At the Guardian, Xan Brooks has a diverting account of how he came to get ejected from Faye Dunaway's presence while conducting her "first British press interview in nearly 20 years ". Dunaway is across the pond for the Raindance Film Festival showing of her latest film, Flick, a horror movie directed by David Howard. Brooks opens his account by describing how Howard listed for him all "the things I am absolutely not to ask her. Firstly, there must be no mention of Mommie Dearest, the Joan Crawford biopic credited with destroying Dunaway's career. Nor must I ask her about Andrew Lloyd Webber, who bumped her from the Los Angeles production of Sunset Boulevard in 1994; or about her adult son, who may or may not be adopted; or about the cosmetic surgery that she may or may not have undergone. Is that it? 'Yes,' says Howard. 'I think that's the lot.' He turns out to be wrong." Brooks veered into a minefield when he chose to ask her about Roman Polanski's Chinatown and how much reports of tensions on its set might have damaged her career. ("Oh," Dunaway says, "The Roman thing.") When our intrepid correspondent asks the ladylike Dunaway if it's true that she once threw a cup of urine at her pint-sized director, the interview wraps itself up in short order.
Before the meltdown, Dunaway gives what sounds like an amusing performance, half elegant and half dippy, as an aging star who may only be a faded name to younger moviegoers and who seems surprisingly intent on being judged a creature of regal dignity. In Flick, she plays "a one-armed Memphis cop on the trail of a zombie Teddy boy." Brooks marches right out onto thin ice at the start, mentioning that Howard has said that in casting her, "he was taking his lead from Roger Corman, the B-movie producer who made a habit of hiring older Hollywood legends such as Ray Milland to appear in his movies" Dunaway's response: "I think he was going for - not old Hollywood, let's not say that. But maybe a little of the old-style glamour." Despite the dragon-lady demeanor that made Dunaway stand out in the '60s and '70s and that made her a neat fit for both the role of Joan Crawford and the nostalgic setting of Chinatown, Dunaway describes her breakout role as Bonnie Parker as the one "that's closest to me. I was a southern girl and so was Bonnie. We share the frustrations of living in that small, limited environment - dying to get out and move forward in the world. That was part of my makeup as a girl." Cut short though it was, the conversation does give you a feeling that you might have glimpsed something about Dunaway, and why she hasn't done better at staying afloat in the last couple of decades: women have to fight to stay alive in Hollywood, and Dunaway, who clearly has the resources to be a fighter, doesn't want to be seen that way: it conflicts with her surprising desire to be seen as a lady. She doesn't seem to grasp that Brooks is trying to help her out, not trap her, when he suggests that the nasty stories told against her for having been difficult might "come down to a case of Hollywood sexism, I ask her. After all, nobody ever complained about her former co-stars Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen or Marlon Brando being a little bit wild or rebellious. But Dunaway doesn't bite: she can't think what I mean."
