Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. The reason Faye Dunaway was such a powerful actor, says her son Liam Dunaway O’Neill in the documentary Faye , “is because she would keep her emotions inside, and then when she had to act a scene, she would let it out”. Her approach won her an Oscar in 1977 for Network , in which she played a tough-as-nails television news boss, and nabbed her two more nominations, for Chinatown in 1975 and Bonnie and Clyde , just her second film, in 1968.
But it also earned her a reputation as “difficult”, a perception that ultimately came to overwhelm all other aspects of her career. Faye , directed by Frenchman Laurent Bouzereau in his first standalone feature doc after decades shooting behind-the-scenes material for Steven Spielberg, tackles that perception head on. And his intimate but unflinching portrait reveals Dunaway not merely as a highly strung diva, but as someone who was living with mental illness.
“I had periods where I was very depressed and I was very moody,” she says in the film. “I actually have, we might as well say, a bipolar diagnosis.” Faye Dunaway photographed for the cover of Newsweek magazine in 1968.
Dunaway is 83 now. But it was only a few years ago that, at the urging of her son, she visited a clinic in Boston, was diagnosed and received treatment. “And she came out,” Liam says in the film, “like a whole new person”.
Sitting beside her director in an interview room at the Can.