Then it gets weird: “At night I would go home…and feel Crawford in the room with me, this tragic, haunted soul just hanging around.” She describes “a chilly presence, a coming-in-and-sitting-on-the-window-ledge sort of thing.” Neither star, it seems, could rest. It is difficult to spend the day inside a character that is so dark, and not easy to shed the emotions, like the costumes and makeup, at the end of the day,” Dunaway writes in Looking for Gatsby. “A week into production the role really began troubling me. Years earlier, in a quote Dunaway gleefully repeated in the book, Crawford had declared, “of all the actresses, to me, only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage it takes to make a real star.” Dunaway said she hoped her portrayal would “even the scales,” as she told Hollywood biographer Jane Ardmore in an article titled “I Want to Climb Inside Her Skin.”ĭunaway was and is allegedly challenging on film sets-but by her own admission, Mommie Dearest was especially difficult. “The general sentiment in the industry was that anyone who played Christina’s version of Crawford would pay a price for taking on one of Hollywood’s great legends,” she wrote. Still riding high from her recent Oscar win for Network, Dunaway saw in Crawford a role only she was brave enough to play. And with its sizable budget, lavish sets, and A-list star, the prestigious resulting biopic was considered a surefire box-office hit and Oscar shoo-in. By 1981, the controversial book was being turned into a film. Everyone knows what happened next: After the star’s will mysteriously but expressly excluded two of her four adopted children, “for reasons which are well known to them,” eldest daughter Christina published the sensational exposé Mommie Dearest, alleging the Hollywood superstar was a narcissistic and abusive alcoholic rather than the perfect mother she’d long pretended to be. Joan Crawford, for the record, had died about four years earlier. “One told me it was like seeing Joan herself come back from the dead.” When Dunaway first emerged, “the set fell absolutely silent,” the actor wrote in her autobiography, Looking for Gatsby. Iconic thick eyebrows and blood-red clown lips were drawn atop Dunaway’s contorted face muscles. “She looks just like Joan Crawford.” He’d been given a rare peek at the secretive film’s production, and at Dunaway’s uncanny transformation by makeup artist Lee Harman-whose meticulous process, according to a Washington Post article, involved seven-plus hours and cross-referencing Dunaway’s face with Crawford’s using a Q-tip. “My god,” wrote Roger Ebert when Faye Dunaway finally appeared from her dressing room on the closed set of Mommie Dearest.

Mommie dearest by christina crawford