Dorothy Faye Dunaway (born January 14, 1941) is an American actress. She is the recipient of many accolades, including an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a BAFTA Award.
Her career began in the early 1960s on Broadway. She made her screen debut in 1967 in The Happening, the same year she made Hurry Sundown with an all-star cast, and rose to fame with her portrayal of outlaw Bonnie Parker in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination. Her most notable films include the crime caper The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), the romantic drama The Arrangement (1969), the revisionist Western Little Big Man (1970), a two-part adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas classic The Three Musketeers (1973, with The Four Musketeers following in 1974), the neo-noir mystery Chinatown (1974) for which she earned her second Oscar nomination, the action-drama disaster The Towering Inferno (1974), the political thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975), the satire Network (1976) for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), and the sports drama The Champ (1979).
Her career evolved to more mature character roles in subsequent years, often in independent features, beginning with her controversial portrayal of Joan Crawford in the 1981 biopic Mommie Dearest. Her later films include Supergirl (1984), Barfly (1987), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Arizona Dream (1994), Don Juan DeMarco (1995), The Twilight of the Golds (1997), Gia (1998) and The Rules of Attraction (2002). Dunaway has also performed on stage in several plays, including A Man for All Seasons (1961–63), After the Fall (1964), Hogan's Goat (1965–67), and A Streetcar Named Desire (1973). She was awarded the Sarah Siddons Award for her portrayal of opera singer Maria Callas in Master Class (1996).
Protective of her private life, she rarely gives interviews and makes very few public appearances. After romantic relationships with Jerry Schatzberg and Marcello Mastroianni, Dunaway married twice, first to singer Peter Wolf and then to photographer Terry O'Neill, with whom she had a son, Liam.
Early life and education
Dunaway was born in Bascom, Florida, the daughter of Grace April (née Smith), a housewife, and John MacDowell Dunaway Jr., a career non-commissioned officer in the United States Army. She has a younger brother, lawyer Mac Simmion Dunaway. She is of Ulster Scottish, Irish, and German descent. She spent her childhood traveling throughout the United States and Europe, including lengthy stays in Mannheim, Germany, and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah.
Dunaway took ballet, tap, piano, and singing lessons while she was growing up and she graduated from Leon High School in Tallahassee, Florida. She then studied at Florida State University and the University of Florida. Later, she graduated from Boston University with a degree in theatre.
She spent the summer before her senior year in a summer-stock company at Harvard's Loeb Drama Center, where one of her co-players was Jane Alexander, an actress and future head of the National Endowment for the Arts. During her senior year, she worked with director Lloyd Richards on a BU production of a new version of The Crucible, where Arthur Miller saw her perform. in New York City.
Shortly after she graduated from Boston University, Dunaway appeared on Broadway as a replacement in Robert Bolt's drama A Man for All Seasons. She subsequently appeared in Arthur Miller's After the Fall and the award-winning Hogan's Goat by Harvard professor William Alfred, who became her mentor and spiritual advisor. In her 1995 autobiography, Dunaway said of him: "With the exception of my mother, my brother, and my beloved son, Bill Alfred has been without question the most important single figure in my lifetime. A teacher, a mentor, and I suppose the father I never had, the parent and companion I would always have wanted, if that choice had been mine. He has taught me so much about the virtue of a simple life, about spirituality, about the purity of real beauty, and how to go at this messy business of life."
Career
1967–1968: Early films and breakthrough
thumb|Faye Dunaway in 1967
Dunaway's first screen role was in the comedy crime film The Happening (1967), which starred Anthony Quinn. Her performance earned her good notices from critics; however, Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times panned the performance, saying that she "exhibits a real neat trick of resting her cheek on the back of her hand."
Dunaway had tried to get an interview with director Arthur Penn when he was directing The Chase (1966), but was rebuffed by a casting director who did not think that she had the right face for the movies. When Penn saw her scenes from The Happening before its release, he decided to let her read for the role of the bank robber Bonnie Parker for his upcoming film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Casting for the role of Bonnie had proved to be difficult, and many actresses had been considered for the role, including Jane Fonda, Tuesday Weld, Ann-Margret, Carol Lynley, Leslie Caron, and Natalie Wood. Penn loved Dunaway and managed to convince actor and producer Warren Beatty, who played Clyde Barrow in the film, that she was right for the part. Besides Dunaway's being a comparative unknown, Beatty's concern was her "extraordinary bone structure," which he thought might be inappropriate for Bonnie Parker, a local girl trying to look innocent while she held up small-town Texas banks. He changed his mind, though, after seeing some photographs of Dunaway taken by Curtis Hanson on the beach: "She could hit the ball across the net, and she had an intelligence and a strength that made her both powerful and romantic." Director Sidney Lumet stated that it was "a brilliant, an extraordinary performance. The courage of that evil that she brings to it, I think that's just major acting." Although the film became a cult classic as well as one of her most famous characters, Dunaway expressed her regrets for playing Crawford, as she felt "it was meant to be a window into a tortured soul. But it was made into camp." and the series was cancelled after only four episodes. Around that time, she was contacted by NBC, who wanted her to take on the role of a female sleuth, more in the vein of Columbo than Murder, She Wrote. As the prospective series was being developed, Dunaway contacted Columbo star Peter Falk, wanting his advice on how to approach playing the sleuth character. While discussing the role, Falk told Dunaway about a Columbo script that he had written himself. It's All in the Game featured a seductive woman who plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Lt. Columbo in the midst of a murder. Falk had written the script some years prior, saying that he could not find the right actress to take on the role. He offered it to her, and Dunaway accepted immediately. The 1993 TV movie proved a success and was nominated for several Golden Globe and Emmy Awards. Dunaway was recognized with the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series, saying it was at that moment when she felt like she was truly home. "I was overwhelmed by the generosity of spirit my colleagues extended me that night. It was like being wrapped up in a warm embrace. Though this is more often than not a town of grand illusions and transitory friendships, the moment seemed heartfelt, and touched me deeply."
With the prospective detective show not working out, Dunaway became interested in returning to the stage. She auditioned to replace Glenn Close in the musical Sunset Boulevard, a stage version of the 1950 film of the same name. Composer and producer Andrew Lloyd Webber cast Dunaway in the famed role of Norma Desmond, and Dunaway began rehearsing to take over the LA engagement when Close moved the show to Broadway.
2016–present: Return to film and theatre
In 2016, Dunaway made a rare public appearance at the TCM Classic Film Festival, in which she hosted a screening of Network and also joined in conversation with Ben Mankiewicz for a Q&A session in which she discussed her decades-spanning career. Also that year, Dunaway became the face of Gucci's Sylvie 2018 campaign.
In 2019, more than 30 years since her performance in The Curse of the Aching Heart, Dunaway planned to return to Broadway with an updated version of Matthew Lombardo's one-woman play Tea at Five, which was first performed at Hartford Stage in 2002.
Dunaway reunited with Kevin Spacey in 2022's The Man Who Drew God, co-starring and directed by Franco Nero. Faye, a documentary about Dunaway, directed and produced by Laurent Bouzereau, premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and can be seen on HBO and Max. She was to next appear in the supernatural love story, Fate, opposite Harvey Keitel. On October 3, 2024, Dunaway was announced as starring in the coming-of-age supernatural thriller, The Evilry. On January 14, 2026, it was announced that she had been cast in the drama film Prima.
Legacy and reputation
thumb|266x266px|Dunaway in 1997
Dunaway is regarded as one of the greatest and most beautiful actresses of her generation, as well as a powerful emblem of the New Hollywood. In 1974, she married Peter Wolf, the lead singer of the rock group The J. Geils Band. Their career commitments caused frequent separations, and the two divorced in 1979. Their child, Liam Dunaway O'Neill, was born in 1980. In 2003, despite Dunaway's earlier indications that she had given birth to Liam, Terry O'Neill revealed that their son was adopted. She then had a three-year relationship with Warren Lieberfarb, Home Video president of Warner Bros., before going on to date Hook Herrera, a blues harpist with the band Hook and the Hitchhikers. Her most recent publicized romantic attachment was with French TV host in the mid-1990s. In a rare interview for Harper's Bazaar in 2016, Dunaway said she felt that "it's important to have a partner, probably," but she described herself as "a loner" and added, "I kind of like to be alone and do my work and, you know, be focused on my own things."
Credits and accolades
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