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Elizabeth Taylor and Faye Dunaway Made Star Power Into an Art — These HBO Docs Prove It
'Faye' and 'Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes' illuminate the legacies of two Oscar-winning legends
In the documentaries, Dunaway — still with us at age 83, and interviewed recently for this film — and Taylor — who died in 2011 but whose “lost tapes” catalogue an extensive 1964 debriefing with journalist Richard Meryman — both express doubt, anxiety and even shame for career missteps, misbegotten projects and the ways in which their private troubles played out in public view. In interviews with the press, Dunaway, while seeming to hold her feelings back, has a relentless erudition and quickness that makes clear just how much of herself was in “Network’s” brilliant executive, or “Chinatown’s” tricky femme fatale. We’re told that Taylor was 32 when she played the fiftysomething Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” and while her physical transformation for the role is indeed impressive, it’s the changes to her soul and bearing — her willingness to flaunt her signs of age in a sort of ironic self-deprecation — that feels most remarkable.
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