Coming from Florida, and partly European,
going up to New York in 1962, she joined the Lincoln Centre Repertory Theatre Company, and after some impressive performances on the New York stage, appeared in ‘THE HAPPENNING’, her first film, in 1967. This first film sums up Dunaway’s central concern in her best films to come, since it concerns four hippies of the 1960s criticizing the amoral materialistic values of American society in a humorously rebellious manner. But it was her second film in the same year, ‘BONNIE & CLYDE’, where Dunaway appeared as Bonnie, beside Warren Beatty as Clyde, in the film version of the famous real bank-robbing couple cheered on by the American poor during the economic depression in 1930s America, which brought her deserved praise.
Dunaway & the counter-culture
Dunaway, in this her second film, almost received an Academy Award, since it was apparent her acting interpreted the daring character of Bonnie as her own, not in the sense that she glorified bank robbing of course, but by her using the role to explore the romantic daring of an individual youthful temperament.
However, the genuinely exciting popularity of director Arthur Penn’s film, ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, lay in two surprisingly different developments in American, and even world culture. The film was made in the midst of an international youth culture revolution in the 1960s, and Faye Dunaway’s portrayal of Bonnie, helped by the youth-conscious designers of the film, introduced the revival of 1930s fashion — her skirts, shirts, beret, etc — into the beginning of the 1960s post-modern mode, where the old or ancient was recognized for creative ingenuity and attractiveness, and became the NEW by the assertion of a perpetual present in the world’s 
cultural history. This ‘new’ sensibility and aesthetic direction involved white ‘hippies’ wearing Native Indian vests, sashes, moccasins etc, in the same way as when 19th Century Indian Scouts in the West wore 7th Cavalry jackets, leather belts, and cowboy hats over bright head-ties; it involved Blacks of the hip Counter-Culture wearing Native Indian fringe jackets and wool ponchos, Oriental shirts and sandals, etc.
Hip post-Modernism
In general, the ‘hippie’ culture revived antique fashion over hundreds of years old, and this was proven and further popularized by the fashion of leading Pop bands like ‘The Beatles’ (Sgt. Pepper’s Band), ‘Procul Harum’, ‘Jethro Tull’, ‘Led Zeppelin’, ‘Redbone’, ‘ The Jimi Hendrix Experience’, ‘Sly & The Family Stone’, ‘Earth, Wind, & Fire’, even the recent ‘Duran Duran’, etc; or Black Jazz artistes and groups like ‘Sun Ra’, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, ‘Weather Report’, ‘Return To Forever’, and others. The 1960s, perhaps the greatest decade of the 20th Century, if not one of the greatest decades in world history, was led by an international intellectual youth culture, which showed the way towards new forms of fiction, poetry, critiques, films, music, fashion, and playwriting, which revived and developed ancient aesthetic achievements. Faye Dunaway, as an actress, personified this culture, and the decade’s difference.
Dunaway’s difference
But within this collective difference of the time’s social changes, Dunaway went further by establishing her true cultural worth by the Modernist stance of her individual critical difference within the new conformity collective social movements tend to demand. Her roles since ‘HURRY SUNDOWN’, also of 1967, gradually explored a more bold, free questioning of conformist behaviour, which the films she made allowed.
Two distinct qualities in her acting emerged: (1) As the curious and daring co-worker of men; and (2) as an innovative worker in the mass media. Dunaway added a passionate and uninhibited sexuality to these intellectual roles, which gave them balance and attractiveness. We see these qualities delightfully in ‘THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR’ of 1968, and especially in ‘THE ARRANGEMENT’ of 1969, as Kirk Douglas’s co-worker and lover in the advertising world.
Sought after as an actress in the 60s and 70s, Dunaway’s roles in European and other Hollywood films are not to be missed, even though they may not offer the notoriety of her role in 1974s ‘CHINATOWN’. Actually, it is ‘The Arrangement’ which prepared Dunaway for her Oscar-winning role in ‘NETWORK’ of 1976, as the tough, innovative TV producer helped by one of classic Hollywood’s best individualistic actors, William Holden, and Peter Finch, perhaps Australia’s most outstanding actor to date. In 1981, Dunaway revealed clearly her cinematic post-Modernism by her critical role as the classic Hollywood actress, Joan Crawford in ‘MOMMIE DEAREST’. But it is ‘BARFLY’ of 1987, with Mickey Rourke in one of his best roles and films as the aspiring bohemian California fiction writer who drinks a lot and competes in fist-fights, which returned Dunaway to the screen in top form, casually flaunting her beautiful, mature body in an intelligent supportive role for a talented but marginalized artist. If we no longer see intelligent daring roles like Dunaway’s today, as much as we did in the past, it is because such films of quotidian reality are rare in today’s fantasy obsessed Hollywood.
