Annette Bening
Annette Bening
Annette Carol Beningis an American actress. She began her career on stage with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival company in 1980, and played Lady Macbeth in 1984 at the American Conservatory Theatre. She was nominated for the 1987 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her Broadway debut in Coastal Disturbances. She is a four-time Academy Award nominee; for the films The Grifters, American Beauty, Being Juliaand The Kids Are All Right. In 2006, she received a star...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actress
Date of Birth29 May 1958
CityTopeka, KS
CountryUnited States of America
It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the bad girl or the good girl or the bad mother or the good mother, the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children or the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies, all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.
I still remember the five points of salesmanship: attention, interest, conviction, desire and close.
I've always been pretty levelheaded. In show business you need to have a certain internal stability.
I am really looking forward as I get older and older, to being less and less nice.
I like that I've been through things, that when something happens, it resonates with something that already happened. It's not that things like loss are more or less painful. But they're deeper. I find that fascinating.
We still want to idealize moms, and sometimes we want to idealize actresses who are moms, too. I know that's something I've experienced, but we're all just doing the best we can and we're all trying to raise our kids and talk to them about everything that needs to be discussed.
If you're an actor, you have to find a way to make peace with all the media attention.
Right now, I love the fact that I have so many opportunities, but I know this privileged position cannot last. That doesn't mean that I'll stop working. I picture myself as an old actress doing cameos in films with people saying: "Isn't that that Bening woman?
I remember hearing someone say that good acting is more about taking off a mask than putting one on, and in movie acting, certainly that's true. With the camera so close, you can see right down into your soul, hopefully. So being able to do that in a way is terrifying, and in another way, truly liberating. And I like that about it
Acting is not about being famous, it's about exploring the human soul.
Anybody who has children and children who are well feels a sense of responsibility towards parents and kids and families that are struggling and that aren't well.
It's easier to see in someone else, another actor, how they kind of disappear and then this other persona appears. A great actor is a thing of mystery.
I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.
There are so many different kinds of relationships, so it's sort of difficult to define what is considered normal.