At Lunch with Annette Bening: Being Gloria Grahame

The Oscar winning actress Gloria Grahame was hardly Hollywood royalty, a sulky blond bombshell playing bad girls and good. The movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, directed by Paul McGuigan and based on Peter Turner’s memoir of his affair with the American actress, takes you from her saucy time meeting Turner, a Brit much younger than she, through her final days. The actress Annette Bening, Hollywood royalty for sure, is down to earth; despite critical praise for many glorious performances including last year’s Mike Mills movie, as the matriarch in Twentieth Century Women, she has not yet won an Academy Award. Bening’s Gloria Grahame as an older and wiser version of her character in The Grifters. Last year, her husband Warren Beatty was honored at the Museum of the Moving Image, and she will be feted this year at their gala in December. Is this sublime actress on the road to an Oscar nod at last?

That was the talk last week at Le Cirque when the actor Robert Wuhl announced that Annette Bening was his favorite actress to the crowd at lunch. Also present was her co-star Jamie Bell, riveting as Peter Turner. Historically, after Grahame and Turner broke up, she was rehearsing for a movie in Sheffield and collapsed. His family in Liverpool took her in. In a fine role as Turner’s mother, Julie Walters shows the kind of real empathy characteristic of the British, caring for the sick woman, said Jamie Bell, best known for his dancing as Billy Elliott. Bell’s despair as the fictive Grahame is dying stands out, as does his physicality, so when he says he hopes to star in a biopic as Fred Astaire, as he told me, that sounds like a movie you’d want to see. And who would be his Ginger Rogers? “Maybe Claire Foy. She can dance.”

Regina Weinreich

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