Elizabeth Taylor and Faye Dunaway Made Star Power Into an Art — These HBO Docs Prove It
variety.comDaniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic There’s something that unites the recent documentaries “Faye” and “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes.” It isn’t just that both played on HBO — “Faye” launched in July, while “Elizabeth Taylor” is to premiere August 3 — or that both center the stories of legendary, Oscar-winning performers.
Faye is, of course, Faye Dunaway, of “Network” and “Chinatown,” while Elizabeth Taylor, one of the most decadently media-hounded figures of the 20th Century, practically needs no introduction at all.
What the films share, though, is a poignant and sometimes painful double yearning. In the documentaries, Dunaway — still with us at age 83, and interviewed recently for this film — and Taylor — who died in 2011 but whose “lost tapes” catalogue an extensive 1964 debriefing with journalist Richard Meryman — both express doubt, anxiety and even shame for career missteps, misbegotten projects and the ways in which their private troubles played out in public view.
The viewer feels for them, first because they are human, and then because their manner of expressing their emotions is so extravagantly more than human.
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