Warren Beatty of the film, he credited Hackman with giving the "most authentic performance in the movie, so textured and so moving," recalls Dunaway. He was impressed with Gene Wilder after seeing him in a play and didn't even need him to audition, in what became Wilder's screen debut. And Beatty had already known Pollard: "Michael J. Pollard was one of my oldest friends," Beatty said. "I'd known him forever; I met him the day I got my first television show. We did a play together on Broadway." "Bonnie and Clyde" went on to be a critical and commercial success, despite the
Faye Dunaway convenient for her. That same year, she returned to the screen in Michael Winner's period melodrama "The Wicked Lady", in which she played an 18th-century highway robber. The film proved to be a critical and commercial failure. "Though I loved making "The Wicked Lady", in the end it just didn't have the juice it needed to be a hit. It seemed to never quite decide whether to be a farce or a drama, and so it failed by being neither." In 1984, Dunaway played the lead villain in the superhero movie "Supergirl". She felt that "the film was really just