Faye Dunaway paid to escape a film contract and landed Bonnie and Clyde
Early on, Faye Dunaway signed a six-picture deal with the director Otto Preminger, clashed with him on her second film, and bought her way out at real cost. Had she stayed, she later reflected, she would have been stuck in five bad movies and never been free to play Bonnie Parker, the role that made her famous.
Dunaway was born in Bascom, Florida, on January 14, 1941, to a housewife and a career Army sergeant, and grew up moving around the United States and Europe, with long stays in Mannheim, Germany, and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. She took ballet, tap, piano and singing lessons, finished high school in Tallahassee and earned a theatre degree from Boston University. Arthur Miller saw her in a student production of The Crucible, and after graduating in 1962 she was steered toward Elia Kazan's new Lincoln Center company.
Broadway came first, as a replacement in A Man for All Seasons and then in Miller's After the Fall and in Hogan's Goat, whose author, the Harvard professor William Alfred, became her mentor and something like the father she felt she never had. Her screen debut in 1967, The Happening, drew decent notices, though Roger Ebert mocked her habit of resting her cheek on her hand. Hurry Sundown for Preminger that same year was the experience she described as a daily psychodrama.
Arthur Penn had once been turned away from her by a casting director who thought her face was wrong for film. Seeing her scenes from The Happening changed his mind, and he pushed her for Bonnie over better-known names including Jane Fonda and Natalie Wood. Warren Beatty, producing and playing Clyde, worried that her striking bone structure was too glamorous for a small-town robber until beach photographs by Curtis Hanson convinced him. The 1967 film shocked audiences with its violence, earned ten Oscar nominations including one for her, and made her among Hollywood's most bankable stars; Ebert, reversing himself, called the leads major actors.
Chinatown brought a second nomination, and Network won her the Best Actress Oscar. Later she moved into character parts, starting with a much-debated Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest in 1981, and won the Sarah Siddons Award for playing Maria Callas on stage. She rarely gives interviews.
Source: Faye Dunaway
