Annette Bening Is Ready for a Revolution
“One of the real pleasures of acting for me is that I don’t have to judge the person I’m playing,” Annette Bening says. The actress is calling to discuss her latest project, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, in which she plays real-life actress Gloria Grahame. “I just have to get behind their eyes,” Bening continues. “To become an advocate for somebody - I love that responsibility."
She might have scorched the silver screen in films like The Big Heat and It's a Wonderful Life, but in some ways, the late Grahame does need just that: an advocate to draw our attention to her story. Based on her erstwhile lover Peter Turner's memoir of the same name, the film introduces us to Grahame only after she's well outside the spotlight. In the late '70s, the actress met young actor-turned-writer Turner (Jamie Bell) and they fell into a relationship, despite an almost 30-year age difference.
In the film, Grahame and Turner's relationship is presented as perfectly normal, sex scenes and all. There shouldn't be anything unusual about these lovers - we see May–December romances all the time, on-screen and off - but there is. Bening appreciates that Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool turns her past experiences on their head. “When I started, I was about the age Jamie is now, and all of the actors I was working with were 20 years older than me - at least - and nobody mentioned it,” she says. “I was playing their love interest or wife, and no one said, ‘Wow, that’s unusual.’ It’s just accepted as a norm for older men and younger women.”
Grahame was once a star of the silver screen, and won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1953. But in her later years, studios and producers lost interest: a fate common among her peers. Grahame was just 57 when she died of breast cancer in 1981, but her star was beginning to wane long before that. Aspects of her story still feel relevant, but Bening admires what Grahame did in the circumstances. "In Gloria’s time, women were trapped into [the tropes of] the good mother, the bad girl," she says. "That’s beginning to shift.”
“She always referred to herself as the ‘replacement,’” Bening says of her "pragmatic" character. "She was pretty self-effacing, I think. She had a great run and then she was one of those people who, when she got a little bit older - man, the work dried up. She really had a hard time. She was doing TV and not-very-good movies in the ‘60s and ‘70s. She did whatever she could to make a living.... She was tough, and she got on with it.”
Still, the crueler aspects of her profession managed to disrupt that practicality from time to time. In one striking scene, Turner suggests that Grahame might be too old to play Shakespeare's Juliet. She is shocked and hurt, both by the fact that Turner sees her as an older woman and by the idea that an actress can outgrow a role. Bening says her own experience hasn’t been quite so harsh, but that’s primarily because she focuses on parts that mirror her own age.
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“I haven’t gone through something like that. I’ve been able to play my own age, pretty much, and I’ve always wanted to do that. I was interested in trying to reflect something about my own experiences in life through these characters," she explains. "Hopefully, if you’re doing it right, you’re serving a story, but you’re also finding out something about life.”
Given this career-shaping rationale, it's unsurprising that Bening considers filmmaking and storytelling essential, particularly in times of political and social turmoil. “There’s something very basic in the need we all have for great stories,” she says. “We are still looking for that human connection - that story that just gets us, that we feel touched by. Especially with the political situation. I was in England when Brexit passed and I’m here now in the U.S., and so much is going on. The role of the arts and of culture and literature - the whole world of creative expression - is so vitally important to all of us, whether we just need to be entertained or whether we want to be told a story that’s going to help us to understand what’s going on around us.”
Of course, some of that turmoil has come from inside Hollywood itself. Since Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment and assault earlier this year, a slew of filmmakers, actors, and executives have been similarly outed for their poor behavior - including Bening’s American Beauty co-star Kevin Spacey. Bening is obviously disappointed by the revelations, but feels that positive change can ultimately result from this reckoning.
“I do think the way in which all of us now, when we go into any of these situations.... I can’t imagine any of us not thinking about all this in a different way,” she says. “That’s to the benefit of young people starting out as well as people who are established - that people are going to rethink their behavior."
But she doesn't want the revolution to stop there. "Maybe the real deep and profound change is not just in my profession, but also for women who need to be protected everywhere," she says. "The women who are working at McDonald’s as single moms supporting their families, and it’s the only job they can get, and someone is harassing them, and they’re not saying anything because they’re going to lose their income - those are the people I keep thinking about. I keep hoping this will affect women across the spectrum...all kinds of women who are much more vulnerable and who don’t have a voice. This will hopefully be a tipping point where the culture can change.”
Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is in theaters December 29.
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