Faye Dunaway had proved to be difficult and many actresses had been considered for the role, including Jane Fonda, Tuesday Weld, Ann-Margret, Carol Lynley, Leslie Caron, and Natalie Wood. Penn loved Dunaway and managed to convince actor and producer, Warren Beatty, who played Clyde Barrow in the film, that she was right for the part. Besides her relative anonymity, Beatty's concern was her "extraordinary bone structure", which he thought might be inappropriate for Bonnie Parker, a local girl trying to look innocent while she held up smalltown Texas banks. However, he changed his mind after seeing some photographs of Dunaway taken by
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