Faye Dunaway Biography

Born prematurely on Jan. 14, 1941 in Bascom, FL, Dorothy Faye Dunaway was the daughter of MacDowell Dunaway, Jr., a career Army officer, and his wife, Grace April Smith. After a stint as a teenaged beauty queen in Florida, she intended to pursue education at the University of Florida, but switched to acting, earning her degree from Boston University in 1962. Faye Dunaway was given the enviable task of choosing between a Fulbright Scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts or a role in the Broadway production of “A Man For All Seasons” as a member of the American National Theatre and Academy. Faye Dunawaypicked the latter, enjoying a fruitful stage career for the next two years, which was capped by appearances in “After the Fall” and “Hogan’s Goat.” The latter – an Off-Broadway production in 1967 – required Dunaway to tumble down a flight of steps in every performance, earning her a screen debut in the wan counterculture comedy “The Happening” (1967). Just two months after its release, however, she was wowing audiences across the country as Depression-era bank robber Bonnie Parker in Arthur Penn’s controversial “Bonnie and Clyde.” Faye Dunawayturn as the naïve but trigger-happy and sexually aggressive Parker earned her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, and provided a direct route to the front of the line for Hollywood leading ladies in an unbelievably short amount of time.

Dunaway followed this success with another hit, “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968), in which her coolly sensual insurance investigator generated considerable sparks with playboy and jewel thief Steve McQueen. Faye Dunawaythen bounced between arthouse efforts like “Puzzle of a Downfall Child” (1970), directed by her then-boyfriend, photographer Jerry Schatzberg, and the revisionist Western “Doc” (1971), as well as big-budget efforts like “Little Big Man” (1970), which cast her as a predatory preacher’s wife with designs on Dustin Hoffman’s reluctant Native American hero. Dunaway also balanced these projects with several well-regarded theatrical productions, including a 1972-73 stint as Blanche Du Bois in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and notable TV-movies like “The Woman I Love” (1972), which cast her as the Duchess of Windsor, and TV broadcasts of “Hogan’s Goat” (1971) and “After the Fall” (1974). But her turn as the duplicitous Lady De Winter in Richard Lester’s splashy, slapstick take on “The Three Musketeers” (1973) and its 1974 sequel “The Four Musketeers” preceded a long period of critical and box office hits, starting with her mast performance in 1974’s “Chinatown.”