Annette Bening - Queen of Hollywood
How do you greet the sperm donor of your children when you first meet them? "So you are Paul, I am very happy," says Nic (Annette Bening) in her latest movie "The Kids Are All Right," while her slightly slippery eyes fling knife and her already narrow mouth becomes a bad stroke. Nic is the man in the house, she earns the money, Jules (Julianne Moore), her life partner, rather gives the late Hippie. But her two children, Joni and Laser, want to get to know their producer, and so the chaos takes its course. An absolute highlight in the "Best Family Film of All Time" ("New York Times") is Annette Bening, who attests the "LA Times" "layered perfection". "This time she gets him," say the critics and mine the Oscar, for which she has been nominated three times. It's about time too.
"The kids are all right," USA 2010, Annette Bening, Julianne Moore
What is striking about her face - nothing stands out. It is a smart, quiet face, often unvarnished even in public. No sprayed lips, no slipped down silicone pad under the cheekbones, no surprised torn children's eyes with shirred eyelids. Annette Bening is an actress, 52 years old, unadulterated nature, a serenity that otherwise only Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren dare. Vanity, she says, meaning that fellow women's botox rigidity, which makes any mimic impossible, is really the last thing that should hinder her in her work. "Besides, I do not want to look the same all my life."
"That's me?" Asks Annette Bening.
But of course there is sometimes a slight surprise when she sees herself in the mirror or on the screen. The fine lines, the crow's feet, the softened chin area. This is me? Now? "But then I look at women who are 60, 70 and older and whom I admire," says Bening, "and I think: I will be like that, wonderful!" It is this rigor that makes Annette Bening an exception in Hollywood. "She never seems to be trying hard, but she always does," says ex-boyfriend and colleague Ned Bellamy about her, including her husband Warren Beatty, with whom she has been happily married for 18 years, and four children Has.
How did you tame your husband, Mrs. Bening? ", She was recently asked by a TV reporter, and she asked back," Not at all, would you like a tamed man? "Where the question is well justified, because as Warren Beatty cast the female lead in 1991 for his movie "Bugsy," which was voted "Hollywood's most active sex gland," as evidenced by such diverse women as Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Julie Christie, and Madonna, his charisma as a man, and his movie achievements like "Bonnie and Clyde" or "Reds" made him the most coveted bachelor of Hollywood Annette Bening, however, at the age of 33 not quite young, although Tony-nominated actress from New York, but comparatively filmunerfahren, seemed compared to him a mouse ,
Annette Bening and Warren Beatty
"Well, how was she?" Bugsy director Barry Levinson asked after Beatty and Bening sniffed at the Italian. "Good, I'll marry her," said Beatty, who - against his habit - did not do anything with his co-star during the shoot. Only in the end, he said in "Vanity Fair", did he whisper in her ear "I would like to make you a baby right now". She agreed.
Just started in Hollywood, she was reduced to "the woman who tames Warren", made him, the soon to be 60-year-old, a diaper changer and filled his old party house in the Hollywood Hills with babies. She wore it with humor. "What can I offer you, coke or breast milk?" She is said to have asked a reporter once.
Occasionally she made a couple of films in which she played with her husband ("Perfect Love Affair"), Harrison Ford ("In Things Henry") or Michael Douglas ("Hello, Mr. President") the dear woman at his side. "Do you still have it in you?" She sometimes asked herself, "Are you still burning enough for your job? What life's work will you look back on in your old age?"
Annette Bening: "I love my family more"
Questions that bothered her but did not alarm her, though she spent most of her Hollywood career as a barefoot and pregnant woman. A life outside of the film business, a center other than the belly button was more important to her. "I love my job, but I love my family even more," she says, enjoying herself with women who put on the breast pump under a career suit.
"Krass", USA 2006, Annette Bening, Brian Cox
She already knew that she wanted children as a child. At 13, she was the most popular babysitter in San Diego, where she lived with her parents and three siblings. Here she also discovered her love for the theater. Her father, an insurance agent, and her mother, a church chorus, supported her plans, letting her move to the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where her colleagues already noticed "this exciting mix of innocence and sexiness."
Annette Bening had a lightness even as a young woman
"Already as a young woman, she had the lightness and safety on stage that others have to work hard to achieve," says director Steven White, with whom she was briefly married and now friends, "she played Lady Macbeth and Medea in her twenties 'She did not do it before and after her.'
She moved to New York in the late '80s, got a Tony nomination for "Coastal Disturbances," and was a little criminal punk in the little grubby movie "Grifters." She also noticed Warren Beatty, who was looking for the role of "Bugsy" lover Virginia Hill, a partner "who was equally strong and made me look good".
He found her. And now, at the few events the couple visits, she steps aside to speak smart sentences in microphones. "I had my time, now it's hers," says this gesture.
"American Beauty", USA 1999
Yes, it's her turn, she has already skinned and has become one of the best movie and theater actresses in America. She does not shoot much, but she was first-rate in each of her latest films. Her dramatic mothering role is her specialty, in "Krass" she plays an unsuccessful poetess who leaves her son to her therapist, in "Mother and Child" she releases her baby for adoption, and never was frustrated narcissism more entertaining than in "Being Julia" and "American Beauty". In the process, the passionate mother of four slips her broken film mothers so deeply under her skin that they become understandable and forgivable. With her there is no wrong sentence, no wrong movement, she is a master of silence, which one can hardly bear as a spectator, with a wink she expresses whole tragedies. The inner struggle, barely visible to the outside, no one can do that better than her. At a dinner in "The Kids Are All Right" she learns that Jules and Paul have an affair. She says nothing, her face everything. How does she do it? "With a mix of life experience and imagination," she says.
Annette Bening: Expect the unexpected
Bening does not rest on her laurels, she devours mountains of books, is looking for exciting fabrics, good authors, she knows that it is mostly small films in which she plays the big roles. "I rarely do million-dollar projects, but movies that people have scratched and blew their hair out to make it happen."
"Mars Attacks!", USA 1996, Jack Nicholson, Annette Bening
A blessed life? Yes, but also a tested one. Expect the unexpected. What people dream, the gods will disappoint. A phrase that Annette Bening has often said and experienced as Medea on stage. It has recently become known that Kathlyn, 18, her first-born daughter, has lived as a man for a few years and calls herself Stephen Ira. As the rumors intensified, Bening canceled her participation in the Belfast Film Festival. But there is a photo of Stephens Graduation, where she stands next to her son and laughs. In life, not in the movie.
