The woman at the centre of a mystery
In Chinatown, released in 1974 and directed by Roman Polanski, Faye Dunaway plays Evelyn Mulwray, the wife of Los Angeles water chief Hollis Mulwray, whose apparent infidelity draws private detective J. J. Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, into a conspiracy about water, land, and power. At first, Evelyn seems like a classic film noir figure: elegant, guarded, possibly lying, and certainly hiding something. Dunaway plays her with extraordinary control. Her voice is low, her movements are precise, and her face gives away almost nothing. That control is the performance’s great achievement, because as the film proceeds, we learn that Evelyn’s composure is not coldness. It is survival. She is protecting a secret so painful that speaking it aloud feels like a second injury.
The plot, written by Robert Towne, is famously intricate. Gittes is hired by a woman pretending to be Evelyn, photographs Hollis with a young woman, and then finds Hollis dead. The real Evelyn confronts Gittes, threatens to sue him, and then, reluctantly, begins to work with him as the investigation widens. Dunaway and Nicholson make a superb, prickly pair. Gittes is wisecracking, confident, and convinced he understands women like Evelyn. Dunaway lets Evelyn correct him, slowly and without raising her voice, until he realises how little he understands. Their scenes together are a masterclass in screen acting: two stars listening, interrupting, and revealing character through what they refuse to say.
Restraint as a form of courage
What makes Evelyn Mulwray one of Dunaway’s greatest roles is the way she builds a character from restraint. In many films, a tragic heroine announces her suffering. Evelyn does the opposite. She has been taught, by her father Noah Cross, played by John Huston, and by the world she inhabits, that her pain is shameful and must be hidden. Dunaway shows the cost of that hiding in small details: a trembling hand, a sudden change of subject, a look that lasts a fraction too long. When Gittes slaps her during the interrogation scene, demanding to know whether the young woman Katherine is her sister or her daughter, Dunaway’s answer, repeated with increasing desperation, “She’s my sister and my daughter,” is one of the most devastating moments in American cinema. It is not a showpiece of shouting. It is a woman breaking under the weight of a truth she has carried for years.
Polanski’s direction supports that restraint. He films 1930s Los Angeles in warm, sunlit colours, with elegant clothes, cars, and houses that make corruption look respectable. Dunaway’s costumes, her hairstyle, and her careful diction all contribute to Evelyn’s armour. She looks like a woman who has learned to be perfect because perfection is the only protection she has. When that armour cracks, the effect is shocking precisely because Dunaway has maintained it so convincingly. The audience realises, as Gittes does, that they have been misreading Evelyn all along. She was never the femme fatale of the story. She was its victim, and its most courageous figure.
Power, water, and the past that will not stay past
Chinatown is about more than a murder. It is about how Los Angeles was built, who profited from its water, and how powerful men rewrite the future by controlling the past. Noah Cross, Evelyn’s father, embodies that power. He is charming, ruthless, and convinced that the future belongs to men like him. Dunaway’s scenes with Huston are chilling, because she plays Evelyn as a woman who knows her father’s charm and his cruelty intimately. She is not fooled by him, but she is also not free of him. The film’s tragedy is that Evelyn’s attempt to protect Katherine, her daughter and sister, from Cross brings her back into his orbit, and into the Chinatown district where Gittes once learned that some mysteries cannot be solved by good intentions.
Dunaway was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for this performance, and it is easy to see why. She does not steal scenes from Nicholson; she deepens them. Gittes is the detective, but Evelyn is the moral centre of the film, the person whose suffering gives the conspiracy its human meaning. Without Dunaway’s performance, Chinatown could have been a clever puzzle. With it, the film becomes a tragedy about a woman who tries to escape her family history and discovers that history has already claimed her daughter.
A performance that changed how we see Dunaway
Before Chinatown, Dunaway was known for glamour, wit, and a certain cool sexuality. After it, critics spoke of her as a serious dramatic actress of the first rank. The role showed that she could play vulnerability without sentimentality, and strength without hardness. Evelyn is strong because she endures, not because she wins. Dunaway understood that distinction, and she played it with a discipline that never feels like technique. Even in the film’s final, devastating sequence, when Evelyn tries to drive Katherine to safety and is shot by police, Dunaway keeps the performance human and specific. She does not die as a symbol. She dies as a mother trying, too late, to save her child.
That ending, with Gittes being led away and told to forget it, because “it’s Chinatown,” has become one of the most quoted conclusions in film history. It works because Dunaway has made us care about Evelyn as a person, not as a plot twist. The corruption of Los Angeles is abstract until it kills a woman we have come to understand. Dunaway’s achievement is to make that understanding feel earned, scene by scene, through restraint, intelligence, and a willingness to let Evelyn be unknowable until the moment when knowing her breaks our hearts.
Why Evelyn Mulwray endures
Evelyn endures because she refuses the simple categories of noir. She is neither innocent nor guilty in the ways the genre usually allows. She is a woman who made a terrible choice as a girl, who was abused by her father, and who has spent her adult life trying to protect the child born of that abuse. Dunaway plays her without asking for pity and without offering excuses. She plays her as a person, and that is why the performance still moves audiences more than fifty years later.
Watch Chinatown for Towne’s screenplay and Polanski’s direction, but watch Dunaway for the quiet work at its centre. Notice how little she says, how much she withholds, and how devastating it is when she finally speaks. Evelyn Mulwray is Faye Dunaway’s most profound creation, a portrait of dignity under unbearable pressure, and a reminder that the greatest screen acting is often the art of not showing everything at once.