The HBO documentary “Faye,” which premieres Saturday on Max, opens with perhaps the most famous post-Oscar-win photograph in Hollywood history. Taken by Faye Dunaway’s future husband Terry O’Neill, it features the actor nonchalantly lounging poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Her best actress Oscar for Sidney Lumet’s 1976 television satire, “Network,” which she’d won mere hours before, sits on a table next to her, perfectly framed in the shot.
Below Dunaway is a mess of scattered newspapers. Like all bits of memorable Hollywood magic, this entire scenario was staged. Dunaway, now 83, who appears throughout “Faye,” lays out exactly how it happened, and describes how iconic the image has become.
She also talks candidly about a wide range of topics, including her movies and stage work, her alcoholism, and being diagnosed as bipolar. Advertisement I’d seen that “Network” Oscar picture many times before director Laurent Bouzereau put it onscreen, but this was the first time I mentally made a connection to another Oscar winner’s famously staged morning-after photo. Dunaway played that actor, Joan Crawford, in 1981′s trash classic “Mommie Dearest.
” Since that film, beloved by John Waters (he does the DVD commentary!) and yours truly, was something of a third rail in earlier interviews with Dunaway, I was a bit shocked that “Faye” devotes time to it. Mara Hobel, who played young Christina Crawford, tells Bouzereau she had a good time making the.
