Caught Up in Annette

https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/09/04/caught-up-in-annette/

Annette Bening stunned Hollywood when she put her career on hold to start a family with her Bugsy costar, Warren Beatty. Through the mid-nineties, Bening didn’t work all that often. As the decade wound down, Bening was ready to focus on her acting career again. She sat down with Martha Frankel for this profile from the November 1998 issue of Movieline magazine just as she was getting back to work.

Nine years ago, I couldn’t stop talking about Annette Bening. Her portrayal of the Marquise de Merteuil in Valmont blew me away. I came out of the film thinking, who is this woman and where did she come from? (Broadway, it turned out, where she’d earned a Tony nomination for Coastal Disturbances.) Bening followed Valmont with an even better performance as Myra, the con woman without a heart of gold in The Grifters. When she sashayed across a room to kiss John Cusack, I realized that there wasn’t another actress of her generation who could hold a candle to her. I couldn’t wait to see her next film.

What a disappointment it turned out to be. I can believe Guilty by Suspicion seemed like a good idea at the time–she got to team up with Robert De Niro. But it sucked. So did Regarding Henry, in which she played Harrison Ford’s uninteresting wife. Who was this bland woman impersonating the scheming minx who’d first caught my eye?

I let out a sigh of relief when I heard Bening was going to play Virginia Hill in Warren Beatty’s big, glossed-up film Bugsy. And I wasn’t disappointed. Her smart, smoldering gangster moll was easily the best thing in the movie. Little did I realize that this was the end of the Bening I loved. The chemistry that was obvious between Bening and Beatty on-screen was matched by a romance offscreen, and in an event that stunned Hollywood (and me), the habitual bachelor/womanizer Beatty asked Bening to marry him, and she did. Not long after that she turned down the role of Catwoman in Batman Returns because she was pregnant with her first child. Then she seemed to drop out of sight.

While Hollywood was clearly surprised at Beatty’s move in finally getting married and starting a family, it was Bening’s behavior that freaked me. Here she was, well into her ’30s with no time to spare as far as prime screen years were concerned, and just as she was one hit from major stardom, she turned down some of the best offers in town in favor of settling down and playing house. When she did finally work again, it was with Beatty in the anemic remake of Love Affair. The film tanked and people grumbled about the lack of chemistry between the married stars. But offscreen Bening and Beatty were acting like teen sweethearts at the mall. They even dressed alike. Their interviews during this time were a marvel: they finished each other’s sentences and between the two of them said absolutely nothing. And they’d already added a second child to their nest.

Bening’s role as the feisty Washington lobbyist Michael Douglas falls for in the 1995 film The American President briefly reminded me what a superb actress she is. After that she did small roles in Richard III and Mars Attacks!, and in between those films had another baby.

Now, eight years after The Grifters, I hear Bening is putting her career back in motion. She’s starring with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis in director Ed Zwick’s terrorism thriller The Siege, and she’ll be in Neil Jordan’s drama of the paranormal In Dreams early next year. The one thing I want to know as I set off to interview Bening is why she’s spent the last several years behaving as if her artistic ambitions were best suited to reading bedtime stories to her kids.

As an assistant lets me into the office Bening shares with Beatty off Mulholland Drive at the top of Beverly Glen, I remember that someone told me this is the place where these two first met. Beatty has said he was floored by Bening the minute he was introduced to her. After talking to her about Bugsy, he took her next door for pizza. Just as I’m wondering if this is the kind of romantic move that got Beatty his reputation, Bening walks in. Dressed in pants, a T-shirt and sandals, she has no makeup on. She’s almost dainty in the refinement of her features, but she has a handshake that could bring a wrestler to his knees.

“So,” I say to her before she even sits down. “Since I know you don’t like talking about your marriage, how about if from here on we refer to your husband as What’s-His-Name?”

Bening lets out a high, infectious laugh. In repose, there’s a kind of sadness to her expression, but make her laugh and it’s as if you’ve pleased the gods–her whole face lights up. Maybe this is what happened to What’s-His-Name in the pizza parlor.

“Isn’t the house you had that got destroyed in the earthquake near here? Have you rebuilt it?”

Bening shakes her head no. “It’s still just sitting there. It was totally destroyed in 45 seconds.