Faye Dunaway — Actress, The Dangerous Intelligence of New Hollywood

Biography

From Bascom to New Hollywood

Born Dorothy Faye Dunaway on January 14, 1941, in Bascom, Florida — the daughter of a career soldier, raised across army bases in the American South and in Europe. She studied drama at the University of Florida and at Boston University, trained with the Lincoln Center Repertory Company in New York, and arrived in Hollywood in 1967 at twenty-six with the stage credentials and the coiled energy that Arthur Penn immediately understood what to do with.

Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) made her famous in the way that a very few films make an actress famous — not because the role was large but because the performance was irreducible. Bonnie Parker's dream of something larger than Texas, her intelligence trapped in circumstances that can't contain it, her relationship with her own legend: Dunaway played all of it simultaneously. The Oscar nomination was her first film.

Roman Polanski cast her as Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown (1974) — the woman whose terrible secret the film's noir structure is designed to withhold and then reveal. It is the finest female performance in the New Hollywood period: three hours of sustained mystery, warmth, and finally devastation, delivered with complete control of what to reveal and when.

Sidney Lumet's Network (1976) gave her Diana Christensen — the television executive who treats human suffering as programming material. She won the Academy Award for a performance of such comprehensive satirical intelligence that audiences still quote it fifty years later. The three films — Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Network — constitute one of the greatest decades in American screen acting.

1941

Born in Bascom, Florida; army family; raised across bases

1962

Lincoln Center Repertory; New York stage training

1967

Bonnie and Clyde — first film; Oscar nom; the decade begun

1968

The Thomas Crown Affair — Vicki Anderson; cool glamour

1974

Chinatown — Evelyn Mulwray; the finest New Hollywood performance

1977

Oscar won — Network; Diana Christensen; mad as hell

1987

Barfly — Oscar nom; Bukowski; unexpected return to form

Filmography

From Bonnie and Clyde to Network

1974Neo-Noir · Polanski · Mystery

Chinatown

Roman Polanski's perfect neo-noir — Dunaway as Evelyn Mulwray, the woman whose secret the film's entire architecture is constructed to withhold. The finest female performance of the New Hollywood era: sustained mystery and warmth and finally devastation, delivered with absolute control.

Oscar Nom

Evelyn must be mysterious without being cold, warm without being readable, and finally tragic without being merely pitiful — three qualities that would individually constitute a demanding role. Dunaway holds all three simultaneously throughout, releasing the secret only when Polanski's structure requires it. Her final scene — the sound, the eye, the understanding — is the most devastating moment in 1970s American cinema.

1976Satire · Lumet · Paddy Chayefsky

Network

Sidney Lumet's Paddy Chayefsky satire — Dunaway as Diana Christensen, the television programming executive who treats human suffering as content. Her Academy Award-winning performance: comprehensive satirical intelligence delivered with complete conviction, still being quoted fifty years later.

Oscar Win

Diana Christensen is one of cinema's great monsters, but Dunaway plays her without the protective distance of caricature — she is genuinely seductive, genuinely brilliant, and genuinely incapable of feeling what she understands intellectually. Her speech to William Holden about why she finds their affair undramatic is the film's most chilling scene because it is delivered with perfect sincerity.

1967Crime · Drama · New Hollywood

Bonnie and Clyde

Arthur Penn's New Hollywood landmark — Dunaway as Bonnie Parker, the bored small-town waitress whose dream of something larger leads her into the myth that will kill her. Her first film and her first Oscar nomination, at twenty-six, announcing a decade of defining American performance.

Oscar Nom

Bonnie's intelligence is the film's moral complication — she understands what she is doing and what it will cost, and she chooses it anyway because the alternative is the diner. Dunaway plays the calculation and the romanticism simultaneously, which is the only way the character makes sense. Her poem scene — reciting her own legend to a newspaper reporter — is the performance in miniature.

1987Drama · Bukowski · Barbet Schroeder

Barfly

Barbet Schroeder's Bukowski adaptation — Dunaway as Wanda Wilcox, the alcoholic bar denizen who forms an attachment to Mickey Rourke's Henry Chinaski. Her third Oscar nomination and her most unexpected performance: unglamorous, specific, and quietly devastating.

Oscar Nom

Wanda is the role that the Diana Christensen and Evelyn Mulwray comparisons had made difficult to anticipate — a woman with no power, no glamour, no intelligence deployed in the service of anything, surviving on momentum alone. Dunaway played it without the protections her stardom might have demanded. Her scenes with Rourke have the disreputable warmth of the best Bukowski prose.

Honors

Three Nominations — Three Defining Roles — One Oscar

Academy Award — Best Actress

1977

Network

Won for Diana Christensen — the television executive who cannot feel what she understands. The Academy's recognition of a satire delivered with the conviction of drama.

Oscar Won

Oscar Nominations

1968 · 1975 · 1988

Bonnie · Chinatown · Barfly

Three nominations across twenty years — each for a performance that defined the film and the decade in which it was made

3 Nominations

Golden Globe — Best Actress

1977

Network

Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama — alongside the Oscar, confirming that Network was the industry's unanimous recognition of a peak performance

Globe Won

BAFTA — Best Actress

1977

Network

BAFTA Award for Best Actress — completing the sweep of major awards for the Diana Christensen performance that defined a year and a career

BAFTA Won

Artistic Identity

Intelligence as Danger

The Coiled Energy

Dunaway's specific quality — the quality Arthur Penn knew what to do with in 1967 — is a sense of intelligence under pressure, of a mind too large for the circumstances it inhabits. Bonnie, Evelyn, Diana: all three are women whose intelligence creates and then destroys them.

The New Hollywood Decade

The five years from Bonnie and Clyde to Network produced one of the greatest streaks in American screen acting — Chinatown and Network alone would constitute a career for most actresses. She did both in consecutive years and added Barfly a decade later as confirmation that the talent had not been circumstantial.

The Polanski Standard

Chinatown is the hardest test of the three great performances — three hours of sustained mystery requiring the actress to know what the character knows while keeping it entirely invisible to the audience. Dunaway sustains it without a single moment of deliberate withholding that would betray the technique.

Diana Christensen

Network's Diana Christensen is the most prophetic character in 1970s American cinema — the executive who cannot distinguish between human suffering and content, whose intelligence is deployed entirely in the service of appetite. In 1976 this was satire. It has since become description.

Legacy

The Decade That Defined What American Acting Could Be

Faye Dunaway's legacy is the New Hollywood decade — Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Network — and the demonstration that the intelligence she brought to each of them was not accidental but structural. She is the actress for whom the new cinema was created: a performer whose specific quality the studio system had no category for, and which the new directors immediately recognised and used.

Diana Christensen, delivered with total conviction in 1976, has aged from satire to prophecy without losing its force. Evelyn Mulwray's final scene — the sound, the eye, the recognition — is still the most devastating ending in American cinema, and it works because Dunaway had spent three hours building a woman whose vulnerability was entirely real.

Academy Award Won

Network — Diana Christensen

Oscar Nominations

Bonnie · Chinatown · Barfly

Major Awards for Network

Oscar · Globe · BAFTA

Years Between First and Third Nom

1968 to 1988

20yr