Faye Dunaway gets candid about her brilliant career and bipolar disorder in HBO documentary

It’s described as maybe the greatest Hollywood photo ever taken. There is Faye Dunaway sprawled on a chair next to the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool the morning after her Oscar win. Newspapers headlining the awards show are strewn near a table that’s presided over by her gleaming golden statuette. But the actress' gaze at the ultimate trophy seems disillusioned as the reality of it hits her.

“What I love is that ‘is that all there is?’ was kind of the theme to it,” says the ferociously talented legend who is the subject of a documentary that debuts Saturday on HBO (and will be available for streaming on Max).

“Faye” is a candid, affectionate portrait of a woman who reigned on the big screen from the late 1960s to the middle of the 1970s, when American movies caught up to the turmoil and tumult of the modern world.

If you’re a GenXer, you may recognize Dunaway, now 83, and recall one or two of her films, perhaps the 1981 camp classic “Mommie Dearest,” the biopic about Joan Crawford that nearly destroyed her career. Long before the technology existed, the image of Dunaway as Crawford screaming, “No wire hangers!” at her adopted daughter was meme-worthy.

Those in the Gen Z range probably are unfamiliar with Dunaway, which makes the HBO doc a remarkable opportunity to introduce the current generation to a complex artist who was often labeled as difficult. As “Faye” sensitively reveals, Dunaway wasn’t just battling the usual show business sexism against independent women.  She was struggling with bipolar disorder at the time she was achieving greatness.

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Directed by Laurent Bouzereau  “Faye” features his extensive interviews with Dunaway, along with film clips, archival footage and illuminating interviews with her son, Liam Dunaway O’Neill; close friend Sharon Stone; and some thoughtful critics and scholars, among others.

It traces how Dorothy Faye Dunaway grew up with an alcoholic father and a mother who eventually divorced him and raised her alone in Florida, where pretty Southern girls with ambitions of performing pursued beauty queen titles. After Dunaway won a “sweetheart of Sigma Chi” contest while attending the University of Florida, she transferred to Boston University and then landed in a Lincoln Center repertory theater led by director Elia Kazan.

Noticed for her acclaimed off-Broadway acting in 1965’s “Hogan’s Goat,” Dunaway was cast opposite Warren Beatty in 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” the cultural inflection point that helped create New Hollywood with its violence, humor, sense of anguish and willingness to depict subjects like sexual impotence. She became an overnight star, plus a fashion trendsetter for her striking costumes (designed by Theadora Van Runkle) as one-half of the famous bank-robbing duo from the Depression era.

In an early interview around that time, Dunaway said “success is freedom,” a truism that was only partly true for the female population in cinema. She would go on to deliver brilliant performances in classics like 1968’s sexy caper  “The Thomas Crown Affair” with Steve McQueen (best known for the smoldering glances during an erotic chess game between the stars), 1974’s bleak neo-noir “Chinatown” with Jack Nicholson and 1976’s scathing satire “Network.” Her role as a brittle TV executive with a prescient knack for reality TV won her the best actress Oscar.

In "Faye," Dunaway addresses the double standards of filmmaking in that era, when wanting more control over your projects and having strong opinions were accepted and encouraged for men, but treated as drawbacks for women. She talks about the notorious anecdote about her walking off the set when “Chinatown” director Roman Polanski (who later pleaded guilty to unlawful intercourse with a minor and fled America) yanked a stray hair from her head that was interfering with a shot.

Afterward, she says, Nicholson nicknamed her the dreaded Dunaway, or “Dread,” much to her delight.

The pinnacle of Dunaway’s daring as an uncompromising actress is “Network.” Although it is remembered for Peter Finch’s “I’m mad as hell” speech as troubled TV anchor Howard Beale, it also must be recognized for Dunaway’s steely commitment to playing Diana Christensen, a woman dominating an industry run by men. “All I want out of life is a 20 share and a 30 rating,” says Dunaway as Diana, and she means it. There’s no love in this character, no hidden empathy or tenderness that surfaces late in the story. Dunaway is magnetic, but completely unsympathetic as Diana, never taking an easy route that might have won her some sympathy.

Once “Mommie Dearest” was declared a disaster by critics (the documentary argues it needed a director who would have toned down its midnight movie aspects), Dunaway struggled to regain her momentum. Always serious about her craft, she kept taking chances in smaller movies. She played an unglamorous alcoholic in 1987’s “Barfly” and won a Golden Globe for playing modeling agency founder Wilhelmina Cooper opposite a young Angelina Jolie in HBO's “Gia.”

"Faye" is at its most sensitive regarding the revelations about Dunaway’s mental health issues.  The frankest observations come from Dunaway herself, who, during a sequence that documents her micromanaging tendencies as she fusses over details before an interview with Bouzereau, says: “So now you see what it is about me. Not easy.”

Dunaway opens up about her struggles with manic depression and alcoholism, particularly in terms of how her bipolar disorder has impacted life behind and in front of the cameras. She describes how she is happier and healthier thanks to medication and treatment. Her son, with remarkable compassion, discusses monitoring her moods and musing on how her mood swings have affected her career.

“I think you have to ask yourself this question: If she wasn’t in so much pain, would she have been that good? Which then, in turn, wouldn’t have made her be able to touch people acting,” he says. “You’ve got to take the good with the bad. That’s just life.”

It takes guts to go the places that Dunaway did emotionally in her movies, but it requires even more to sustain a full personal life while juggling the demands she had to meet. “Faye” is never more compelling than when it examines how Dunaway adopted a son with her then-husband, photographer Terry O’Neill (who took her famous Oscar photo) and began devoting herself to motherhood at roughly the same time she was taking on a job that required her to portray the abusive parent of an adopted daughter in “Mommie Dearest.”

In the 1990s, Dunaway acted in the national tour of “Master Class,” Terrence McNally’s play about opera diva Maria Callas. It became her passion project to write, direct and star in the film version. In October 2009, back when Michigan’s film incentives were drawing all sorts of productions, the Free Press wrote that filming was expected to start the following week in metro Detroit and that Dunaway had been in town for about a month working on pre-production.

In “Faye,” her son says she ran out of money after filming for two or three months. Devastated  by the collapse of the project, Dunaway admits today that she took on too many jobs at once.

“I was in pieces for quite some time, you know. Locked up in my room, going to analysis. … I should have set it up and got a good director and I would act in it. But I wanted too much at that time. So it was a mistake,” she says. Given the power of her stage work in “Master Class,” it was a loss for cinema audiences as well as her.

As the documentary nears its conclusion, Dunaway is shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, the year she was chosen as the face of the festival and honored on giant posters. As photographers snap away, Faye, the mega-star, snaps into gear, exuding her full charisma as a personality.

Watching it on a TV screen, “Faye” demonstrates that Dunaway’s talent radiates on any screen: big, small or pocket-sized smartphone. As author and critic Mark Harris says in capturing her essential quality. “Faye Dunaway in one word: un-dismissible.”

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

'Faye'

8 p.m. Saturday

HBO (also will be available to stream on Max)

1 hour, 31 minutes