Roman Polanski Destroys Faye Dunaway

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/25876683-roman-polanski-destroys-faye-dunaway

From Roman Polanski's autobiography book "Roman":

"Bob Evans favored Jane Fonda for the part of Evelyn. She turned it down, so Faye was hired despite Evans’s reservations about her being a “difficult” actress. I knew Faye well, or thought I did. Formerly Jerry Schatzberg’s girlfriend, she’d stayed with us briefly in Rome the previous summer, during a romantic interlude with Andy Braunsberg. I felt I’d be able to cope with her.

If Bob Evans had been right about Cortez, he was doubly right about Faye Dunaway. I’d rooted for her on the ground that her special brand of “retro” beauty—the same sort of look I remembered in my mother—was essential to the film. Possibly because I’d given Faye an exaggerated idea of her makeup’s contribution to the feel of the picture, she started spending more and more time on her face.

Whenever we had to cut during the first few seconds of a take, she insisted on making up all over again. It got so I couldn’t take it anymore. Not only did she fuss over her appearance to an almost pathological degree, but she had a thing about Blistex.

She applied the stuff to her lips so regularly that the crew celebrated her last day’s shooting by presenting her with a special Blistex Award—a jumbo-sized four-foot tube built by the art department.

Makeup wasn’t my only problem with Faye. The hesitations and pauses that characterized her delivery were born of necessity, not art. They were her way of trying to remember what she had to say next, for she seldom knew her lines and was always pestering me to rewrite them.