Who suffered more career wise Diana Scarwid or Faye Dunaway due to Mommie Dearest?

Scarwid was lucky she had a career. Could an actor be more flat and blasé' than her? I felt compelled to finish her sentences even though I didn't know what she was going to say.

Watch Guyana (it was on youtube at least least year or so when I watched it.)

She's quite compelling in it.

(plus Brenda Vaccaro! Irene Cara!)

Scarwid suffered more, because Dunaway had a hell of a career before Mommie Dearest. She was around 40 by then, so was bound to see her star fade, anyway, and she'd had a hell of a run.

Scarwid was still quite young at the time, and her career never did recover. So I'd say she was more harmed than Faye.

I have to watch Honeysuckle Rose. She was in that. I just taped it off TCM a few months ago.

Her Oscar nomination is kind of shocking. She beat out heavy publicized contenders like Beverly D'Angelo in Coal Miner's Daughter and Debra Winger in what was hailed as a star making performance in Urban Cowboy.

I UNDERSTAND....

Scarwid's next job was a year later on TV in the famous Tv movie where Helen Hunt freaks out on drugs and jumps out the high school window.

I’m not sure Scarwid’s career suffered because she hadn’t really had one at the time. Dunaway suffered, certainly, but I don’t think it’s the sole reason her career took a downturn in the ‘80s. She also made a bigger deal out of the movie’s initial reception than she needed to, refusing to discuss it in interviews and then blaming the director and attributing all her misfortune to it. If she had embraced her role, and certainly many people now recognize it as a brilliant performance in an otherwise so-so movie, people might have been more sympathetic towards her. Dunaway’s own neuroses and lack of sense of humor, which plagued her before Mommie Dearest, are what stymied her career.

Scarwid's Oscar nom was a bit of a one-off.

She's carved out an interesting career as a character actress. She was great in the sort of "younger Holland Taylor" or "younger Susan Sullivan" role in "Wonderfalls."

Scarwid is so…mannered, I guess. I like her and find her interesting to watch but I don’t expect she ever would have had much of a leading lady career. Even if Mommie Dearest had been a smash hit I don’t think Hollywood would have known what to do with her.

Young Christina who got fat and ended up on Roseanne.

Faye was already on the downslide. It was really Eyes of Laura Mars that was the beginning of the end, not Mommie Dearest. Then that thankless supporting role in The Champ. "Eyes" is fun but she looked so matronly in it.

She played Jake Weary's fat boozehound mother in an episode of L&O:SVU.

"Matronly"?

My career suffered too!

Scarwid has a sense of humor, unlike Faye, about the film. Diana has worked for years and managed to get an Emmy nomination for Truman years later. I think her career trajectory probably would’ve been the same. Faye career was hurt more because of the film. She says people thought she was too much like the Crawford in MD, but if you listen to that insane voicemail in the 90s and the horror stories about her, she IS like the Crawford in the film. Her reputation really caught up with her after MD.

What's MD?

Moby Dick, Rose.

I wonder why Scarwid retired. Did Miss Dunaway run her out of Hollywood?

r13 She didn't look like that in the film.

[quote] She played Jake Weary's fat boozehound mother in an episode of L&O:SVU.

That was her???

Rofl. I loved that lady. She played the character so well.

Diana Scarwid looks like Medusa.

Nobody needed to see Diana's GRANNY PANTIES!

I’m sorry, but I LOVED Mommie Dearest. I thought it was a terrific film and I thought Fay Dumaway was great in it. Never understood all the hate on that film.

It took Supergirl, for Faye to hit rock-bottom. A super villainess driving Buick Riviera, no less.

[quote] Never understood all the hate on that film.

The critics were NOT one of their faaaaaaannnnzzzzzz!!!!!

It's not like MOMMIE DEAREST is the most embarrassing work in Faye's mixed career, that includes the aforementioned SUPERGIRL and THE EYES OF LAURA MARS, two movies much harder to sit through than MD, in my opinion.

Then, of course, there's THIS....

This thread is idiotic.

Of course the person who suffered the most was Viola Davis.

End of thread.

Dunaway suffered more from her personal demons and lack of humor than a movie role.

Scarwid was always going to be a character actress. She's turned in some really great performances over the years and I think she's done fine. To me, her worst performance is in MD. She's flat and lifeless in just about every scene like she's phoning it in. Maybe she thought she needed to tone her performance down when she saw how over the top Faye was in the scenes. Maybe she tried to add a little levity to the scenes.

She was quite intimidated by Faye. Rutanya Alda's book details finding a crying Scarwid in the parking lot after a days work. I think she says Scarwid didn't understand why Dunaway hated her.

Mara Hobel turns 50 on Friday. I feel so ancient.

Why exactly did this film hurt them? It's 40 years later and we're still discussing this film.

Pretty sure Scarwid made the choice or was directed to underplay Christina to Crawford's cranked to 11 Joan, I think that is actually the biggest problem with the film, when they're in scenes together their performances look ridiculous, with Faye's hystrionics making Scarwid look like she is lacking in affect and vice versa. Their performance energies needed to be much more in synch. If Scarwid wasn't directed to do that and made the choice to underplay Christina it's a pretty devious move as she makes Faye look like a jackass.

Scarwid is actively annoying to watch.

R33, Freudian slip, which shows how great Dunanaway's performance was as Crawford. The character of Christina had to be defeated by the character of Crawford, whomever played either actress.

R31, I can't remember it that well, but I'm pretty sure Hobel didn't deserve two Razzie nominations. She was a kid for heaven's sake!

I've seen a few mentions of Inside Moves on here recently and really need to look it up.

Scarwid has been a perfectly good character actress as an adult but I did think she was terrible in Mommie Dearest.

R13 I remember another thread we had on here where a couple of people were arguing over whether Dunaway was fat in The Eyes of Laura Mars or not, and I hadn't considered her to be even remotely fat, but back in the day apparently people were somewhat obsessed with the weight she'd gained for The Champ and they thought she hadn't lost enough of it by the time she was in Laura Mars.

If you look at photos promoting the film you'll see her in capes and weird poses that were apparently meant to disguise the weight gain. There's even that weird hat that I guess is meant to make her face look thinner.

r38 She filmed Laura Mars before The Champ.

Sorry r39, I didn't bother to figure out which thread it was (there are a lot of threads on Faye Dunaway) so I didn't re-read the post and went by memory.

Turns out it was a thread on Lee Grant! Whatever film it was, it was two pictures after Network, but since there is a made-for-TV movie in there no one was sure which film it was.

Beverly Hills Madam.

[quote] Jake Weary's fat boozehound mother

Excuse me!!!!!?????!!!!!!!!

[quote]R36 Hobel didn't deserve two Razzie nominations. She was a kid for heaven's sake!

So was I,[italic] just a kid!

Dunaway claims she gained weight for THE CHAMP because she thought it would make the character appear more maternal.

Of course, the actress was also faking a pregnancy for the press at the time, while secretly adopting a son.

R11- She was only 26 years old in The Thomas Crown Affair but she looked at LEAST ten years older.

That was the styling of that era.

R23- and I LOVE my sewing 🧵 machine.

I get LESBIAN vibes from Diana Scarwid.

Scarwid gives a very campy performance (along with Helen Hunt) in the 1982 TV movie "Desperate Lives." Worth checking out.

Pauline Kael on Silkwood: "There's no vulgar life in Silkwood except for Diana Scarwid's Angela, a cosmetician in a mortuary who has an affair with Dolly [Cher] and lives with the three for a while. Scarwid does a vaudeville turn that rouses the audience from its motion-picture-appreciation blues. Standing ramrod straight, and with her bottom packed into pastel pants, she gets laughs out of her tight walk; she gets laughs out of lines that have no laughs. She prolongs syllables and twists meanings--she sounds like Jean Harlow as a Valley Girl. Scarwid seems to be the only person connected with the movie who isn't worried about not being artistic enough. (When she and Kurt Russell are bitching at each other, they're a terrific team.) And it's a lucky thing that Angela the cosmetician is around to ply her professional skills on this movie, because Silkwood is a stiff."

Poor angry Pauline.

Scarwid (which was just autocorrected to “scared”) was in the Brooke Shields vehicle BRENDA STARR… which did nothing for anyone’s career.

What is this from? She looks fab.

Did she have work done? She looks like a young Eleanor Parker.

R53 That is from Wonderfalls, which is utterly fabulous and I always recommend it to everyone.

She played Karen Tyler. As I said at R8 she sort of plays a Susan Sullivan/Holland Taylor type sophisticate. Caroline Dhavernas, Katie Finneran and yes, Lee Pace are her children on the show. It's clever, if more wry and thoughtful than haha funny, but she's great.

I finally saw "Inside Moves" last year. It starts off well, then pretty quickly flattens into TV movie blandness. The cast do what they can, but the writing doesn't offer them much to work with.

I wonder why she retired. She hasn't worked since 2011.

I would say that Laura Linney is the poor man's Diana Scarwid, but comparing the two it would have to be the other way around.

Diana is 65. She's probably not living in LA any longer.

I believe she is residing in her home state of Georgia now.

It is deeply mystifying to read people writing that Faye Dunaway's career died after MD. She won an Emmy in 1994, was nominated for 5 Golden Globes after MD and won TWO, and was nominated for a SAG in 1998 for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television!!! That's not shabby at all. Of course, the quality of the films declined, but she continued to exist as a working actress. She has made over a hundred films since MD (it's almost the same number of films on Isabelle Huppert's filmography). She turned down the role of Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream and Jane Fonda's part in The Great Beauty (it was stupid to do that, since she said yes to so many shit movies). She lost her standing as a great lead star, sure, but she kept on working.

R27

What the hell was that??

So awkward and cheesy and cringe. And who is that brunette tomboy gypsy weirdo girl?

Unless you are Jeane Dixon, it's difficult to convincingly argue that Scarwid was harmed by MOMMIE DEAREST. IMDB makes it clear that playing Christina Crawford was her big break.

Before that, five years of television. After it, SILKWOOD and after that she has at least one film in almost every year that followed until 2011 when it stops. IMDB says she retired and returned to her native Savannah, GA.

Without MOMMIE DEAREST, it could easily have been five more years of parts on television and then an exit from the business that no one noticed. She was not exactly on a roll when the Crawfords came a'calling.

Umm, Have you seen my filmography after 1981?

1981 Mommie Dearest Barbara Bennett

1981 Dark Night of the Scarecrow Mrs. Ritter TV movie

1983 Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land Mrs. Harvey TV movie, (final film role)

Diane had a great, thankless cameo as the snobby mother of DL fave Selma Blair in the the underrated 2003 movie, "A Guy Thing."

yes she was r63.

She had just been nominated for an Oscar for Inside Moves. That's what got her the part in Mommie Dearest. She probably had other offers too.

She had that scintillating brio the role requires.

If only she’d played tiny tot Christina, too.