She was one of the worst people in Hollywood, according to Bette Davis. To Jack Nicholson, she was “the Dreaded Dunaway”. Steve McQueen unflatteringly nicknamed her Done Fadeaway on the set of The Thomas Crown Affair, either due to her extreme weight loss or because he thought she was a no-mark. She wasn’t. Faye Dunaway remains an icon of Hollywood’s second golden age, a fantastically talented actor and a central figure in the celebrity gossip sphere. But behind the delicious anecdotes was a woman struggling with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, a darkness that is hinted at but never fully explored in this documentary from the director Laurent Bouzereau.
Our first encounter with Dunaway, now 83, provides a presumably tongue-in-cheek demonstration of her trademark belligerence (or is she genuinely this rude?), as she demands that Bouzereau begin shooting immediately (“I’m here now, come on!”). Yet she goes on to gamely narrate her evolution from Dorothy Faye, brought up by a single mother in Tallahassee, Florida, to imperious Oscar winner (we also hear from her friend Sharon Stone, Barfly co-star Mickey Rourke, director James Gray, her son, Liam, and others). Dunaway’s rise – via Elia Kazan’s rep company, then Broadway – was swift, the logical result of impressive skill, incomparable beauty and sheer will. She seized the zeitgeist with meaty, interesting projects: we hear how a spate of career-defining films from the 60s and 70s – Bonnie and Clyde, The Thomas Crown Affair, Chinatown, the amazingly prophetic Network – captured the shifting spirit of the era (nodding respectively to political violence, women’s lib, governmental corruption and the dehumanising effect of TV). She was a serious star with infamously high standards and the chutzpah to ensure they were met.
