Faye Dunaway is one of the few true legends we have left.
The iconic actress, famous for playing tough, vicious and difficult women, ranks among the greatest actresses in film history.
And the 83-year-old actress has not lost hope today…
Danaway is remembered for her twisted cry of ‘No more wire hangers!’ in the cult film Mother Dearest, as well as the films Ride the High Country with Michael Caine and Bonnie and Clyde, where she beat out Jane Fonda and Natalie Wood for the lead role.
The actress, born in Bascom, Florida, is also the winner of three Golden Globes and an Emmy.
It is difficult to talk about Faye Dunaway’s career without mentioning the film ‘Pretty Women.’ Embodying the energy of Joan Crawford, Faye Dunaway stunned the cast and crew of Mommie Dearest when she first emerged from the dressing room as the iconic actress who had died four years earlier.
Mommie Dearest (1981) is a sensational film adaptation of Christina Crawford’s memoir of the same name, which recounts her troubled relationship with her adoptive mother, the legendary actress Joan Crawford.
Danaway truly captured something terrifying and fascinating.
Actress Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford on the set of Paramount Pictures’ Mommie Dearest in 1981. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Blurring the boundaries of reality in her unsettling portrayal of Crawford, Dunaway brought Joan to life both on and off the set. So much so that she told one Hollywood biographer, ‘I want to get under her skin.’
Either Dunaway honed her craft as a method actress, or she was possessed by her spirit. She writes in her autobiography, The Great Gatsby: ‘One person told me it was as if I had seen Joan herself rise from the dead.’
Indeed, there were reports in the press that Dunaway was haunted by Crawford. The Los Angeles Times wrote about her voice: ‘(Dana) seems to have borrowed it for 12 weeks from the ghost of Joan Crawford.’
Having played one of her most memorable roles, Dana says she regrets it. ‘I think that role turned my career in a direction where people irrevocably formed the wrong impression of me, and that’s terribly difficult to overcome,’ she said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. ‘I should have known better, but sometimes you’re vulnerable and you don’t realise what you’re getting yourself into.’
Working alongside some of Hollywood’s sexiest men, such as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Kirk Douglas and Johnny Depp, Danuway showed serious restraint and maintained platonic relationships with her colleagues.
“I was attracted to a few people — not too many, but perhaps Jack (Nicholson) and Warren (Beatty). Warren was living the bachelor life at the time, and Steve (McQueen) was happily committed to someone, and I wouldn’t have gotten involved in something like that even if I’d been offered it, but it didn’t happen.”
She said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar: ‘Just don’t. I have a rule: you know it will ruin the performance and ruin the film, so you don’t do it.’
The classic beauty with delicate high cheekbones broke that rule for the affable Marcello Mastroianni, an award-winning Italian actor who proved too seductive.
Her relationship with the Italian superstar is a case of life imitating art. In the film A Place for Lovers (1968), called ‘the most disgusting pseudo-romantic drivel I’ve ever seen!’ by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, Danaway plays a fashion designer who has an affair with a race car driver played by Mastroianni. In real life, she had a whirlwind three-year affair with the actor, whom she left when he refused to leave his wife.
Faye Dunaway in the film Bonnie and Clyde, 1967 / Getty Images
In an interview with People, Dunaway said: ‘I was deeply in love with him. He was the kind of person I had never met before, and he made me feel deeply secure.’
In 1974, she married musician Peter Wolf, lead singer of The J. Geils Band, whom she divorced five years later.
An article published by Marie Claire in 2017 states that Danawey was unhappy in her marriage to Wolfe and began an affair with renowned British photographer Terry O’Neill. O’Neill took a photo of her sitting by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel with her Oscar for The Network on the table next to her.
The couple married in 1983 and had a son, Liam (born 1980), whom Dunaway misled the public for many years by claiming he was her biological son. Dunaway and O’Neill divorced in 1987.
Danaway was accused of being a spoiled diva, extremely provocative and inconsistent towards her colleagues, the film crew and even the hotel staff.
In 2019, after creating a ‘hostile’ and ‘dangerous’ environment, she was fired from the role of Audrey Hepburn in the off-Broadway production of Tea at Five, and in 1994, Andrew Lloyd Webber removed her from the production of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.
One of its main characters, Jack Nicholson, nicknamed her ‘a woven grenade,’ and in 1988, when Johnny Carson asked, ‘Who are the worst people you know in Hollywood?’ the outspoken and unapologetic Bette Davis quickly replied: ‘Faye Dunaway and anyone else you can put in that chair will tell you the same thing.’ She continued, ‘I don’t think we have time to go into all the reasons — she just doesn’t want to cooperate. Miss Dunaway is Miss Dunaway.’
Despite Dunaway’s difficult, often abrasive and cruel behaviour, she remains an actor of considerable talent.
In 1997, People included her in its list of the 50 most beautiful people, and in 1996 she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
As for her relationship status, she is currently unmarried.
In a 2016 interview with People, she said she was still open to dating. ‘I’m very lonely,’ she admits. ‘I always think I’d like to have a partner in life, and I would be one — if I found the right person.’
Her latest credit is 2022, when she starred alongside Kevin Spacey in the Italian film L’uomo che disegnò Dio.
We think Hollywood wouldn’t be the same without Danaway. Tell us what you think of her role as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, and how you feel about her emotional outbursts!
