The actress lit up, describing her memories of an electric time: the release of her first big film, nightclubs and dancing, the spirit of rebellion in 1960s New York. Bouzereau took out the magazine, which Dunaway had not seen in decades.
“She started crying,” Bouzereau says. “I knew I had won her heart a bit.”
As the film reveals, before Faye Dunaway came the round-faced Dorothy Dunaway, a military brat whose childhood was marked by instability and violence. She made her way to the University of Florida, then Boston University, and later the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, led by director Elia Kazan. (Kazan told Dunaway that she “walked in a cloud of drama.”)
The beauty came later for Dunaway, in her mid-20s, as the result of starvation and hydrogen peroxide. (“In truth, you don’t get to eat three healthy meals a day and fit the clothes that come off the runway,” Sharon Stone, a loyal friend of Dunaway’s, says in the film. “Faye and I know that.”)
Appearing opposite Warren Beatty, Dunaway electrified global audiences in her third film, the controversial Bonnie and Clyde (1967), based on the true story of bandits Bonnie Parker and Clyde “Champion” Barrow. Critic Roger Ebert described her performance as “flawless,” and the film as “a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance.” From then, the actress took on roles in one critically acclaimed picture after another. She played a brilliant investigator in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), co-starring Steve McQueen; she seduced Jack Nicholson as the Los Angeles heiress with a secret daughter and/or sister in Chinatown (1974); and in Network (1976) she embodied a heartless television producer, scoring an Oscar for her work.
