Faye Dunaway makes composure look like hard work, and determination need not make her characters secure. We rate her most highly in Chinatown, where she makes a guarded woman absorbing without explaining her away.
Fi1m perspective
In Chinatown (1974), Faye Dunaway makes Evelyn Cross Mulwray’s reserve something we want to watch. She lets us notice the effort it takes to stay composed, but does not tell us how to read it. We found that effort unsettling: she makes restraint look difficult to sustain. The performance holds our attention well before the detective has made sense of her.
Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was the breakthrough, with rebellion giving her determination an obvious purpose. Her major work of the 1970s found other uses for it. Alongside Evelyn sits Diana Christensen, the ruthless, ambitious television executive in Network (1976). These are strong-willed women, but Dunaway does not make strength look comfortable.
Roman Polanski gives her a difficult task in Chinatown: she must hold our attention while the writing keeps Evelyn at a distance. At times, the character risks becoming another question for Gittes to answer. Dunaway supplies enough of the person to stop that happening. Beside Jack Nicholson’s persuasive confidence, her caution makes us pay closer attention to what an apparently assured man cannot settle. Their performances give us a reason to follow the crowded plotting beyond the pleasure of finding things out.
Dunaway’s own account of acting fits this performance: “You don't become a character. You experience and illuminate her in some way. You may know things about her that she does not know.” Her small, considered gestures suit that approach. In Evelyn, they let us register strain without pretending we have already understood the woman.
As Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (1981), the intensity becomes overbearing. That performance became a lasting reference point in her later career, but it need not determine where we begin. Start with Chinatown; there is plenty to follow in the plotting, but do not let it distract from Dunaway.
Biography
Faye Dunaway is an American actress. She was born Dorothy Faye Dunaway on 14 January 1941 in Bascom, Florida. She graduated from Boston University with a BFA in 1962 and began her career on Broadway in A Man for All Seasons that year.
Dunaway made her screen debut in The Happening (1967) and rose to prominence with her role as Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). She appeared as Evelyn Cross Mulwray in Chinatown (1974) and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Network (1976). Other notable films include The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Mommie Dearest (1981).
