The Reputation and the Reality
Ask Hollywood about Faye Dunaway and you’ll hear the word before anything else: difficult. It has followed her for fifty years like a shadow she never cast. Directors have called her demanding. Co-stars have called her intense. The tabloids, over the decades, have called her worse. But talk to the people who actually watched her work — the cinematographers who lit her face, the costume designers who dressed her, the directors who got the performances of a lifetime out of her — and a different word comes up, again and again: prepared.
Faye Dunaway was never difficult for the sake of it. She was difficult the way a concert violinist is difficult about the tuning of her instrument. The instrument was herself, and she tuned it relentlessly. This is the untold story — not the diva of legend, but the craftswoman behind the fire: a Method-trained stage actress who treated every close-up like opening night and every costume fitting like research.
The Making of a Method Actress
Dunaway’s training was the real thing, not the Hollywood version of it. After graduating from the University of Florida, she studied at Boston University’s School of Fine Arts and then at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York under Sanford Meisner — the legendary teacher whose technique emphasized truthful behavior under imaginary circumstances. Meisner’s famous repetition exercises, his insistence on listening and responding rather than indicating emotion, became the foundation of everything Dunaway did on camera.
Her stage career in the 1960s was genuinely distinguished. She understudied and then replaced in A Man for All Seasons on Broadway. She won a Theatre World Award. She worked with the Lincoln Center Repertory Company under Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead, appearing in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall and other demanding productions. When she arrived in Hollywood for Bonnie and Clyde, she wasn’t a starlet — she was a trained theater actress with a craftsman’s discipline.
That discipline showed in the smallest details. For Chinatown (1974), she worked with costume designer Anthea Sylbert to build Evelyn Mulwray’s wardrobe as a kind of armor — the perfectly tailored 1930s suits, the gloves, the controlled hair — every element designed to show a woman holding herself together by force of will. She understood, as all great film actors do, that the camera reads thought, and that thought has to be prepared long before the director calls action.
The Polanski Story: A Hair’s Breadth
No account of Dunaway’s perfectionism is complete without the most famous anecdote of her career — the one from the set of Chinatown. Director Roman Polanski, notorious for his obsessive control, noticed a stray hair on Dunaway’s face during a take. Without asking, he reached over and plucked it out. Dunaway, furious at the violation, threw a cup of urine — she had been keeping it nearby because she didn’t want to leave the set and lose her concentration — in his direction. Polanski stormed off. The production shut down for the day.
The story has been told and retold, usually as evidence of Dunaway’s temper. But those who were there tell it differently. Dunaway wasn’t angry about the hair. She was angry because Polanski had broken her concentration in the middle of a performance she had spent weeks building — and because, as a woman on a 1974 film set, she had to fight for the basic professional respect that male stars took for granted. Jack Nicholson, her co-star, later said he understood completely: “Faye was protecting her work. I’ve done worse for less.”
The two reconciled and finished the film, and Chinatown remains one of the great director-actress collaborations in American cinema. But the anecdote hardened into legend, and the legend hardened into reputation. Dunaway would spend decades answering for a cup thrown in defense of her craft.
The Friendships: McQueen, Nicholson, and the Boys’ Club
For all the talk of difficulty, Dunaway inspired fierce loyalty in many of her collaborators — especially the men. Steve McQueen, her co-star in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), adored her. Their chemistry in that film — the famous chess game seduction scene, played almost entirely in glances — came from genuine mutual respect. McQueen, himself famously difficult, recognized a kindred spirit: someone who cared about the work more than the politics.
Jack Nicholson became a lifelong friend after Chinatown. He admired her fearlessness and defended her publicly whenever the “difficult” label surfaced. “Faye is one of the bravest actresses I’ve ever worked with,” he said. “She goes places other actors won’t go.”
Warren Beatty, her Bonnie and Clyde co-star and lover during filming, remained a complicated figure in her life — a creative partner, a romantic memory, and a reminder of how quickly Hollywood turns yesterday’s muse into today’s cautionary tale. In her memoir Looking for Gatsby (2011), Dunaway wrote about Beatty with a mixture of affection and clear-eyed realism that characterizes all her recollections: she loved the work they did together, and she learned from the politics that surrounded it.
The Craft Nobody Talks About
Here’s what gets lost in the diva narrative: Faye Dunaway was, technically, one of the finest film actresses of her generation. Watch her hands in Chinatown — the way Evelyn Mulwray’s fingers tremble almost imperceptibly when she’s lying. Watch her eyes in Network — Diana Christensen’s gaze never softens, not once, not even in the love scenes, because Dunaway decided that Diana’s tragedy was her inability to see people as people. Watch the final scene of Bonnie and Clyde — the way Bonnie’s face goes slack and childlike in death, all the defiance draining out of it.
These are not accidents. They are choices, made by an actress who did her homework. Dunaway prepared the way stage actors prepare: with backstory, with biography, with objects. For Bonnie Parker, she carried the real Bonnie’s poetry in her mind. For Evelyn Mulwray, she constructed an entire inner life of trauma and repression. For Diana Christensen, she studied real television executives — their speech patterns, their body language, their terrifying certainty.
Cinematographers loved her because she understood light. She knew how to find her mark and hold it, how to let a close-up breathe. Burnett Guffey, who shot Bonnie and Clyde, said she had “a face the camera wanted to explore.” John Alonzo, who shot Chinatown, said she was the most technically precise actress he ever lit — she hit her marks without looking down, take after take.
The Price of Standards
The honest truth is that Dunaway’s perfectionism did cost her — not because standards are wrong, but because Hollywood in the 1970s and 1980s punished women for having them. A male star who demanded fifty takes was a genius; a woman who did the same was a problem. Dunaway has spoken about this double standard with increasing frankness over the years, and the industry has slowly caught up with her. When contemporary actresses like Jessica Chastain or Cate Blanchett talk about fighting for their characters, they are walking a road Dunaway cleared.
She also paid a price for her selectivity. After the Network Oscar, she turned down commercial projects that might have kept her bankable, holding out for great scripts that didn’t always come. It was principled, and it was costly. But it was also consistent with everything she had ever been: the Meisner-trained stage actress who believed the work was the point.
The Survivor
Today, Faye Dunaway is in her eighties, and her legacy is undergoing the reassessment it deserves. The “difficult” label is being retired by a generation of critics and filmmakers who recognize it for what it was: the price of being a serious woman in an unserious town. Her performances — Bonnie, Evelyn, Diana — are taught in acting classes. Her influence runs through every actress who refuses to smile prettily through a scene that demands rage.
In recent years, she has appeared in documentaries about her own career with a candor that is disarming. She talks about the mistakes, the regrets, the roles she should have taken. She talks about Mommie Dearest without flinching. And she talks about the craft — always the craft — with the undiminished passion of the young woman who studied with Sanford Meisner and believed, absolutely, that acting could be art.
The fire was never the problem. The fire was the gift. Faye Dunaway burned brighter than almost anyone of her generation, and if she occasionally scorched the people around her, it was because she was trying to get at the truth — in every take, in every close-up, in every single frame. That is not difficulty. That is devotion. And it is why, half a century after Bonnie Parker first tilted her beret at the camera, we are still watching.
There is a final irony worth savoring. The industry that once whispered “difficult” now teaches her performances in conservatories. The directors who clashed with her now cite her in interviews as the standard. And the young actresses who grew up watching Chinatown on late-night television carry her fearlessness into auditions she could never have imagined. Faye Dunaway didn’t just survive Hollywood’s judgment — she outlasted it, the way all true artists do: by leaving behind work too good to argue with.