By 1981, the controversial book was being turned into a film. Everyone knows what happened next: After the star’s will mysteriously but expressly excluded two of her four adopted children, “for reasons which are well known to them,” eldest daughter Christina published the sensational exposé Mommie Dearest, alleging the Hollywood superstar was a narcissistic and abusive alcoholic rather than the perfect mother she’d long pretended to be. Joan Crawford, for the record, had died about four years earlier. “One told me it was like seeing Joan herself come back from the dead.” When Dunaway first emerged, “the set fell absolutely silent,” the actor wrote in her autobiography, Looking for Gatsby. Iconic thick eyebrows and blood-red clown lips were drawn atop Dunaway’s contorted face muscles. “She looks just like Joan Crawford.” He’d been given a rare peek at the secretive film’s production, and at Dunaway’s uncanny transformation by makeup artist Lee Harman-whose meticulous process, according to a Washington Post article, involved seven-plus hours and cross-referencing Dunaway’s face with Crawford’s using a Q-tip. “My god,” wrote Roger Ebert when Faye Dunaway finally appeared from her dressing room on the closed set of Mommie Dearest.
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