Annette Bening: A Private Star

https://lebeauleblog.com/2021/04/21/annette-bening-a-private-star/

Following her Oscar-nominated performance in The Grifters, Annette Bening was one of the hottest actresses in town. Then she married eternal Hollywood playboy, Warren Beatty, and her career took a backseat to family. In 1994, the married couple made their second movie together, a remake of Love Affair. Writer Lawrence Grobel observed that Bening had been taking lessons the art of revelation-avoidance from her famously private husband in this cover story from the December 1994 issue of Movieline magazine.

She wanted to meet at a restaurant, but with all that I had been reading about Annette Bening and how she drove frustrated reporters to write about their experiences rather than what she didn’t have to say, I certainly didn’t want to try my luck in a public place.

She’s married to Warren Beatty, so she obviously has been learning from the master of interview avoidance and nonrevelation. She agreed to come to my house and drove up in her white BMW dressed in white stretch pants and a loose-fitting white shirt. She looked good and seemed friendly. I told her I had once interviewed Warren many years ago–I didn’t tell her 20 years ago, because that would make her 16 and I didn’t want to seem that old. She was still in high school in San Diego then.

The Bening family was originally from Wichita, Kansas, but Annette was seven when they moved to California. She grew up in San Diego, where her father was in the insurance business. She had a normal, unremarkable childhood, went to the local junior college where she began to act, and ended up at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT). She got married and she and her husband moved to Denver to do theater.

Later, in New York, she landed a play called Coastal Disturbances and was nominated for a Tony. She made a TV pilot but she was dropped when the show got picked up. Then she auditioned for a John Hughes movie, The Great Outdoors, and won a part opposite Dan Aykroyd. Mike Nichols cast her in a cameo in Postcards From the Edge. Milos Forman cast her in Valmont. Then Stephen Frears put her in The Grifters and Annette Bening was noticed. Big time. Her cunning role earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Other parts came readily: she played De Niro’s wife in Guilty by Suspicion, Harrison Ford’s wife in Regarding Henry and Bugsy Siegel’s girlfriend Virginia Hill in Warren Beatty’s Bugsy. She and Beatty fell in love, and the Playboy of the Hollywood World became Mr. Annette Bening.

Bening won the plum role in Batman Returns as Catwoman, only to give it up when she became pregnant. Other films were offered to her, but the one she waited to do was a remake of Love Affair (which was already remade once as 1957’s An Affair to Remember), in which she starred with her husband.