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 the main competition. Neither "Doc" nor "The Deadly Trap" had generated much attention, either critically or financially, so Dunaway accepted an offer to star in a movie for television, "The Woman I Love" (1972), in which she portrayed Wallis Simpson. She returned to film in 1973 with Stanley Kramer's drama, "Oklahoma Crude", opposite George C. Scott. It was an ambitious project in which Dunaway had to play another complex character, "a woman who is caught between her ambition and her feminity. When the film opens, she is as tough as nails, a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later woman. Along the way, she slowly opens