FAYE DUNAWAY - MY LIFE IN 10 Pictures

“It’s not age that makes a life. It’s what you do with it.” — Faye Dunaway

BORN IN Bascom, Fla., Dorothy Faye Dunaway grew up a “poor Southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks.” But she knew almost right from the start what she wanted to be. “My grandmother said that I decided to become an actress when I was 2.” Of course, it took her a while to get there, making her way from Broadway to film and stardom. Still, success had its drawbacks. “I never felt good enough,” she admitted. “I had large insecurities.” Those may have contributed to her reputation for being temperamental, as well as a career she’s described as “pretty much a roller-coaster ride.” Yet for Faye, who turns 82 on Jan. 14: “Work is a salvation. Work is how you connect with who you are, no matter how painful it might be.”

1 1961 PLAY FOR KEEPS “The stage might be the only place I really feel at home,” shared Faye, who’d make her Broadway debut in A Man for All Seasons just six days after graduating college. “I like the ensemble. It’s the family that you’ve always wanted to have. It’s like a perfect love, a relationship that is always growing and changing and deepening.”

2 1967 MY BONNIE “It’s the role that’s closest to me,” she said of her star-making turn opposite Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde. “I was a Southern girl, and so was Bonnie. We share the frustrations of living in that small, limited environment — dying to get out and move forward in the world.”