The darkness that drove one of Hollywood’s brightest stars

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.”

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 Cannes Film Festival, where Faye debuted in May, Dunaway is charming. But there are still hints of the irascibility of old.

“I didn’t understand the first thing you said,” she says in response to a question in heavily accented English from a Polish journalist.

“I’m yawning,” she says in response to another. “I’m a little tired. I’m sorry.”

She asks for a curtain to be closed, because there’s just too much light coming into her eyes. “It’s just so bright. Not that one. No no. That one there. Just close it all the way.”

Faye is a riveting watch, dwelling at length on the key films – Bonnie and Clyde, The Thomas Crown Affair, Network, Chinatown, Eyes of Laura Mars, the much (and unfairly) maligned Mommie Dearest, Barfly – and reminding us that Dunaway at her peak was not just one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the screen but also an actor of extraordinary power.

She picked characters she could relate to, she says, and poured a bit of herself into each of them. But in turn, something of the women she played leached into her.

Without overtly identifying as a feminist, she was forging her own path at a time when the studios’ grip on the sorts of films that got made, and the sort of roles actors could choose, was loosening.

“I just wanted to do what I wanted to do, and I didn’t so much care that it wasn’t allowed by men,” she says in Cannes. “I just forged ahead, you know, that’s what I did. It was desire. I suppose you can call it ambition, an ambition to achieve certain things, and I didn’t hide it.

“I think playing those kinds of characters, the independent woman, the woman who has a life of her own … the kinds of characters I played have been right in there with [the feminist] movement,” she adds.

Faye does, of course, detail some of the moments when diva Dunaway came to the fore, including a blow-up with director Roman Polanski on the set of Chinatown over a stray hair that refused to sit down (for what it’s worth, Polanski comes off no better in this tale than his star). It also includes a clip of Bette Davis – no shrinking violet herself – telling talk show host Johnny Carson that Dunaway was the worst person she had ever performed with.

Dunaway doesn’t flinch from these stories. But being able to label the source of her sometimes erratic behaviour has come as a relief.

“It’s an excitement, and the opposite of that, of course, is there’s sadness,” she says of bipolar. “So when I realised what was affecting my behaviour, I was very glad to know, because it explained it. But as I say in the documentary, you’re still responsible for your actions. It may explain them, but it doesn’t excuse them necessarily, if they’ve been painful for other people.”

Watching the clips from her movies again, what leaps out is the raw power and emotional strength of her performance. And in the light of the bipolar diagnosis, it’s hard not to conclude that her talent was directly related to her ability to tap the wellspring of emotional turmoil within.

That, at least, is how Dunaway herself sees it.

“I had those aspects in my behaviour, I think in fact they helped the performances, because that kind of emotional scope was something you could pull on and draw on for the character,” she says.

But it was also “a mixed bag. You don’t want it in life, but in my particular world, you kind of need it, you need that up, and you need the down, and you need the complexity in between.

“I think it was a necessary part of what I did, my craft,” she continues. “That’s what we do, we use all of those emotions. So I think it was a curse and a blessing.

“I think it’s just as well to curb it in your life, to control it and understand it and to make your behaviour conform more to other people,” she adds. “I think I’ve learned to do that to some degree.”

Faye is on Foxtel and Binge from July 14.

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and Twitter at @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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