Faye Dunaway Fired From Broadway-Bound “Tea at Five” for Slapping a Crew Member and Generally Just Being Very Faye Dunaway

Full Disclosure: Faye Dunaway once threw a stapler at my head. She did not miss. This was at a bookstore I worked at, where she also called me a f*cking idiot for not knowing the name of the Spanish poet she couldn’t remember.

Which is why none of the following surprises me AT ALL.

Page Six is reporting today that legendary Oscar-winning actress Faye Dunaway has been fired from the Broadway-bound play Tea at Five for creating a “hostile” and “dangerous” environment backstage that “left production members fearing for their safety.”

The one-woman play, in which Dunaway would play Katherine Hepburn, was meant to be a theatrical comeback of sorts for Dunaway, who famously was fired by Andrew Lloyd Webber before she opened in the 1994 Los Angeles production of Sunset Boulevard.

But Dunaway had been acting erratically throughout the Tea at Five rehearsals and on the road in Boston.

Someone gave her a salad for lunch and she threw it on the floor. She was watching her weight and said the salad would be better on the floor than in her hand.
She was frequently late for rehearsals, sometimes up to two hours, sources say. She refused to allow anyone to look at her during rehearsals, including the director and the playwright. Although she had the script for six months, sources claim she was never able to learn her lines. During the run of the play at Huntington she was fed lines and blocking through an earpiece.
One source says, “98 percent of the play came through the earpiece.”
Late at night while in rehearsal she left what one production source called “troubling, rambling, angry” voicemails to the creative team during the middle of the night.
She also insisted that no one wear white to rehearsals because it “distracts me,” she said. When she was rehearsing on stage at the Huntington no one was allowed to move in the theater because that also distracted her.
The producers were so concerned about her condition they called Actors’ Equity Association to see if it was “ethical” to put someone in her state in front of an audience, sources say.
Over the last weekend of June she had a full on “Mommie Dearest” meltdown and demanded that staffers at the Huntington Theater get down on their hands and knees and scrub the floor of her dressing room, sources claim.
She allegedly threw mirrors, combs and boxes of hairpins at the staff of the theater. She also pulled gray hairs out of her wig because she wanted to play a younger version of Hepburn than the playwright had written.

The final straw, though, came when they had to cancel the July 10 performance because she physically and verbally abused several production members.