Faye Dunaway

Dunaway was born in Bascom, Florida, the daughter of Grace April (née Smith), a housewife, and John MacDowell Dunaway Jr., a career non-commissioned officer in the United States Army. Her parents married as teenagers in 1939 and divorced in 1955. She had one younger brother, lawyer Mac Simmion Dunaway. She is of Ulster Scottish, Irish, and German descent. She spent her childhood traveling throughout the United States and Europe, including lengthy stays in Mannheim, Germany, and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Dunaway took ballet, tap, piano and singing lessons, while growing up and graduated from Leon High School in Tallahassee, Florida. She then studied at Florida State University and the University of Florida, later graduating from Boston University with a degree in theatre. She spent the summer before her senior year in a summer stock company at Harvard's Loeb Drama Center, where one of her co-players was Jane Alexander, the actress and future head of the National Endowment for the Arts. During her senior year, she worked with director Lloyd Richards on a BU production of a new version of The Crucible, where Arthur Miller saw her perform. Following graduation in 1962, at the age of 21, she took acting classes at the American National Theater and Academy, and was recommended to director Elia Kazan, who was in search of young talent for his Lincoln Center Repertory Company. She also studied acting at HB Studio in New York City. Shortly after graduating from Boston University, Dunaway appeared on Broadway as a replacement in Robert Bolt's drama A Man for All Seasons. She subsequently appeared in Arthur Miller's After the Fall and the award-winning Hogan's Goat by Harvard professor William Alfred, who became her mentor and spiritual advisor. In her 1995 autobiography, Dunaway said of him: "With the exception of my mother, my brother, and my beloved son, Bill Alfred has been without question the most important single figure in my lifetime. A teacher, a mentor, and I suppose the father I never had, the parent and companion I would always have wanted, if that choice had been mine. He has taught me so much about the virtue of a simple life, about spirituality, about the purity of real beauty, and how to go at this messy business of life."