"Over the last weekend of June she had a full on 'Mommie Dearest' meltdown and demanded that staffers at the Huntington Theater get down on their hands and knees and scrub the floor of her dressing room..."

"...sources claim. She allegedly threw mirrors, combs and boxes of hairpins at the staff of the theater. She also pulled gray hairs out of her wig because she wanted to play a younger version of [Katharine] Hepburn than the playwright had written.... This is not the first time [Faye] Dunaway has displayed erratic behavior in a show. In the early 1990s she toured the country as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s 'Master Class.' She showed up an hour late for many performances. She had bellhops rearrange her furniture in her hotel suites in the middle of night because she didn’t like the 'flow' of the room. Once, a theater in St. Louis sent her a white limousine, and she reportedly had a fit because she hates white. She demanded a rental car from the hotel to get to the theater. The limo company sent a black car instead, but it was too late — Dunaway was racing to the theater, trailed by both the white limo and the black one. I managed to track her down back then and she was charming on the phone. 'Your story sounds like a Fellini movie,' she told me."

From "Faye Dunaway fired from Broadway-bound ‘Tea at Five’ for slapping crew member" by Michael Riedel (NY Post).

The requisite video clip:



That's Faye as Joan Crawford, back in 1981, 37 years ago. A decade after that, she did the raging diva routine again as Maria Callas. And now, at the age of 78, they installed her in the grand persona of Katharine Hepburn. Do it again, Faye. Be the imperious diva.

Some day, somebody will play the role of Faye Dunaway. The fantastically beautiful actress, snagged into playing another beautiful actress, typecast as the actress who plays actresses, actresses who age and resist their predicament, and she get pissed off about it and rages in a way that is ludicrously like the way she played another actress in that movie back in 1981. Ah, she was so young then! Now, she's 78, she's ruined her legendary beauty with plastic surgery, and she's shocked to discover the Katharine Hepburn she's been hired to play is Katharine Hepburn at the very end of her life and Katharine Hepburn lived to be 96.

Oh, that scene where she tenderly lifts the wig and soliloquizes about the depredations of age, absent-mindedly rearranging the strands, plucking a hair or two, then finally ripping out handfuls, ranting loudly and breaking into sobs. She buries her ruined face in the ruins of the Katharine-Hepburn-at-90 wig. Oscar-worthy.



As Faye Dunaway says, "Your story sounds like a Fellini movie." Speaking of Fellini, there's this in the Faye Dunaway Wikipedia article:

During the filming of A Place for Lovers (1968), Dunaway fell in love with her co-star Marcello Mastroianni. The couple had a two-year-live-in relationship. Dunaway wanted to marry and have children, but Mastroianni, a married man, could not bear to hurt his wife and refused, despite protests from his teenage daughter Barbara and his close friend Federico Fellini. Dunaway decided to leave him and told a reporter at the time that she "gave too much. I gave things I have to save for my work." She later recalled in her 1995 autobiography:

There are days when I look back on those years with Marcello and have moments of real regret. There is that one piece of me that thinks that had we married, we might be married still. It was one of our fantasies, that we would grow old together. He thought we would be like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, a love kept secret for a lifetime. Private and only belonging to the two of us.

Mastroianni later told a reporter for People in 1987 that he never got over his relationship with Dunaway. "She was the woman I loved the most", he said. "I'll always be sorry to have lost her. I was whole with her for the first time in my life."

I gave too much. I gave things I have to save for my work....