Faye Dunaway reveals hard Hollywood life in bombshell doc: Bipolar disorder, alcoholism — and being ‘difficult’
nypost.comlong had a reputation in Tinseltown for being “difficult,” candidly reveals in the film, which starts streaming Saturday on Max, that her more egregious behavior over the years was due to suffering from bipolar disorder, manic depression and alcoholism.“I had periods where I was very depressed, and I was very moody and I actually have, we might as well say, a bipolar diagnosis,” Dunaway says. “You can be up high, you can be manic, you can be very depressed.”The actress added that Polanski’s pluck was “enough to set off the manic depression.
It was offensive. You don’t do that.”Putting a button on the fracas, the Oscar winner said: “After that hair incident, Jack nicknamed me ‘Dread’ — the Dreaded Dunaway.
He still to this day calls me Dread, and I love it.”That wasn’t the only drama during the noir shoot. Dunaway also became obsessed with the lip balm brand Blistex.“I can’t speak without it,” she admits.Koch remembers that “Lee Harmon, who was our great makeup man, had a tube of Blistex, and between every shot he’d have to put Blistex on her lips.
It was her security blanket. But for Roman and for the rest of us, oy vey, what a pain in the ass.”Dunaway’s outbursts became much worse over the years, and spilled out into newspaper headlines.Actress Rutanya Alda, who played the aggrieved housekeeper Carol Ann in 1981’s Joan Crawford drama “Mommie Dearest,” said she was terrified of the lead during filming.“She was scary,” Alda says in the doc. “She was frightening.
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