The word “diva” is grossly overused, both as a pejorative and a superlive. A cursory search of the term on , , or — to say nothing of social media platforms— will find the label attached to all types of reality-television personalities, athletes, and emerging pop singers. Yet Faye Dunaway, the subject of a new , is a diva.
The Academy Award-winning actress, known for her fierce talent and daunting hauteur, boasts a career spanning 60 years. She feuded, publicly and viciously, with Bette Davis, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Roman Polanski. Marcello Mastroianni never got over their love affair.
Decades before Dunaway was cast as Joan Crawford in the infamous biographical melodrama , Crawford remarked that “only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage to make a real star.” Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Jerry Schatzberg all captured her arresting beauty—as did her future husband Terry O’Neill, at dawn after her 1977 Oscar win, creating perhaps . In , director Laurent Bouzereau ( ) considers all of this, creating a compassionate yet unflinching portrait of a woman whom Columbia University film professor Annette Insdorf aptly sums up as “complicated.
” Bouzereau’s fascination with the actress has been lifelong: She “was part of my upbringing, discovering film in the ’70s, and falling in love with movies in general,” he says. Counting Liam O’Neill, Dunaway’s son, as a close friend, Bouzereau had planned to make a film with him about L.