Alfie

cover | story |
Drama
Queen
As a girl she dreamed of being a star of the stage,
but — almost in spite of herself — ANNETTE BENING
became a star of the screen. Now, with Being Julia,
she draws on her roots to play a leading lady of
the theatre. INGRID RANDOJA speaks with Bening
about bringing the Beatty brood on set and
striving for perfection
Okay, might as well get it
over with right off the
top; mention the name
Annette Bening and what’s
the first thing that pops into
Annette Bening as Julia
your head? That’s right,
Warren Beatty, and more specifically, the fact she’s the
woman who domesticated Hollywood’s most notorious
playboy.
Hmmm, but that reveals more about our fascination with
Warren Beatty’s promiscuous past than anything about the
46-year-old, two-time Oscar-nominated Bening. If we forget,
for an instance, that she’s Beatty’s significant other and the
mother of his four children, then who are we left with?
Simply put, a riveting, fearless performer who makes an
appearance every few years in one or two films, and then
disappears, leaving us wanting more.
You may have first noticed Bening in 1990’s Postcards from
famous 32 | october 2004
the Edge, playing a starlet bedded by movie star cad Dennis
Quaid, or later that year in her breakout role as a sexy con
woman in The Grifters. Hollywood went gaga for the new kid
on the block, bestowing her with a Best Supporting Actress
nomination for Grifters. However, she wasn’t an ingénue, she
was in fact a recently divorced, 32-year-old veteran theatre
performer who had learned her craft on stages across
America.
She didn’t win the Oscar, but a year later she did win the
heart of her Bugsy co-star and director Beatty, who is quoted
in a 2000 Vanity Fair article as saying it took him “all of 30
seconds to fall in love with Annette.” In 1992 she gave birth
to their first child, Kathlyn, and for the past decade Bening
has only taken roles that fit into her child-rearing schedule,
including the audience friendly The American President and
the critically acclaimed American Beauty, which earned her a
Best Actress nomination.
She’s now entering one of her busy movie phases, beginning