Bringing a film noir icon to life
Los Angeles native Gloria Grahame was complex. She was the ultimate film noir actress (the kind they called a ‘‘dame’’ back then), but she also won an Oscar.
And she got herself into one of the strangest Hollywood sex scandals ever (which, yes, we’ll get to).
But did you know that, at the end of her life, the actress found comfort and support from a much younger ex-lover and his English working class relatives?
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, based on that young actor Peter Turner’s memoir of his time with Grahame in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, is now a movie starring Jamie Bell as Turner and Annette Bening as what some might call the damaged diva, but whom the actress playing Grahame has nothing but admiration for.
‘‘Her life, obviously, was very complicated,’’ Bening says of Grahame.
‘‘Which is part of the reason for this moment, where she’s in England, she’s been through everything, she can’t really get work in Hollywood, she’s doing shows in Watford and Sheffield ... and I respect this about her.
‘‘I liked that she had a very complicated and real life, but she was a survivor. I don’t think she pitied herself, and she wanted to stay at it. She was doing The Glass Menagerie when she fell apart and Peter came and saved her.
‘‘I think Peter was a completely different kind of person than she’d ever really been with,’’ Bening adds of her subject who married four times, the final one to her stepson, Anthony, from her second union with director Nicholas Ray.
‘‘Maybe she’d had affairs with people like that, but I don’t think she’d had a real relationship with any. And then to think that they had broken up and that she then called him ... and it’s remarkable about how that chapter played out, how he stepped up and his family were such lovely and good, decent people.’’
Turner’s book was published in 1986, and a decade later mutual friend and James Bond movie producer Barbara Broccoli approached Bening with the story.
It took another 20 years to get the film, directed by Paul McGuigan ( Lucky Number Slevin) made, with Bening now much closer to the age Grahame was when she was with Turner and succumbed to stomach cancer complications.
Bening’s interest in Grahame, however, pre-dated Broccoli’s introduction to Turner and his book. It started while she was preparing for her third feature film, the 1990 neo-noir release The Grifters, in which Bening played a Grahamelike femme fatale.
‘‘The director, Stephen Frears, had said to me, ‘You should watch her movies’,’’ Bening recalls.
Grahame’s noir classics include Crossfire (1947), Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) opposite a never-better Humphrey Bogart, Sudden Fear (1952), genre king Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) and Human Desire (1954), and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).
She also played the town bad girl in It’s a Wonderful Life, the ‘‘girl who can’t say no’’ Ado Annie in the movie musical Oklahoma!, and won her Supporting Actress Academy Award for Vincente Minnelli’s Hollywood expose The Bad and the Beautiful, for which she gave one of the briefest acceptance speeches (‘‘Thank you very much’’) this side of Alfred Hitchcock’s.
‘‘In that period, the way a bad girl was treated in movies is pretty shocking, from a modern context,’’ Bening notes.
‘‘The number of times that Gloria was hit in films – slapped, smacked, punched, backhanded ... hot coffee thrown in her face [in Big Heat]! And in Human Desire, Broderick Crawford just beats her up.
‘‘Anyway, in looking at her again, as I’m studying her life to get ready for this movie, that really struck me and I was touched by that.’’ And that was just on screen. Years before she married his son, it was widely believed that Nicholas Ray divorced Grahame because he caught her in bed with the then-adolescent Anthony.
She always denied that rumour, but it dogged her for the rest of her life and certainly, negatively impacted her Hollywood career.
In light of the current avalanche of sexual harassment and abuse accusations in the movie business, Bening can speculate how women like Gloria were treated in the traditionally sexist industry in a far less enlightened time.
‘‘I can only imagine what Gloria went through, I bet she had a few stories,’’ Bening says.
‘‘Back then, we would never know, right? I’ve met a few ladies over the years, some of the great stars, who would talk about this studio head or that executive trying to pressure them to do things.’’
In more recent times, Bening has worked with some of the accused predators who’ve been called out in the past several months.
Harvey Weinstein distributed The Grifters.
Her first movie with soon-to-be husband Warren Beatty was the James Toback-scripted Bugsy in 1991.
And Bening played the wife to Kevin Spacey’s Oscar-winning perv in 1999’s American Beauty.
They all apparently knew better than to mess with her.
‘‘I was 31 when we made The Grifters, I was not a kid when I met Harvey,’’ she explains.
‘‘So no, I do not have any stories, thankfully. I think it’s a very important moment and maybe a tipping point.
‘‘It’s good that people are coming forward and being taken seriously, and all of the people who want to come forward and talk about what happened can.’’
No-one’s complained of unwanted behavior from Beatty, who before settling down and having four kids with Bening was Hollywood’s most storied ladies man.
If he’s had embarrassments in the past year, they involved the failure of his long-nurtured directing project Rules Don’t Apply and being handed the wrong envelope at the most recent Oscar ceremony, which resulted in La La Land erroneously being announced the Best Picture winner when Moonlight actually earned the prize.
Bening says don’t be concerned for her husband, though. ‘‘How is he? Great,’’ she says. As for Bening, Liverpool is another acclaimed project in a decade that has seen her go from one outstanding, distinctive performance to another in the likes of Mother and Child,The Kids Are All Right, The Face of Love, Danny Collins and last year’s 20th Century Women.
Among upcoming projects is a movie version of Chekhov’s The Seagull, in which she plays another famous (if fictional) actress, Irina Arkidana, opposite the super hot likes of Saoirse Ronan and Elisabeth Moss.
‘‘I feel really lucky that I can try new stuff. Especially now.
‘‘It’s freer as you get older, I think. You get more free, hopefully, in the work, and it just becomes a little less neurotic and more just an expression of something that you don’t feel quite so worried about.’’