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 to play the role of a mother, "which was emotionally where I wanted to be in my life", and "The First Deadly Sin" (1980), as she wanted to work with Frank Sinatra. In 1981, Dunaway played the title role in "Evita Peron", a television miniseries based on the life of the famed First Lady of Argentina. That same year, Dunaway portrayed actress Joan Crawford in the adaptation of her daughter Christina's controversial memoirs, "Mommie Dearest", in which she had depicted her adopted mother as an abusive tyrant, who only adopted her four children to promote her acting career, making quite