Sympathy for the Diva: Why We Love ‘Difficult’ Stars

Before Faye Dunaway makes her big entrance, you hear her snap from off camera: “We need to shoot. I’m here now. Come on!” When we meet her inside her apartment, she’s using a piece of paper to fan herself with a petulance that’s reminiscent of Queen Charlotte from “Bridgerton.” This is the feisty opening to the HBO documentary “Faye,” and it doesn’t do much to dispel decades of rumors painting Dunaway as a temperamental diva. Difficult, erratic, vain, narcissistic: These descriptors have etched themselves into the reputations of many famous women, and they have also been countered in all sorts of media. Much like Barbra Streisand’s memoir, “My Name Is Barbra,” or the 2018 Grace Jones documentary, “Bloodlight and Bami,” one clear purpose of “Faye” is rebuttal: to let Dunaway reconstruct the narrative.

Like many in my generation, I first saw Dunaway in “Mommie Dearest,” the 1981 film — either a disaster or a masterpiece, depending on whom you ask and their tolerance for camp — in which she played another supposed she-devil: Joan Crawford, whom the movie depicts as an abusive mother and a fame-hungry prima donna. Unlike Roger Ebert, who called it “one of the most depressing films in a long time,” I was transfixed by “Mommie Dearest.” I couldn’t get enough of Dunaway’s shellacked eyebrows, the murderous rose-garden scene, the “no more wire hangers” theatrics. There’s an entire age cohort whose sense of Dunaway is all scrambled up in this role. Instead of meeting her via classics like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Chinatown” and “Network,” we met her as Crawford, berating everyone in her path. As Dunaway says in a 1984 interview clip shown in the new documentary, “There’s an inevitable tendency of people who both work in the industry and the audience to associate, to think you’re like the parts you play.”

If you’re not up on the reputation that Dunaway now has to dispute, a quick scroll through Reddit threads about her should get you up to speed. There are first-person accounts, too, many of which appear in HBO’s documentary. In one clip, Johnny Carson asks Bette Davis — rumored to be a bit of a harpy herself — to name the most difficult person she ever worked with; Davis, looking prim in a white bucket hat, shoots back, “One million dollars, Faye Dunaway,” to great laughter. In a clip that’s not shown in the documentary, Brenda Vaccaro, who worked alongside Dunaway in the 1984 movie “Supergirl,” says that Dunaway “would terrify people” — though she also calls her a “brilliant actress” and adds that “you can see the struggle.”

“Faye” uses a mix of straight-to-camera interviews, family photos, archival footage and plenty of film clips to humanize little Dorothy Faye, a girl from Bascom, Fla., who quickly achieved Hollywood-icon status. It also dwells on that “struggle” part and enlists talking heads to spring to Dunaway’s defense. We learn about her alcohol dependency and her late-in-life diagnosis of bipolar disorder, both of which Dunaway finally sought treatment for after years of unexplained mood swings, depression and erratic behavior. Sharon Stone, Dunaway’s chum and mentee, talks about the intense pressure on actresses to be thin and says that Dunaway has only ever been kind and generous to her. She becomes fiercely protective when the subject of “Mommie Dearest” comes up: “Everybody wants to make fun of her for ‘Mommie Dearest,’ but you tell me how you play that part,” she says. “The joke is on the director, the joke is not on the artist.”

At each stage, we the audience have our own parts to play: fans, bullies, executioners, cheerleaders, allies.

Mickey Rourke — whose own reputation isn’t exactly untarnished — starred in “Barfly” with Dunaway. He was, he says, “in awe of her and kind of a little intimidated.” He attempts to soften Dunaway’s image, but that task becomes complicated when people like Howard Koch come along to share their experiences. Koch was first assistant director on the set of “Chinatown.” In his first phone call to Dunaway, he says, she guessed that he was a Sagittarius, then informed him that this astrological offense meant they would never get along. He then dishes about Dunaway’s demanding that Blistex be applied to her lips before every take. Jack Nicholson, we learn, had a loving nickname for her on the set: “Dread.”