Among them are Crawford's frenzied destruction of her rose garden in a fit of temper after being fired by MGM studio head Louis B.

(Sharaff did not care for Dunaway, later claiming that in entering the star's dressing room it was best to first 'throw a raw steak in - to divert her attention.') The actress must have felt herself in good hands under the direction of Perry, known for his sensitive handling of actors in such previous works as David and Lisa (1962), The Swimmer (1968), Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Play It As It Lays (1972).īut many scenes in Mommie Dearest come close to parody. With the aid of makeup artist Lee Harman and costume designer Irene Sharaff, Dunaway transformed herself into an astonishing Crawford clone. If anything, the film exaggerates Christina's scathing portrait of her mother as an abusive harpy - a characterization that many in the film industry felt may have been an act of revenge for the fact that Christina and her brother Christopher were left out of Crawford's will 'for reasons which are well known to them.' However faithful to real life this portrayal of Crawford as a cleanliness-obsessed, child-beating monster may be, Dunaway throws herself into it with fearless abandon in a performance that the actress herself has compared to Kabuki theater. But she could hardly have imagined that this would come to pass in an unflattering screen bio so flamboyantly over the top that it has become a camp classic, playing more successfully as grotesque comedy than the gripping psychological study originally intended. Ironically, Crawford had once said in an interview that, if a movie were ever made of her life, Dunaway was the actress she would most like to play her.

Faye Dunaway stepped into the most infamous role of her career, that of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, when the originally announced star, Anne Bancroft, withdrew after reading the script adapted by director Frank Perry and others from the best-selling 1978 memoir by Crawford's adopted daughter Christina.

Mommy dearest 1981 the movie