Faye Dunaway

Dorothy Faye Dunaway was born on January 14, 1941, in Bascom, Florida, to Grace April Smith, a housewife, and John MacDowell Dunaway Jr., a career non-commissioned officer in the United States Army. Her parents, who had married as teenagers in 1939, divorced in 1955. Dunaway has a younger brother, Mac Simmion Dunaway, who became a lawyer. Of Ulster Scottish, Irish, and German descent, she spent her childhood moving across the United States and Europe, with extended stays in Mannheim, Germany, and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. During her upbringing she studied ballet, tap, piano, and singing, and later graduated from Leon High School in Tallahassee, Florida.

Dunaway pursued higher education at Florida State University and the University of Florida before earning a degree in theatre from Boston University in 1962. The summer before her senior year, she performed in a stock company at Harvard's Loeb Drama Center, where Jane Alexander was among her fellow performers. During her senior year she worked with director Lloyd Richards on a production of The Crucible, which Arthur Miller attended. Following graduation, she trained at the American National Theater and Academy and at HB Studio in New York City, and was subsequently recommended to director Elia Kazan for his Lincoln Center Repertory Company.

Dunaway's Broadway career began in 1961 and extended through 1995. Shortly after completing her degree, she joined the cast of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons as a replacement, a production that ran from 1961 to 1963. She then appeared in Arthur Miller's After the Fall in 1964 and in William Alfred's Hogan's Goat from 1965 to 1967, a play written by the Harvard professor who became her mentor. Additional Broadway credits include The Changelings, But for Whom Charlie, and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1973. She starred in The Curse of an Aching Heart and later in Master Class, for which she received the Sarah Siddons Award for her portrayal of opera singer Maria Callas. Her stage work earned her a Theatre World Award in 1966.

Dunaway made her screen debut in 1967 in the comedy crime film The Happening, the same year she appeared in Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown alongside Michael Caine and Jane Fonda. That year she also starred as outlaw Bonnie Parker in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, a role for which she had only weeks to prepare and which earned her her first Academy Award nomination. The film received ten Academy Award nominations and established Dunaway as a major screen presence. Her subsequent films in the late 1960s and early 1970s included the crime caper The Thomas Crown Affair, the romantic drama The Arrangement, the revisionist Western Little Big Man, and a two-part adaptation of The Three Musketeers, with The Four Musketeers following in 1974.

Her film work in the mid-1970s produced some of her most recognized performances. She received her second Academy Award nomination for Roman Polanski's neo-noir mystery Chinatown in 1974, the same year she appeared in the disaster film The Towering Inferno. In 1975 she starred in the political thriller Three Days of the Condor, and in 1976 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the satire Network. Later credits from that decade include the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars and the sports drama The Champ.

Dunaway's career shifted toward character roles beginning in the 1980s, starting with her portrayal of Joan Crawford in the 1981 biopic Mommie Dearest. Subsequent films included Supergirl, Barfly, The Handmaid's Tale, Arizona Dream, Don Juan DeMarco, The Twilight of the Golds, Gia, and The Rules of Attraction. Across her career she accumulated accolades including an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a BAFTA Award.

In her personal life, Dunaway had relationships with Jerry Schatzberg and Marcello Mastroianni before marrying singer Peter Wolf and later photographer Terry O'Neill. With O'Neill she had a son, Liam. She published an autobiography in 1995.