Annette Bening 5th Oscar Nom Javascript must be enabled to use this site. Please enable Javascript in your browser and try again. × Search search POPULAR SEARCHES SUGGESTED LINKS Join AARP for just $9 per year when you sign up for a 5-year term. Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. Leaving AARP.org Website You are now leaving AARP.org and going to a website that is not operated by AARP. A different privacy policy and terms of service will apply. Close
Annette Bening 5th Oscar Nom
In Film Stars Don t Die in Liverpool Bening brings noir star Gloria Grahame to life
Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. She earned two Oscar nominations and won for her husband Nicholas Ray’s The Bad and the Beautiful. But after she wooed and eventually married Ray’s young son Tony Ray, her career chilled. To be fair, Nicholas was no innocent — he bedded the 16-year-old Natalie Wood — but Hollywood is not fair to female sexpots. In her 50s, Grahame wound up doing stage shows like The Glass Menagerie in non-prestige theaters in Britain. Flowers & Gifts 25% off sitewide and 30% off select items See more Flowers & Gifts offers > Jamie Bell, 31, and Annette Bening, 59, live out a romance in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool." Susie Allnutt/Sony Pictures Classics Bening rewatched Grahame’s movies to play her and nimbly captures the actress’ . It’s breathier than usual for Bening, but not a celebrity impression, and she doesn’t try to approximate Grahame’s trademark pout, notoriously tortured by bad plastic surgery and wads of cotton stuffed under her upper lip. Mainly, Bening captures Grahame’s classic-Hollywood girlishness, her ambition and a defiance of aging as heroic as it was neurotic. At an age when actresses get to play the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Grahame still aimed to play Juliet. Like the actor who plays him (Jamie Bell), Turner didn’t know who Grahame was at first. Somebody tells him, “She was a big name in black-and-white films — not doing too well in color.” Yet her life seems quite colorful — she’s stayin’ alive as an artist and a romantic — and there’s some sweet humor when the film star moves in with Turner’s working-class Liverpool relatives as her illness gets serious. Julie Walters, 61, Oscar nominated as Bell’s ballet teacher in Billy Elliott, plays his mum this time, and their scenes together are like a warm bath of sentiment. So are the scenes in L.A., where Turner met Grahame’s stage mother (nicely played by Vanessa Redgrave). In fact, the whole movie is a warm bath, and that is its achievement and its limitation. There are a few flinty touches, as when Grahame’s sister (Frances Barber) tells Turner that Tony Ray was 13 when his dad caught him in bed with Grahame, and Grahame snaps an unsentimental response. But this movie is mostly about honorable romance remembered in melancholy, not scandal, bad behavior and reckless impulsiveness. I would have preferred something harsher, with infinitely more backstage film drama, which might explain why we care about Gloria Grahame and the many movie masters in her life: her neighbors Bogart and Bacall, her rebel husband Nicholas Ray, and his son Tony Ray, who grew up to be the Oscar-nominated producer of An Unmarried Woman. This movie is emotionally rewarding, but most Gloria Grahame movies are startling as a gangster's slap in the face. Go watch all her hits, plus the forgotten 1979 masterpiece Chilly Scenes of Winter, in which she plays a highly theatrical madwoman. Bening deserves awards for yet another performance of lapidary exactitude, but there's a deeper look at theater people's lives in her Oscar-nominated Being Julia, and she was closer to the anarchic, scary spirit of Grahame when she channeled her in The Grifters. Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool shows Gloria Grahame’s softer side — so it’s the absolute opposite of the noir films that made her famous. Bening convinces us that Grahame was, for all her eccentric genius and pride, quite soft-boiled. More on entertainment AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe AARP VALUE & MEMBER BENEFITS See more Health & Wellness offers > See more Flights & Vacation Packages offers > See more Finances offers > See more Health & Wellness offers > SAVE MONEY WITH THESE LIMITED-TIME OFFERS