ANNETTE BENING:
She’s one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actresses and turns 60 this year. Annette Bening talks to Louis Wise about playing a faded movie star who falls in love with a younger man in her new film and why husband Warren Beatty refuses to dance with her.
at 60, she’s sexy and in demand
Annette Bening slopes into our hotel-room interview looking less like the classic movie star she is than just a chilled out Californian mum – and I suppose she is that, too. After all, the actress, who turns 60 this year, has four grown children from her marriage to Warren Beatty. Surprisingly tall, she’s in a loose grey cashmere sweater and Perspex specs; on her feet are what seem to be shiny black plastic clogs. On her arm, completing the total effect of West Coast affluent boho, is a large wooden bangle spelling out “After all, tomorrow is another day”. “Ring a bell?” she asks drolly.
It’s little wonder Annette is literally bedecked in film history. Her CV – American Beauty, The Kids are All Right, The Grifters, Valmont – plus the fact of her marriage (she met Warren while they were making Bugsy) makes her bona fide Hollywood royalty. Although she would tut at such a term. Either way, having never succumbed to being just a superheroine or a babe – though she excels at a certain type
of sexy – she is the face of a cinema that struggles to get made now. What’s its name? “‘Serious’ is not the word,” Annette ruminates in her low, slow way. (The chilled-mum vibes come with a hefty dose of holistic therapist.) “I can never find the right word. ‘Adult’, also, is um, yes. ‘Adult’ is something else. ‘Sophisticated!’ Sophisticated,” she decides.
We are here to discuss her latest project, a touching romance where she plays a faded movie star, Gloria Grahame, engaged in a love affair with a much younger man. At the time we meet, however, something large and uncomfortable looms over us, so we may as well get it out of the way. I’m going to have to ask you about Harvey Weinstein, I tell her. “I don’t mind, I expected it,” she replies softly.
Did it surprise you? “Well, I knew Harvey certainly as not being a very delicate person – I think everyone knew that,” she says cautiously. “But I certainly didn’t know about these horrendously serious, grotesque stories.” She is “glad it came all out” – she applauds the women’s bravery. But of course the second question is: didn’t you know? “I didn’t. It’s not like a lot of people knew the seriousness of what was going on, and I certainly didn’t. I had heard rumours, but nothing to the degree that has come out.” And the third question has to be: has it ever happened to you? “I’ve never had anything that overt happen to me. I’ve been in that ballpark, let’s say. But I’ve never been in that position. I was in a place where I could take care of the situation. So no, I didn’t have anything where I was completely overwhelmed.”
The answers are the classic ones: what you’d expect both from someone in her position and just from being Annette Bening herself. She is poised, earnest, considered and calm – worlds away from that neurotic wife in American Beauty. (We meet before another scandal engulfs her co-star there, Kevin Spacey.) As we discuss Weinstein, I wonder aloud if she was perhaps a little protected by starting in the movies later on, less a vulnerable ingenue, more an established stage actress – she made her first film aged a creaking 30. “That’s right, yes. I was in the theatre before that, and I never had anything like that happen to me there. It could have, but it didn’t.”
Whatever the reason, then, she seems to have avoided most of Hollywood’s pitfalls – which, among other things, puts her in poignant contrast to her latest character. In Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, currently screening in New Zealand, Annette plays Gloria Grahame, genteelly down and out at the tail end of her career. She was an Oscar winner, a specialist in the golden age of film noir, but her fine work had by this point been eclipsed by her notoriety. When we meet her in the late 1970s, she is jobbing along in Blighty, doing The Glass Menagerie in Lancaster, Sheffield and Bolton. She died in 1981, largely forgotten. “It’s not like playing a well-known movie star,” Annette says. “There isn’t a lot of material, and a lot of it out there is salacious and not very reputable.”
That is one way to put it. A reputation for being “difficult”; an obsession with plastic surgery; four ill-fated marriages, including one to her own stepson: Gloria’s “bad girl” character on screen was eclipsed by a bad girl reputation off it. Annette, though, will not be drawn on any needless speculation. When I put the raciest aspects of Gloria’s life to her – there was one rumour that she began the affair with said stepson when he was only 13 – she dismisses them as such. You could either read Gloria as your archetypal cinema siren or just another misogynistic, distorted version of that. No prizes for guessing which one Annette goes for. “I was struck, in watching her movies, how often she was treated badly, how she was beaten up. I mean, it’s really shocking now to watch – to see not only how women are slapped around and beaten up, but how it’s not even considered to be a ‘dramatic device’!” Gloria has another significance for
Annette: when preparing for her role in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, which would bag Annette her first Oscar nomination in 1990, she was told to research Gloria’s back catalogue – a compendium of noir, with wonderful titles like Sudden Fear, The Big Heat or The Bad and the Beautiful. “She was a serious actress,” Annette insists. But this is all backstory to Film Stars Don’t Die, when Gloria meets the buckish young Peter Turner (an excellent Jamie Bell). The two embark on a surprising May-to-December romance, something sad and sweet and dreamy, much like Turner’s memoir of the same name, which inspired the film. I ask her if the relationship seems transgressive today. Not really, she shrugs. “That’s how love works. There are a lot of relationships that maybe, from the outside, we would look at and say, well, is that as legitimate as what we could consider a ‘normal’ relationship? What is ‘normal’?”
And is it fun to play sexy at nearly 60? “Oh yeah, it’s part of the fun of it,” she nods. “Those of us who are older, we like seeing that being explored on film, because, of course, the fact is that people are sexual when they’re older.”
Perhaps the sexiest scene in the film comes before the two get together, when they just dance to disco in Gloria’s room. Jamie busts out some serious Night Fever moves; Annette is more loungey, but still rather impressive. She dismisses my suggestion that there might be any choreography involved. “I think I’m quite a good dancer,” she says brightly. Is that how you’d dance at a wedding? “Yes.” But wait: are you actually the kind of person who dances at a wedding? “I am! Absolutely. And my husband won’t dance with me.”
What? “Because he doesn’t like to dance,” she sighs. “So I have to drag other people. In fact, the only time he ever danced with me at a wedding was when this guy was trying to get me to dance with him, and I didn’t really want to, so I finally said, Warren, you have to come down. And he finally relented, he protected me,” she beams.
This is all rather sweet, but I’m quite shocked that Warren Beatty doesn’t like to dance. “He is a good dancer, he just doesn’t,” she shrugs. Did you dance at your wedding? “No, we had a very small, quiet wedding. We didn’t have a big party.” Warren and Annette have now been married for 25 years. It’s something, but not a patch on her parents, who have just marked 67. When I ask about her anniversary, though, Annette politely demurs from saying too much. It’s the same for
her four children. (There was plenty of attention a few years ago, when the eldest came out as trans.) “We keep things very quiet and private with our family,” she says. “But we are proud of the anniversary and it means a lot to us.”
Do their children have acting ambitions of their own? “They do, and I respect that. So I let them go their own way. Both of us support them completely, but at this point it’s important they do their own thing.” I observe, part jokingly, that it must be quite daunting to come up against their parents’ joint filmography. A tiny silence, then the response is quite dry. “I never thought about that when I had children – you know, that it might be a burden to them.” I backtrack slightly, but then she says, no, no, she actually has spoken to a fair few people about it – not least Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Gloria’s mother in Film Stars Don’t Die and who had actor parents and actor children. “So there are lots of families where people follow along, do what the parents do. So we’ll see.”
Whatever the Beatty children do, their upbringing has been miles away from their mother’s. She comes from an equally loving, stable home, but an arch-conservative Republican one, with no other actors in the family. She says she has always been a feminist, but in the same breath dates her education to going to college, taking a women’s studies course around 1976 and thinking: “Wow, things are really unfair! And I’m really angry!” Which I could well believe, but she seems so cool and languid today. Does she still have this anger? “There are times that I do. I think there’s a real double standard for women, especially in politics and in positions of power.”
She then goes on to deliver a very polite critique of how women in power are portrayed; though she never says “Hillary Clinton”, she doesn’t need to. For a start, Warren has long been a Democrat donor. This leads me to ask her what she thinks people like her and her husband can achieve, not least when they are so often perceived as being in such a cosy, entitled bubble. Aren’t anti-Trump jokes at the Globes or the Oscars just one big industry love-in? “I think that’s a valid concern,” she nods. “And it just echoes all Trump’s feelings about trying to isolate the ‘elite’, that so-called ‘show-business elite’. Yes, absolutely. It’s funny, too, because he used to be so much a part of that and hobnobbed with everybody. But now he’s President, I guess he’s safer alienating and distancing himself from show-business people.”
Do the roles for older women dry up, as her peers often say, and has that affected her work? “No. It’s not a conscious decision, it’s just ebbed and flowed in a natural way,” she says. “I never came to a point where things were just terrible in terms of work. I knew when I wanted to do something and when I didn’t.”
Her children were her priority, she insists, although now they are older, she says she’d like to do a play on Broadway, maybe even in London.
There’s one thing Gloria
Grahame managed that
Annette Bening hasn’t yet, which is that Oscar. Four nominations and no dice.
How has this happened? “I don’t know what to tell you,” she giggles. Would you like one? “Well, I would think it would be nice,” she says, suddenly quite coquettish.
Personally, I think she needs one. Not least so it makes
Warren Beatty dance.
“There’s a real double standard for women, especially in politics and positions of power.”