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‘Faye’ Review: An Enticing Portrait of Faye Dunaway Looks at Where Acting Meets Life Meets ‘Difficulty’


The film connects Dunaway's volcanic personality to her stormy characters but also suggests that she was unfairly maligned for her demanding ways.

What Dunaway did in “Network” is closer to what De Niro and Pacino were doing in “Mean Streets” and “Dog Day Afternoon” — she was letting the audience live inside the character’s outsize flawed humanity. “ Chinatown,” in 1974, was perhaps her greatest tour de force, and though it’s widely recognized as a stellar piece of acting, one reason she isn’t given more credit for it is that the performance — luminous, silken, charged with tremulous despair — was so surrounded by greatness: Jack Nicholson’s whiplash power, as well as the film’s own mazelike evocation of political corruption and rot. Dunaway recalls that she and Roman Polanski, the director of “Chinatown,” terrorized each other, and there are good stories from her “Barfly” costar Mickey Rourke, her good friend Sharon Stone, and James Gray, who directed her in “The Yards.” And though I wish the documentary had included details of her affair with Lenny Bruce, there are more than enough stories of her tempestuous love life: her relationships with the photographer-turned-director Jerry Schatzberg and with Marcello Mastroianni; her marriage to the rock star Peter Wolf, whom she left to marry the British photographer Terry O’Neill, with whom she adopted her son, Liam, who is prominently featured in the film as a visible testament to her motherly devotion.

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