A hair was standing up on Faye Dunaway’s head.
The Hollywood legend was filming a restaurant scene for the 1974 motion picture “Chinatown,” opposite Jack Nicholson, but production retained getting halted by a stubborn follicle.
“It was a incredibly tense instant,” Dunaway, 83, claims in the new documentary “Faye.” “I have normally curly hair, so my hair does not want to do what another particular person tells it to do.”
Hairspray wasn’t encouraging both. So, hotshot director Roman Polanski brusquely intervened.
“Roman actually walks all around and pulls the hair out of Faye’s head,” “Chinatown” assistant director Hawk Koch remembers in the doc.
“I’ve been close to a extended time — even then I’d been all around a long time — and I’ve never read some of those words.”
But there had been far even bigger troubles roiling deep down than a diva obtaining heated with her director.
Dunaway, the “Network” and “Bonnie and Clyde” star who’s lengthy experienced a standing in Tinseltown for currently being “difficult,” candidly reveals in the film, which starts streaming Saturday on Max, that her additional egregious actions in excess of the yrs was thanks to struggling from bipolar condition, manic depression and alcoholism.
“I experienced durations where by I was pretty depressed, and I was pretty moody and I truly have, we could as properly say, a bipolar prognosis,” Dunaway states. “You can be up superior, you can be manic, you can be incredibly frustrated.”
The actress extra that Polanski’s pluck was “enough to set off the manic depression. It was offensive. You never do that.”
Putting a button on the fracas, the Oscar winner reported: “After that hair incident, Jack nicknamed me ‘Dread’ — the Dreaded Dunaway. He continue to to this day calls me Dread, and I enjoy it.”
That was not the only drama through the noir shoot. Dunaway also grew to become obsessed with the lip balm manufacturer Blistex.
“I simply cannot talk with out it,” she admits.
Koch remembers that “Lee Harmon, who was our wonderful make-up male, had a tube of Blistex, and between each and every shot he’d have to put Blistex on her lips. It was her stability blanket. But for Roman and for the rest of us, oy vey, what a ache in the ass.”
Dunaway’s outbursts turned considerably even worse more than the yrs, and spilled out into newspaper headlines.
Actress Rutanya Alda, who performed the aggrieved housekeeper Carol Ann in 1981’s Joan Crawford drama “Mommie Dearest,” explained she was terrified of the lead during filming.
“She was frightening,” Alda suggests in the doc.
“She was terrifying. I was on the edge of my seat at times thinking, ‘Am I gonna get fired?.’ And [director Frank Perry] would remind me: ‘Don’t do this or you’re gonna get fired.’ From the beginning. ‘Don’t appear so good, or I’m gonna hearth you, and I have no manage around this.’ So, who was in demand? I necessarily mean, it’s a horrible way to work contemplating you are gonna get fired at any time.”
Dunaway chalked up Alda’s adverse notion of her to how Crawford was portrayed in the script.
“Well, that is simply because the character was created fearful, I suppose,” she explained.
In 2019, The Put up broke the information that Dunaway had been fired from the Broadway-bound show “Tea at 5,” in which she played Katharine Hepburn, for generating a “hostile” and “dangerous” operating natural environment backstage.
“The July 10 functionality was canceled moments just before curtain because Dunaway slapped and threw points at crew associates who were being striving to place on her wig,” sources explained to The Post’s Michael Riedel at the time.
Dunaway clarifies her epic Beantown blowup in the doc.
“I didn’t really feel I was ideal for it for the reason that Katharine Hepburn’s New England and I’m from the South. And so there is these types of a distinct sensibility that I was apprehensive about my being able to genuinely enjoy it,” Dunaway commenced.
“And it began to make me far more and more irritated. And I’m rather certain — I know — that was the bipolar [disorder] kicking in.”
Dunaway’s son Liam Dunaway O’Neill, whom she adopted with photographer ex-spouse Terry O’Neill, recalls the theater gig in Boston receiving messy.
“Slowly as the exhibits went on, she started out losing her temper, she began acting out,” Liam, 44, states in “Faye.” “Her demons sort of acquired a maintain of her, and she was fired from it and they canceled it. And that was that.”
Right after departing the production, Dunaway sought out health professionals who approved prescription drugs that she states have “helped” her.
“I am quieter,” she stated. “But throughout my occupation people know that there ended up hard moments. I really don’t necessarily mean to make an excuse for myself. I’m however accountable for my actions. But this is what I came to comprehend was the motive for them.”
Dunaway also reveals in “Faye” that she is an alcoholic.
“I went by a period of time in which I had complications with liquor,” the actress explained. “As did my father. It’s an inherited matter. I’m in [a] software, and I have been for about 15 a long time.”
These days, the Hollywood icon resides in New York City, the place she began her occupation treading the boards of Broadway and Lincoln Center. She is most concerned with her role as a mother and new grandmother.
“She started off off as a standard human being attempting to be well-known,” Liam claimed, “and is ending as a famous individual attempting to be usual.”
