Regarding Annette

Uh, oh, Annette Bening looks put out. Her cerise-painted lips are not smiling, her blue silk jacket is billowing as Hollywood’s woman of the year twirls this way, then that, on tiny, wedge-shaped shoes. Where’s the photographer? Where’s the reporter? How much time will this take? And when is the lunch break?

It’s one of those cattle-call press junkets, although as these things go, it’s classier than most: the new Mike Nichols film, “Regarding Henry”; a discreet little Upper East Side hotel; co-star Harrison Ford lounging in a hallway crawling with the foreign press corps.

But Bening is the one everyone wants to see, the latest comet over Hollywood. It’s her first big role since her Oscar-nominated portrait of con artist Myra Langtry in Stephen Frears’ film-noirish “The Grifters,” a much-noticed follow-up to her scene-stealing walk-on in “Postcards From the Edge.” (Nobody’s really counting her work in Irwin Winkler’s well-intentioned-to-the-point-of-tedious “Guilty by Suspicion.”) Bening’s Langtry was an icy, hot-to-the-touch performance that combined the sexual frisson of Madonna and the thespian self-possession of Meryl Streep. Hollywood rubbed its eyes: The thinking man’s sex symbol had arrived.

Faster than you can say percentage of the gross, Bening filmed Nichols’ “Regarding Henry,” went straight into Barry Levinson’s “Bugsy” playing opposite Warren Beatty and stirring up the requisite off-camera rumors, signed on to play Catwoman in Tim Burton’s “Batman” sequel and jettisoned the unbecomingly low-budget Samuel Goldwyn picture “The Playboys.”

So why is Bening so put out? Surely it’s not that $1-million breach-of-oral-contract suit Goldwyn filed against the actress three months ago? But wait. She’s stopped twirling here in the hotel suite, located the reporter, dismissed the photographer with an airy wave and glides toward the couch “where we can just sit and talk.” And she is smiling. And smiling. And smiling.

For somebody who already has a rap sheet with the press for being a difficult interview, Bening now seems to have the Miss Congeniality award well in hand. She curls up, tucking her sandals underneath her, pink toenails peeking out. She chatters. She confides. She smiles. Her silk suit? Gosh, she bought that years ago when she could hardly afford it. The press crush downstairs? Oh, she knows a lot of them by now and they were really very touched by the movie. Being interviewed? Ah, if you can just be in the moment with them, it’s like acting in front of the camera.

Interviewing Bening is more like chatting with a sorority president than with the industry’s second most in-demand actress (after Julia Roberts). Born in Kansas and raised in San Diego, Bening is regal in that Southern California way--tall, thin, athletic, self-possessed and unrelentingly upbeat. As Nichols says: “Annette reminds me of when I first met my wife (Diane Sawyer)--I thought nobody can be that perfect. But she is.”

Perfect is what you get with Bening--on screen and off. From her first work in regional theater to her recent film roles, her reviews have been virtually nothing but raves.

She was something of a legend during her five years at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), playing such disparate parts as Lady Macbeth and Emily in “Our Town” with amazing ease. In her only season at the Denver Theater Center, local critics handed Bening a best actress award. Her first job in New York, the lead in Tina Howe’s “Coastal Disturbances,” earned Bening a Tony nomination in 1987.

It didn’t take Hollywood long to woo the actress from what looked to be a cakewalk of a stage career. By the time she made “The Grifters” in 1990, critics were calling Bening “perfection,” as Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times wrote of that film. Vincent Canby of the New York Times hailed Bening as having “the angelic looks of Michelle Pfeiffer and comic style and lowdown sexiness of Kathleen Turner.” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael said simply, “a stunning actress.”

With that kind of public billing one might expect savaging of Bening off camera. But colleagues and co-workers speak of her with awed sincerity. “Great instincts.” “Great comic timing.” “No attitude.” “Hard worker.” “Very genuine.” “Beautiful and talented!” “Can’t describe her without sounding like a press release.”

Robyn Goodman, co-artistic director of Second Stage, where Bening starred in the Howe play, is one of the few who have worked with Bening to suggest that the actress is “a little opaque now. You can’t get a handle on her.” The director likens Bening to Meryl Streep “in her early years when she was very guarded.” Bening, says Goodman, is also “that craftsperson who went into it to be an actress and became a star and doesn’t quite know how to deal with it. She has a control about her that makes you ask, ‘What is underneath there?’ Well, there is a lot there, she just releases that intensity in her work and among her intimate friends.”

For her part, Bening returns the favor of her colleagues, characterizing her 15 minutes in Hollywood’s fast lane as if she was signing a yearbook. Nichols is “so bright!” Ford is “so fun!” Barry Levinson is “so delightful.” “Regarding Henry” is “so moving.” This is, after all, a woman who took her parents to the Academy Awards ceremony, who wrote to her high school teacher six years after graduation thanking her for her inspiration and who invited her college acting teacher to her wedding.

“They held the reception at Sea World and her mother sang. Her sister keeps a scrapbook of all her reviews. There’s just a nice ring of sincerity about the family,” recalls Art Noll, former co-chairman of the drama department at San Diego’s Mesa College, where Bening studied for two years. “Annette isn’t the kind of person to waste time with ego, she just wanted to learn everything she could.”

Apparently the only thing Bening hasn’t mastered in her 33 years is being comfortable in the spotlight. She sidesteps all questions about her personal life, keeps a low profile at home in Los Angeles where she rents a house and is frequently described by even those who know her as mysterious. “I think she finds it difficult to talk publicly about herself,” Nichols says.

During the hourlong conversation, Bening keeps up a nonstop stream of conversation to keep things rolling, to keep those pesky questions she would rather not answer from even being asked. She speaks in a low, strong voice just touched with a California accent and punctuated with “You bet!” and “Sure, sure, I can relate to that.”

The only discrepancy in this performance is her face--dusted with powder for the photographers and with that slash of cerise at the mouth--that somehow conveys more emotion than perhaps she intends. Sometimes she looks angry enough to slam out of the room. Sometimes, like when she talks about the 12-year-old actress Mikki Allen, who plays her daughter in the film, she looks like she is seconds from bursting into tears. And when she laughs, her face scrunches up like a schoolgirl’s. What comes through is her energy, intelligence and above all, her self-control, that ability to keep to her own agenda, which on this particular day, is to promote “Regarding Henry.”

“What am I doing next?” she asks slightly startled and then catches herself. ‘Well, I just finished ‘Bugsy’ last week and I’m going to take a break. And . . . I’m really excited about this movie, ‘Henry.’ I love what it says. That it’s hard to be a grown-up. That catastrophe offers us an opportunity to face ourselves.”

“Regarding Henry,” Nichols’ first picture since last summer’s comedy “Postcards From the Edge,” is a four-hanky tale of the emotional rebirth of a New York attorney after a freakish accident. Ford plays Henry Turner--a snarling Type A with an adorable wife (Bening), adorable daughter (newcomer Allen) and no time for either--who is shot in the head during a holdup at a corner store. His recovery process, a combination of “Awakenings,” “Rain Man” and “Charly,” affects the entire family.

Nichols, who had worked with Ford in the 1988 comedy “Working Girl,” says “Regarding Henry” appealed to him “because I liked the idea of being able to look at your life as a stranger.”

Ford had sent Nichols the script after receiving it from the 24-year-old screenwriter Jeffrey Abrams, co-author of the earlier comedy “Taking Care of Business.” Bening was brought on board by Nichols, who says she was the obvious choice to play Henry’s wife, the long-suffering Sara Turner, because he had worked with her before in “Postcards” and “because she is just the best actress in her age range--that rare combination of sexiness, intelligence and humor.”

Bening says her response to the film was instinctive and careerist. “When I first read a script, my response is not intellectual, it’s emotional,” she says. “And I loved this story, it was so simple and had a very positive message--that there is always time for redemption. I had just done (“The Grifters”) and I wanted to find something that took me as far as possible from that. I liked the fact that the focus of Sara is her emotional life, that she is not flashy.”

Bening and the rest of the cast rehearsed with Nichols for three weeks last winter before the 10-week shoot in and around New York. They also met with a family that had undergone a similar experience--a meeting that Bening says “was incredible. (The wife) told me that the irony of the accident was that it allowed her to be needed, that she became capable. She knew how to love well. I tried to make that true for Sara.”

She says she approached the role like she does with every part, by finding “the arc of the character,” which is “balanced by what happens when you walk in front of a camera and have to respond in the moment.” Although Sara Turner is much less complex and compelling than either the duplicitous bunco artist she played in “The Grifters” or the conniving Marquise she portrayed in Milos Forman’s “Valmont,” Bening dismisses any suggestion that her forte is playing less-than-likable leading ladies. “No, it’s like apples and oranges,” she says firmly. “It wouldn’t be fun to only play a Myra or Virginia Hill (in “Bugsy”). I loved Sara, that her inner life did not emphasize glamour or appearance.”

Nichols agrees and suggests that Bening is so adept at conveying emotions on screen that “even a scene that seems to be about the doctor explaining something becomes a scene about Annette listening.” Barry Levinson says much the same thing about Bening’s work in “Bugsy.”

Although she says that playing parts on stage or in film “is not that different from playing dress-up which I did as a kid,” Bening is a well-educated, well-trained, craft-oriented actress who brings a lot of theory to her work. “She is extremely accomplished and her craft is so strong,” says Carole Rothman, co-artistic director of Second Stage. “She can memorize on a dime, can be heard in the back row and her instincts are all right. She shines on stage.”

That craftsmanship is about the only subject--other than the film--that Bening readily discusses; the urge to act, she says almost reverently “is very basic, to get up in front of others and tell stories. That impulse should be honored.”

It begins, she adds, with a willingness to plumb one’s own emotional depths. “You can be the best technical actor in the world and have really interesting behavior, but if you don’t have emotions behind it. . . .” Acting, she says, “is about scaring myself a little bit,” a creative urge “that keeps you on edge. . . . Anger? Yeah, I can relate to that, sure. Tapping into something you’re not normally conscious of? You bet. The skill is doing it again and again and again. That’s the craft.”

She says she does not go around in character when shooting a film, but prefers to maintain “this low level simmer from the time you get to the trailer in the morning until you go in front of the camera when you have to come up with the goods. Otherwise, I try to consciously keep my mind off it.”

Ask Bening what it is that sets her apart from other actresses and she stiffens--”I couldn’t say.” Larry Hecht, her acting teacher at ACT, where Bening first studied in the late 1970s, says simply: “She was born with it. And there is so much there that hasn’t even begun to be tapped.” Ed Hastings, artistic director of ACT, describes Bening’s unique talents as derived from “this little secret that she always seems to find in her characters and keeps quite near the surface. It conveys either great delight or some sort of power and it gives her acting a great kick.”

Press Bening on her talents and she inevitably brings the discussion back to her craft. “Like when they teach you to act, they teach you about objectives,” she says. “You have a need--a kind of emotional imbalance--it’s not neurotic, but you want something. I try to consciously beef up that motivation in order to intensify what I’m doing. You get an image in your head of what you want and then you find a way of expressing that.”

As far back as she can remember, she loved to pretend. The youngest of four children born within five years to an insurance salesman and his wife, a professional church singer, Bening “always liked working in plays.” After the family moved from Wichita to San Diego, Bening attended Patrick Henry High School where she became a fixture in school productions, “very beautiful, lively, a girl with unusual talent and a great deal of poise,” recalls Anne Krill, her high school acting teacher. “But my impression was that she did not have much drive at the time.”

She was popular, well-liked, but independent, one who prefered running and scuba diving to cheerleading. She graduated a year early, took some time off to work for her father who taught Dale Carnegie classes--”I still remember the five points of salesmanship,” she says holding up five fingers and ticking them off: “attention, interest, conviction, desire and close”--and as a cook on a scuba diving boat. She attended a local junior college (Mesa) because of its well-regarded theater department where she “played a lot of major roles” according to Noll, and swiftly became “that dream actor who didn’t require a lot of coaching.”

In 1976, she headed north to San Francisco State where she finished her undergraduate years and then moved across town to ACT--one of 32 students accepted out of 600 applicants. She stayed for five years, first as a student in the conservatory and then as a member of the acting company. “I had a lot of offers from regional theaters at that point,” recalls Bening, who had also met and married her husband, actor Steve White (from whom she is now estranged), during that time. After a year working in Denver, Bening moved to New York, where she immediately landed the Tina Howe play at Second Stage. “She was nervous,” recalls Rothman. “It was her first big role and the whole play was riding on her. But she got incredible reviews.”

Despite her rather rapid fire success, Bening says: “I never felt like I had made it. The whole year I was working in the play, I was going out on a million calls--movies, commercials, TV shows and getting rejected a lot.” She made one commercial--which was never shown--and a television pilot, “It Had to Be You,” that was picked up without her. Eventually she landed the part of Dan Aykroyd’s wife in the John Hughes comedy “The Great Outdoors.” It was when she returned to New York for a small role in Michael Weller’s Broadway drama, “Spoils of War,” that she was spotted by Nichols, who approached Bening about two upcoming plays he was directing.

Although neither of those stage projects came to pass, Bening was moving almost exclusively into film--first in Forman’s “Valmont” (for which she received good to mixed reviews) and then that career-launching performance in “The Grifters” with Frears. The director had ironically turned down Bening a year earlier for the role Michelle Pfeiffer played in “Dangerous Liaisons,” Frears’ version of the Christopher Hampton play “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” which also formed the basis of “Valmont.”

“I’m still very critical of myself in film,” says Bening, who says she not only misses working in front of a live audience but finds film counterproductive to the visualization process she uses in acting. “When you do plays, you say to yourself ‘OK, I’m 6 feet, have dark hair, bad teeth, bunions,’ whatever,” she says. “Every time I saw myself on film I thought, ‘Oh my God! That’s all?”

Although she says she wants to return to the stage, she has no immediate plans other than playing the cartoonish Catwoman in the upcoming “Batman.” As for Virginia Hill, the moll she plays in “Bugsy,” due out in December and which features in addition to Bening, actors Beatty, Ben Kingsley and Joe Mantegna, Bening says: “Virginia was a great gal--very tough, very smart, big hearted, volatile as hell. I watched a tape of the Kefauver hearings on organized gambling that she testified at and she was great, spoke in a nasal voice, wore a broad-brimmed hat and gave away nothing.”

The same might be said for Bening herself who, at the end of the hour, is still curled on the couch, still smiling and still opaque in that relentlessly affable way. Perhaps acting is ultimately like hiding for her? She pauses. “Maybe it is,” she says slowly. “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.”

An aide has discreetly appeared in the suite. Bening is about to be rescued by her promised lunch break. She smiles, unwinds from the sofa. For the barest of moments, the conversation turns personal, or rather turns to scuba diving. “It’s great, it’s great,” she says about her longtime sport. “I used to dive off the Channel Islands along the California coast. I gotta get back into that.

“You know when you’re in a certain state of mind, when you don’t think about the fear--that’s what it is. And the one thing you can’t imagine is the silence,” she says placing her fingers over her mouth imitating a regulator. “It’s so quiet all you can hear is your own breathing.” And the room falls silent except for the sound of her breath as measured as a pulse.