In her latest film, 'Being Julia', Annette Bening plays an actress of a certain age who is also role-playing in her private life. She tells Michael Dwyer about keeping it real
With a few dozen possible Oscar-contending films yet to open in the US before the cut-off point on New Year's Eve, these are early days for predicting the nominees to be announced at the end of January. However, ever since Being Julia opened the Toronto International Film Festival two months ago, speculation has been rife that its star, Annette Bening, will be on the best actress shortlist again. She was nominated as best supporting actress in 1991 for The Grifters and as best actress for American Beauty in 1999.
When we met in London this week, she was elegantly dressed and coiffured but understandably reticent to talk about Oscars.
"I'm flattered when people bring it up," she says. "But I don't attach myself to it because that's out of my hands. I want people to enjoy the movie. I really enjoy the process of making movies.
"It's the tangible part as an actor, when you do what you do and what you enjoy doing. It's a place I'm really comfortable in. Of course, you have your insecurities and you're nervous that you can't come up with the performance you want, but it is when you're most alive in a way."
As it happens, Being Julia deals directly with the insecurities faced by an actress at a certain age. Bening gives a radiant, wonderfully spirited performance as Julia Lambert, a popular theatrical diva in pre-war, late-1930s London, as she contends with a young rival actress.
"I guess in a way we all work out our own personal issues through the stories that we read and the movies that we see," Bening says. "So I think that element is more of a reflection on people's concerns in general with mortality and ageing. I don't think it's something peculiar to actors, or even to Hollywood. I suppose, because the film industry is about what's visual, if you start out as a young actor, then people are reminded as you grow older, but the audience is also working out all of their own issues about ageing.
"As a movie actor, you really do become an object of people's projections, and that's something you've got to come to terms with, that people are projecting very much what they're going through on to you. And that's part of your job, to embody it and work it out."
Did she ever have to cope with ruthlessly ambitious actors along the way?
"I don't know," she says, pausing for a minute. "I haven't had any nightmare experiences. I was in a theatre company early on, when I was an ingénue in the company, and I was lucky because I was in a conservatory that had a repertory company with it. I just remember looking up to the actresses in the company and admiring them, and wanting to be up there on the stage with them and eventually getting to be up there. I don't remember any real competitiveness."
Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1958 and raised in San Diego, California, Bening took a degree in drama at San Francisco State University before starting out on stage with the American Conservatory Theatre. She made an auspicious film début as the Marquise de Merteuil in Milos Forman's 1989 Valmont, which was eclipsed by Stephen Frears's rival version of the same source material in Dangerous Liaisons. One year and two movies later, Bening had secured her first Oscar nomination, coincidentally for Frears's next film, The Grifters.
The Internet Movie Data Base site claims that Bening was very shy when she was growing up, but she rejects this.
"I wasn't a particularly outgoing person," she says, "but I wasn't a wallflower either. I was the youngest of four, and now that I have four kids of my own, I know that, as the youngest, you're socialised, because from the time you're little you're seeing everything happening in front of you. And your older brothers and sisters are going through what you'll eventually be going through. I did plays when I was in high school, but I didn't know any actors then, and I wasn't from a theatrical family."
When I mention that Colin Farrell is another actor who is the youngest of four children, she smiles and says: "Oh, that makes sense. He's so talented. I've met him, too, and he's lovely."
What is it going to be like for her own four children, coming from such a famous theatrical family? In 1991 Bening met Warren Beatty when they co-starred in Bugsy. A year later, she married Beatty, who is 19 years older than her, and they have three daughters and a son.
"I hope it's all OK for the children," she says. "When it comes down to it, when you are a kid it depends on your parents and how much attention they pay you and how much they love you, and I don't think that's any different with our children. But they are going to have to deal with, and come to terms with, having famous parents. That's for sure."
In her multi-layered performance in Being Julia, Bening is acting an actor who is also role-playing in her private life.
"I guess I approached it from her point of view, and she sees everything as very real," she says. "I know what you're saying and I saw that when I first read the story, but as an actor I looked at it in a much more simple way - she's a woman and, for her, it's all real. She falls madly in love and she feels humiliated when it doesn't work out. She's lost creatively. She adores her husband and feels a great ally in him."
Even though she's prone to slipping into old stage lines when they suit the moment?
"Yes, but even in that, from my point of view, she means it. Yes, she has used those lines before, but in that moment, it's actually real for her, and apt," she says.
In the film, which is based on the Somerset Maugham novella, Theatre, Julia says that she and her husband (played by an urbane Jeremy Irons) have such a happy marriage because they lead separate lives, generally with sexual partners much younger than themselves. Julia allows herself to fall for Tom Fennel, a young American played by Shaun Evans, the Liverpudlian actor who, off-screen, is the partner of Andrea Corr. While ostensibly obsequious and sweet-talking, Fennel proves to be a cunning and duplicitous seducer.
"I think Somerset Maugham wrote about that kind of relationship a lot," Bening says. "He was vulnerable to these kinds of characters, and wrote about it with incredible insight, and I felt compassionate towards that. From the beginning, he was always writing about these painful but somehow necessary relationships where we find ourselves, where you're almost falling more in love with the idea of something rather than the actual person, and when you're confronted with the actual person, it's really difficult.
"But he was a great artist and he was someone who managed to turn those experiences into these great stories filled with irony and comedy and depth."
Bening met two of Maugham's grandchildren at the movie's London premiere last Sunday night.
"They were so kind and very much supportive of the film," she says. "They felt he would like it. Of course, some of his stories were filmed while he was alive, including Of Human Bondage, which is the quintessential Maugham. He had a very pronounced stammer and it had a profound effect on his life. He was an incredibly disciplined and prolific writer. He wrote every morning from 8.30 to 12.30, every day of his life, and I believe he was one of those people who coped and survived by working."
Meanwhile, Bening's husband, Warren Beatty, has not directed a movie since the sharp 1998 political satire, Bulworth, and hasn't acted on screen since the sparsely released Town and Country in 2001. Isn't it about time he did something new?
"I know," she says. "I want him to do something. He's always been someone who, over the years, has taken time with everything he has done. He spent years working on Reds before he made it into a film. Each movie he did he developed over a long period of time, and that's just as true now. On top of that, he has four children he's very enamoured with, and he's a really wonderful, involved father. He's always thinking, writing and developing things, so I'm sure when the time is right he'll do what he wants to do next."
Bening, by contrast, has been remarkably busy: in addition to carrying and raising their four children, she has featured in 16 movies since her 1989 début, demonstrating her versatility in a variety of very different films. These have included Kevin Costner's recent western, Open Range; a romantic drama, The American President, opposite Michael Douglas; Richard III, with Ian McKellen; and Neil Jordan's unsettling and underrated 1999 psychodrama, In Dreams.
"What a wonderful man Neil is," she says. "He's so talented. I saw him again recently. I loved working with him. He is truly a master and he has an incredible visual sense, especially for a man as literate and literary as he is. I got a tremendous amount out of working with him.
"That was a very dark film and it dealt with disturbing subject matter - the loss of a child. It was very demanding, but it was quite an adventure making the film in western Massachusetts. We all had our kids with us and I enjoyed it enormously."
She has returned to the dark side for her latest film, Mrs Harris, a factually based drama written and directed by playwright Phyllis Nagy and due to open next year. Bening plays Jean Harris, the teacher who, in 1980, fatally shot her cardiologist lover, Dr Herman Tarnower (played by Ben Kingsley), the author of the Scarsdale Diet.
"It was a big scandal in America," Bening says. "She was a headmistress at a very prestigious girls' school in Washington, a very proper lady having a long affair with a cardiologist who became famous by writing one of the first bestselling diet books. She shot him and killed him and claimed it was an accident because she was distraught over very many things. She was convicted of murder and spent 12 years in prison. She's now in her early 80s and out of prison."
Did Bening meet Harris?
"I was very reluctant to invade her privacy," she says. "There was so much written about her and there are tapes of extensive television interviews she did with Barbara Walters. Also, the film is not an entirely flattering portrayal of her and it wasn't made with her blessing. It's a very unusual take on the story, which is why we all wanted to do it.
"But she had heard that the picture was being made and she wanted to talk to me. So I did and we talked on the phone. She struck me as highly intelligent and just as complicated and interesting as one might have imagined from all the material available on her. She was polite and very nice when we talked, and she obviously had been very much in love with him. As she said at the time, she never wanted to hurt him for any reason, because she adored him, but that she was in psychic pain when she killed him.
"He had not really dropped her, but over the years he was seeing many more people and was very open about that. She always claimed to have accepted that, but many of the statements she made seemed to contradict her own behaviour, which made her such an intriguing character.
"It was such a scandal at the time because she was so sophisticated, well-educated, and supposedly such an upstanding member of society, even though she was falling apart inside. She was a very complex woman, and not entirely sympathetic, which is probably why the story has not been filmed before. She was not the kind of heroic woman that people want to make movies about."
Being Julia is now showing at UGC Cinemas, Dublin