Why Jack Nicholson Called Faye Dunaway 'the Dreaded Dunaway,' Slapped Her on the Set of Chinatown

Faye Dunaway is known for being a demanding and challenging performer who sometimes clashed with directors and costars, but she got along great with Jack Nicholson, her leading man in the classic 1974 film noir Chinatown.

That's not to say that working on the movie was all sunshine and rainbows.

Dunaway revisits the making of the Oscar-winning drama, which turned 50 last month, along with other key moments in her life and career, including her bipolar diagnosis, in the new HBO documentary Faye, which premieres July 13 on Max. Although Dunaway and Nicholson had a good working relationship, she famously butted heads with the movie's director, Roman Polanski.

"We had difficult times, he and I, but he's a great film director," Dunaway, 83, says in the documentary, adding, "Roman the terror. But he thought I was a terror also, I'm sure. We had a pretty complicated time. Jack helped, though. Nicholson being there made all the difference."

In one explosive on-set incident, Polanski was frustrated by a stray piece of hair that kept falling on Dunaway's face and ruining the scene they were shooting. After a few failed attempts to tame it, Polanski walked up to Dunaway and yanked the offending piece of hair right out of her head. Dunaway, who ended up wearing a hat to film the scene, was livid and screamed a stream of obscenities before storming off.

"That's enough to set off the manic depression," Dunaway says with a laugh in the documentary. "It's offensive. You don't do that. So I went to my trailer. It was a whole situation."

"After that hair incident," she continues, "Jack nicknamed me 'Dread'.... 'The Dreaded Dunaway' was his name for me. He still, to this day, calls me 'Dread.' And I love it."

Dunaway also recalls shooting a pivotal scene during which her character makes a shocking confession and Nicholson's character slaps her several times. At first, they did the standard fake screen slaps, until Dunaway, eager to heighten the realism of the movie moment, urged Nicholson to smack her for real.

"I said, finally, to Jack, 'You're going to have to slap me. Just go ahead and do it," she recalls. "He said, 'You sure, Dread?' And so I said, 'Yeah.' And so we did it again, and it worked."

Both Dunaway and Nicholson received Oscar nominations for their performances in the film, which racked up a total of 11 nominations. (Chinatown's sole Oscar win went to Robert Towne for Best Original Screenplay.)

In addition to Dunaway, Faye also features interviews with her Barfly costar Mickey Rourke, her friend Sharon Stone and her son, Liam Dunaway O'Neill.