The word diva is grossly overused, both as a pejorative and a superlative. A cursory search of the term on the Daily Mail, TMZ, or Page Six—to say nothing of social media platforms—will find the label attached to all types of reality-television personalities, athletes, and emerging pop singers.
Yet Faye Dunaway, the subject of a new HBO Max documentary, is a true diva. The Academy Award–winning actor, known for her fierce talent and daunting hauteur, boasts a career spanning 60 years. She feuded, publicly and viciously, with Bette Davis, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Roman Polanski. Marcello Mastroianni never got over their love affair. Decades before Dunaway was cast as Joan Crawford in the infamous biographical melodrama Mommie Dearest, Crawford remarked that “only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage to make a real star.” Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Jerry Schatzberg all captured her arresting beauty—as did her future husband Terry O’Neill, at dawn after her 1977 Oscar win, creating perhaps the most iconic Hollywood image of all time.
In Faye, director Laurent Bouzereau (Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind) considers all of this, creating a compassionate yet unflinching portrait of a woman whom Columbia University film professor Annette Insdorf in the film aptly sums up as “complicated.”
Bouzereau’s fascination with the actor has been lifelong: She “was part of my upbringing, discovering film in the ’70s, and falling in love with movies in general,” he says. Counting Liam O’Neill, Dunaway’s son, as a close friend, Bouzereau had planned to make a film with him about Liam’s father, Terry. When the project collapsed after the photographer’s death in 2019, however, Liam approached Bouzereau with a different idea. “‘It is so important to document the lives of great artists like my dad and my mom,’” Bouzereau remembers him saying. “‘Would you be interested in my mom’s life story?’”
Of course, Bouzereau agreed—but convincing Dunaway herself was another matter. The two men planned to propose the project at a dinner in New York. A bit of luck the day of the meeting helped pave the way for the film.
“In the morning, I had gone to a movie store in the village,” Bouzereau says. “I saw this Life magazine from the ’60s with Faye on the cover for the release of Bonnie and Clyde. So I bought it, and I had it in my bag. We were having dinner with Faye, and I said, ‘Do you remember the Life magazine cover of Bonnie and Clyde?’”
The actor 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 actor took on roles in one critically acclaimed picture after another. She played a brilliant investigator in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), costarring Steve McQueen; she seduced Jack Nicholson as the Los Angeles heiress with a secret daughter-slash-sister in Chinatown (1974); and in Network (1976) she embodied a heartless television producer, scoring an Oscar for her work.
In the 1980s, however, Dunaway’s career began to falter. The iconic and disastrous Mommie Dearest (1981), an adaptation of Christina Crawford’s memoir of abuse at the hands of her mother, Joan, forever altered the public’s perception of Dunaway; through the eerie similarities of their patrician bone structures, affected manners, and neurotic perfectionism, the one movie legend became inextricably linked with the other. Over the next 20 years, Dunaway would continue to appear in important films—The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), Don Juan DeMarco (1995), Gia (1998), and Rules of Attraction (2002)—but in supporting roles.
Dunaway has been known to become “incandescent with rage,” per The Guardian, at the mention of Mommie Dearest or certain other sensitive subjects: Roman Polanski (with whom she feuded on the set of Chinatown), Andrew Lloyd Webber (whom she sued in 1994 for dismissing her from a Los Angeles production of Sunset Boulevard), Liam O’Neill, Terry O’Neill, and cosmetic surgery among them.
As such, the interviews for Faye were handled delicately. “I could show you my notebooks, which are pretty intense,” Bouzereau says. “It looks like something out of the brain of a scientist. There were many case scenarios based on where she decided to dance with me.”
The approach worked: In the film, Dunaway speaks openly about her struggles with bipolar disorder and alcoholism, contextualizing the bad behavior that has shadowed her career for decades—from her legendary tantrums on the set of Chinatown to her alleged violence against crew members on a play in Boston in 2019. “The erratic behavior is down to the biological, physical realities,” Dunaway says in the film. “Thank God there is medication.” (Adds Liam O’Neill: “If she wasn’t in so much pain, would she be that good?”)
No great transformation has taken place, to be clear: Faye opens with Dunaway barking orders at the film’s crew. Fussing, powdering, and preening, she remains every bit the star. (Bouzereau is also quick to point out the double standards that exist in Hollywood: “There are male actors who I have seen [be] very, very difficult on set,” he notes. “They either mirror or are worse than Faye, but it is not spoken about.”) Yet by examining the human truth behind the salacious headlines, the film pokes holes in a popular culture that tends to turn women like Dunaway—high-strung, prickly, opinionated, demanding—into campy caricatures.
Bouzereau promised Dunaway that he would show her the film as soon as it was finished. He arranged a small screening, attended only by her son and a handful of producers. He asked that she keep an open mind.
There was no sign that things would go well. “Everyone sits behind me,” Dunaway commanded when she entered the room. “I don’t want anyone in front of me.”
As the film began, Bouzereau sat in terror. At one point, Dunaway retrieved a notebook from her bag and started scribbling. “I think I aged about 20 years,” Bouzereau jokes at the memory.
Then, after the credits rolled, the star stood and approached her director. “She took me in her arms and started crying,” Bouzereau says, wiping tears from his eyes even now. “I started crying. ‘You really got me,’ she said. ‘You understood me. You did well.’”
After a long time in each other’s arms, he asked her what she was writing.
“I was writing the names of people I want to thank,” she said.
Faye is now streaming on Max.
