve my dreams. And I have.”

Lord Lift My Baby High

“On January 14, 1941,” Dunaway writes in Looking for Gatsby, “I decided to make my entry, three months early. I’ve been told since that Capricorns are always a bit impatient with the pace of the rest of the world, and I can’t say I disagree.”

Only 4 pounds at birth, Dorothy Faye Dunaway was born in Bascom, Florida, to John, a young farmhand, and Grace, a beautiful redhead. Although times were hard, Dunaway tenderheartedly recalls the fun she and her brother Mac had with their extended kin. “It was a lively, horse playing southern family,” she writes.

Grace threw all her energy into turning the clever Faye into a cultured, southern lady who could marry well and escape the poverty that plagued her family. But little Faye, who admits to already being “little but ruthless,” had grander ambitions. When she was only five, she whispered them into her beloved grandmother’s ear, “I’m going to be an actress. But don’t tell mother.”

But first there was growing up to do, as her family followed her hard-drinking, philandering, Army cook father from base to base. According to Dunaway, his frequent disappearances (including going AWOL from a base in Germany) would affect her profoundly. “It would become like a low-grade infection in my life, my father leaving,” she writes. “I never felt his love, though I believe it was there. My mother’s love, for all its glare, I always felt and never questioned.”

The Tortured Poets Department

As a teenager, Dunaway returned to Tallahassee. Her parents soon divorced, and she would only see her father once more in her life.) There, she worked tirelessly to fit in with her wealthier, more genteel peers. She excelled in drama club, had a rich boyfriend, and received a scholarship to Florida State and the transferred to the University of Florida. Making a pact with herself that she would leave the suffocating south once she finally won a beauty pageant (she always came in second place), her sign came in her sophomore year, when she was crowned Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.

Dunaway transferred to the prestigious Boston University theater department. She is at her most relatable and sympathetic describing the guilt she felt not following her mother’s plan for her to be a southern society matron. “It hurt more than I can say, the knowledge that she was hopelessly out of place in the polite, educated society she wanted me to travel in,” she writes. “In leaving the south…I was leaving my mother behind.”

Success came at lightning speed. Dunaway graduated from BU on June 2nd, 1962, and signed a contract to star in the Broadway production of A Man for All Seasons on June 5th. She also became a student at the Lincoln Center training program under Elia Kazan, whom she revered.

But the lonely Dunaway admits she was overwhelmed, depressed, and consumed with self-doubt. The reader can feel the claustrophobia of Dunaway’s ambition as she recounts trolling the streets of New York at night, haunting jazz clubs alone. At one, the Vanguard, she became enamored with the infamous comedian Lenny Bruce. “Lenny was outrageous,” she writes. “I wanted to be like him, at least in attitude. I wanted to challenge it all too—conventions, the establishment, the status quo.”

The two soon became lovers, but Bruce again fell into heroin addiction, and Dunaway was heartbroken the last time she saw him. “Lenny was gaunt and edgy, twitchy, the bags under his eyes so dark it was as if someone had worked him over in a back alley,” she recalls. “Life for him was all about the heroin again, not about me. Not about his work. He blinked back tears and turned away.” Bruce would die of an overdose in 1966.

Roman Holiday

“Fame. It’s easy to get drunk on it,” Dunaway writes. “Not so easy to keep life in perspective in a world where reality is temporarily set aside.”

The 1967 blockbuster Bonnie and Clyde made Dunaway a star and a fashion icon. But more importantly to her, it let her define her own career. “It put me firmly in the ranks of actresses that would do work that was art,” she writes in typically grandiose fashion. “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 the time.”

The golden girl was also dating hip photographer Jerry Schatzberg, co-owner of Oldine, the famous New York club. While she had a penchant for artists, Dunaway had wisely made it a rule to not fall in love with enticing co-stars like Steve McQueen and Warren Beatty. “They were affectionate womanizers,” she writes, “but womanizers they were.”

Dunaway broke her rule when she met the whimsical Italian superstar Marcello Mastroianni on the Italian set of 1968’s A Place for Lovers. “Marcello was fun to be with,” she recalls. “He could take any story and turn it into a tale that would leave you laughing. Oh, we laughed so much, Marcello and I.”

Dunaway seems to relish whenever she gets to mention having a laugh, and the reader vicariously feels relief when fun softens her intense aura. Romance, “light and life” filled her years with Mastroianni, from gondola rides in Venice to summers sailing the Mediterranean Coast.

But there was a glaring problem: the very Catholic Mastroianni was married, and Dunaway soon despaired of being a mistress, knowing the pain her father’s affairs had caused her as a child. “We were like spies in love, slipping into this villa or that…always avoiding the paparazzi,” she writes. Things came to a head in 1970, when a fed-up Dunaway began a relationship with actor Harris Yulin on the set of Doc.

Many years later, a wistful Dunaway called Mastroianni, hoping they could be friends. “’Ciao, Marcello,’ I said when he came to the phone. ‘I thought we might talk.’ There was a long silence, then he said very quietly, ‘But why?’ Perhaps it was for the best. But as I slowly put the phone back in its cradle, I wondered.”

Creative Differences

By the time Dunaway got to the set of 1974’s Chinatown, she had admirably decided that she would not be belittled or abused by men in Hollywood. She famously tangled with the notoriously harsh director Otto Preminger while filming 1967’s Hurry, Sundown—prompting her to file a suit against Preminger, which Dunaway won, over her desire to be released from her picture deal—and wasn’t going to stop sticking up for herself now.

From the start, she and director Roman Polanski clashed, and Dunaway felt he singled her out to bully. “He always hung out with very young girls. Young girls are not threatening, young girls don’t have ideas, they’re not independent, and I was all of those,” she writes. “I was a pretty considerable actress by the time…with strong opinions about my work. Those differences set the stage for a clash.”

The simmering tension exploded one day when an annoyed Polanski, without warning, pulled an errant hair out of her head. “Roman dropped the hair he had jerked out, his mouth curled into a smirk, and he began to walk away,” she writes. “I was furious. ‘Don’t you even touch, much less pull a hair out of my head.’ It was not the hair, it was the incessant cruelty that I felt, the constant sarcasm, the never-ending need to humiliate me.”

Even Jack Nicholson, whom Dunaway adored, felt Polanski’s wrath when he headed to his trailer to watch a Lakers game. “Roman went into a rage, picked up a bat, and charged into Jack’s trailer swinging at the TV set,” Dunaway writes. “He smashed the set to pieces then stalked out.” (Polanski has claimed that it was a mop, not a bat.)

But while he and Nicholson would remain chums, Polanski pointedly attacked Dunaway in the media. Others claim that Dunaway wasn’t totally innocent, urinating in trash cans and once throwing a cup of urine in Polanski’s face after he refused to let her go to the bathroom. (Dunaway has denied throwing the cup of urine at Polanski, previously calling the story “absolutely ridiculous.”)

Whatever the case, Dunaway speaks for women everywhere when she tackles her reputation as a difficult diva. “People say, ‘Well gosh, he’s got guts. He’s a real man,’ and a woman can try to get it right and she’s ‘a pain in the ass,’” she writes. “It’s my nature to do really good jobs, and I would have never been successful if I hadn’t.”

The Ghost of Joan Crawford

Faye Dunaway had always admired Joan Crawford as an actress, though the two never met. As Dunaway noted, Crawford had named-checked the younger performer in her autobiography, My Way of Life, stating that of all modern actresses, “only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage it takes to make a real star.”

So it seemed surprising that Dunaway chose to play Crawford in the scandalous film version of Christina Crawford’s scathing memoir Mommie Dearest. Dunaway admits the production was tainted before it even began, since “the general sentiment in the industry was that anyone who played Christina’s version of Crawford would pay a price for taking on one of Hollywood’s great legends.”

According to Dunaway, she naively believed that the movie could be a more nuanced character study than Christina’s monstrously dark fairy tale. Dunaway’s second husband, photographer Terry O’Neill (with whom she had begun a relationship while still married to her first husband, musician Peter Wolf, according to O’Neill), had become her manager, and she insisted he be a producer on the film as well, to preserve her vision. “It was a war from the beginning,” Dunaway writes. “Christina’s husband was the other executive producer, so he was there pushing her point of view, and Terry was there trying to protect mine. And Joan’s.”

But Christina’s vision won. For Dunaway, the shoot was dark, torturous, and emotionally draining. “At night I would go home,” she writes, “and feel Crawford in the room with me, this tragic, haunted soul just hanging around.” She was physically exhausted as well. Her face ached from contorting it to match Crawford’s tense façade, and her voice was so ravaged after the “no wire hangers” scene that Frank Sinatra came to her house to teach her soothing vocal exercises.

When Mommie Dearest came out in 1981, the reviews were disastrous, and the Oscar-winning Dunaway won a Razzie Award for worst actress. Hollywood, perhaps long itching to kick her to the curb, took their opportunity, and Dunaway fled to London with O’Neill and newborn Liam. “I found I was frozen, but in Joan Crawford’s smile, not my own,” she writes. “People thought of me as being like her. And that was the unfortunate reality for me about this project.”

The Gossamer Grenade

After the breakup of her marriage to O’Neill, Dunaway moved back to America and claimed to have turned over a new leaf, giving up alcohol, getting healthy, and reviving her career.

However, it seems Dunaway did not completely change her confrontational ways. In 1994, she entered into a lawsuit with Andrew Lloyd Webber when he pulled the plug on a production of the musical Sunset Blvd because her singing was not up to snuff. The case was later settled.

In 2019, she was fired from the play Tea at Five, in which she played Katharine Hepburn; it was reported that she’d thrown a salad on the floor and thrown hairpins and combs at the crew.

She admits in Looking for Gatsby that “living has not always come easy for me.” But, Dunaway also claims to have found self-fulfillment, and one can only hope that this is true. “I find that like Gatsby, I too have an extraordinary gift for hope,” she writes. “But it is not in the distance, some far off horizon. I have found it within myself. And my green light, full of promise and possibilities, is not at the end of the dock—I hold it in my hands.”