Faye Dunaway my career." The film was a critical and commercial failure but earned Dunaway a Golden Globe Award nomination, for Best New Star of the Year. Dunaway had tried to get an interview with director Arthur Penn when he was directing "The Chase" (1966), but was rebuffed by a casting director who didn't think she had the right face for the movies. When Penn saw her scenes from "The Happening" before its release, he decided to let her read for the role of the bank robber Bonnie Parker for his upcoming film, "Bonnie and Clyde". Casting for the role of Bonnie
Faye Dunaway Pauline Kael raved about Dunaway's performance, stating that she had reached new heights as an actress and surmised that it would be difficult for Dunaway to top her performance as Crawford. Vincent Canby also praised Dunaway, writing that ""Mommie Dearest" doesn't work very well, but the ferocious intensity of Faye Dunaway's impersonation does, as does the film's point of view, which succeeds in making Joan Crawford into a woman far more complicated, more self-aware and more profoundly disturbed than the mother remembered in Christina Crawford's book." Director Sidney Lumet stated that it was "a brilliant, an extraordinary performance. The courage