Before being led upstairs to meet Faye Dunaway, I sit in the bar with the British director of her latest film. David Howard kindly runs me through 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.
Faye Dunaway's reputation precedes her. One of the most compelling actors of her generation and a powerful emblem of 1970s American cinema, she came to fame as a cornfed killer in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), played the doomed Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown (1974), and won an Oscar for her turn as a rapacious TV executive in Network (1976). But her reputation as a performer has gone hand-in-hand with a reputation as a diva. She has been called difficult and temperamental; after working with her on Chinatown, Roman Polanski said she was unhinged. Maybe this reputation is justified, maybe it's not. All I know is that, despite the warnings, I wind up blundering across another of those Questions That Must Not Be Asked - and after that, all hell breaks loose.
Matters begin brightly enough. This is Dunaway's first British press interview in nearly 20 years and she comes wafting into the hotel suite, every inch the solicitous southern hostess (she was born in Florida). She is wearing a floating lilac dress, her blonde hair lifted as if by a gentle breeze, Dunaway arranges herself on the couch and then finds it is not to her liking. I am sitting with my back to the window and the light is in her eyes. "Now I can't see you," she says and gets up to close the curtains.
Dunaway is in London to talk about her role in Flick, a cheap and cheerful horror movie screening at the Raindance film festival. It features a game performance from Dunaway as a one-armed Memphis cop on the trail of a zombie Teddy boy. Howard explains that, in casting Dunaway, 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.
"Oh yeah," says Dunaway when I mention this. "I heard that he said that. I think he was going for - not old Hollywood, let's not say that. But maybe a little of the old-style glamour."
The shoe fits. It seems no accident that Dunaway's two most indelible roles (in Bonnie and Clyde, and Chinatown) came in Depression-era period movies. Even as a young actor, she looked a creature out of time: a burnished throwback to the era of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, all sharp angles and radioactive glamour. Her contemporaries Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn and Julie Christie seemed to belong more to the rough-and-tumble 1970s. But Dunaway ("as quick and vivid as a flame", in the words of critic David Thomson) always held herself differently - aloof and apart. She never played the ingenue; even as a young actor, there was something formidable about her.
Dunaway frowns. "I don't know if I was formidable. Maybe some of the later roles veered in that direction. But you can't say Bonnie and Clyde was formidable, or even Chinatown - maybe a little bit. Network was formidable in the sense that I was playing a strong, avant-garde woman." She weighs up the adjective, trying to work out whether or not it's a slight. "Maybe formidable is OK."
The daughter of an army sergeant, Dunaway spent an itinerant childhood travelling between bases in Texas, Utah and Germany. Six decades on, she claims she still feels like the rootless kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and retains an affinity for Bonnie Parker, that gum-chewing waitress turned superstar bank-robber. "It's the role that's closest to me," she says. "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."
Life was good in the wake of that film's success. Alongside Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Ellen Burstyn, Dunaway became a mainstay of what is now regarded as a classic period in American movies that ran from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s - starting with Bonnie and Clyde and ending with Star Wars. Did it feel that way at the time? No, she says, of course it didn't.
"You only know it in hindsight. Most of those movies were made within the studio system, which was innovative and rare. Now those movies have to fight really hard to be made and get seen, and it's all because of Mr George Lucas and Star Wars. Everything changed, and since then Hollywood has wanted to make blockbusters, which is why we're into these comic-book movies." She smiles. "I don't think my films would even get made today. Certainly not within the studio system."
Since she won the best actress Oscar in 1976, Dunaway's successes have been more fitful. She was given a Golden Raspberry award, or Razzie, for her wild-eyed Crawford impersonation in 1981's Mommie Dearest. ("It was meant to be a window into a tortured soul," she said at the time. "But it was made into camp.") She sued Lloyd Webber after she was dropped from the cast days before Sunset Boulevard was set to open in LA. Added to this were reports about her behaviour: after directing her on the set of Chinatown, Polanski described Dunaway as "a gigantic pain in the ass" and said that she "demonstrated certifiable proof of insanity". This view seemed to gain traction as the leading-lady roles grew scarcer.
Does the whole thing 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. "Has Jack been rebellious? He does things on his own terms and accepts that things have meaning. Too often we are asked to aim lower. I think that maybe what I have in common with some of the men you've mentioned is that we question things, and think how we can make them better and truer. But I don't ever remember being rebellious."
Most of the stories, I prompt her, stemmed from the set of Chinatown. Dunaway shoots me a look. "Oh," she says. "The Roman thing. Well, he's an auteur, and at the time he had his own pressures, and I don't really want to go into it. But you really want there to be collaboration and you really want there to be kindness, and sometimes that was impossible. The pressures of the moment mean that we all lost our patience a little bit - even Jack."
In his bestselling book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind paints a grisly picture of life on the Chinatown set. Dunaway and Nicholson were both accustomed to a looser, more creative way of working, and here they were acting for a European director who regarded himself as the boss and his players as staff. Tempers flared on both sides. Biskind reports that Polanski once forcibly plucked a stray hair from Dunaway's head, because he thought it was catching the light and spoiling his shot. He also claims that Dunaway later took her revenge by throwing a cup of urine in the director's face after she was refused a bathroom break.
Is this true, that she once threw a cup of urine over Roman Polanski?
It is as if an electric current has gone through her. "I won't respond to that," she blurts. "That doesn't even deserve the dignity of a response. I don't know the details of that. It is absolutely ridiculous."
OK, so the story is untrue. "This from the Guardian?" she explodes. "I don't believe it! It is insulting that you would even bring it up!" Abruptly, the outrage seems to lift her from her seat. "I can't go on with this," she announces to the far wall. "I think you've brought up something that is so distasteful." She can barely get the words out. "You know very well," she says. "I am a lady and you were completely insulting."
It dawns on me that I am being thrown out. I am not sure this has ever happened before, and it is a peculiarly horrible feeling. By now Dunaway is at the far side of the room. She says she is going to ring down to the film-makers. She is incandescent with rage.
"Look," I say. "I'm very sorry. I didn't intend to insult you."
She rounds on me with the phone in one hand. "Yes, you did! Yes, you did! You don't speak of that unless you had an intention." We stare at each other for a second. "My God," she says, as though clobbered by a fresh revelation. "I turned down the Mail to do this!"
Outside, the sky is clouding over. I run into Flick's director and producer. We are all a little shaken, ashen-faced. We stare at the ground. "OK," I tell them. "Turns out I couldn't ask about Polanski either."