Annette Bening

Annette Bening is being interviewed by Christian Amanpour on Flawed women are interesting women:

Annette Bening is the most wonderful actor and her performances are incredible. However I am leaving you to read her bio (at the end of this piece) as I wanted to include her many quotes. As a woman in her early sixties, these will be of value to us:

I still remember the five points of salesmanship: attention, interest, conviction, desire and close.

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.

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 am really looking forward as I get older and older, to being less and less nice.

Acting is not about being famous, it's about exploring the human soul.

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.

Five billion people have played Hamlet. "To be or not to be". And how do you do that and find your way into your own journey, your own way of telling it?

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.

Our children see us a certain way, and we want to be seen by them in a certain way. I certainly want to be a strong, stable, loving, consistent presence in my children's lives. But we are human beings, too.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

There's love for your parents, your family, your spouse, your partner, your friends, but the nature of the connection you have with your child, there's nothing like it. It has its own character and it's so serious and so powerful, and so it's a prism through which I see everything.

I don't really have a choice. I'm getting older.

The tension I feel is the moment they say, "Action!". Movies are like lightning in a bottle, and you always want to find when you possibly can catch a surprising moment.

By the time I was in high school, Roe v. Wade had passed, so that was also happening; girls were getting pregnant and getting abortions - and that happened in my school too.

I read "Game Change". If you want to relive the campaign, that book is unbelievable. It's great. It's the book of that campaign. It brought all the memories back of everything with Clinton and Obama, and Sarah Palin and McCain, and choosing her, and John Edwards. It was an interesting book.

Everybody has a public life, and they have their own private life. Everybody has their secrets. Everybody has their own private, you know, agonies as well as joys. And that's what great drama, whether it's the movies or the theater, that's what it shows.

I don't see myself as competing with other actresses. I mean, I went through a time when I was in New York, and I was going to lots of auditions and trying to get parts, but even then, you're not really competing with the other actresses. There is a competition going on, but it's not like something you can win in that way.

And if there's anything movies can do in a way that I just love, and I love as an audience is, "Show me something I don't know about. Show me something I haven't seen.".

We all perform our lives in a way. And the actor is a perfect metaphor to get at that theme of "how do we find our authentic selves?". And that we all - whether we're actors or not - perform ourselves. As a way of searching. As a way of fumbling around and trying to say, is this my voice? Is this who I am?

I knew I wanted children in my life. The acting was always in relation to it. Life at home is chaos. They're wonderful. They're such interesting human beings. I just love it. I'm lucky.

I've made some movies that I really loved that nobody saw.

Most people are looking for something to give their life meaning.

There are so many different kinds of relationships, so it's sort of difficult to define what is considered normal.

I love being busy, and I love having a lot going on; it's exciting.

When I watch my kids, and I see the primal level at which the sibling relationships are formed, then I completely understand what these unresolved adult sibling problems are based on. You know, "Mom liked you better" and, "You got your own room and I didn't".

Read Benning’s bio here.