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Annette Benning

Annette Bening was born on May 29, 1958 in Topeka, Kansas, the youngest of four children. Her family moved to California when she was young, and she grew up there. She graduated from San Francisco University and began her acting career with the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, eventually moving to New York where she acted on the stage (including a Tony-award nomination in 1987 for her work in the Broadway play "Coastal Disturbances") and got her first film roles, in a few TV movies. As is so often the case, her first big-screen role was in a forgettable movie, this one the 1988 Dan Aykroyd vehicle The Great Outdoors (1988). However, her next work on-screen was in Milos Forman's Valmont (1989), a film adaptation of de Laclos's "Les Liaisons Dangereuses." Unfortunately, de Laclos's story had also just served as the source of a more Hollywoodized and successful movie version, Dangerous Liaisons (1988), which had been released the previous year, and Foreman's treatment went little noticed. Bening's career turned an important corner the following year when she co-starred with Anjelica Huston and John Cusack in Stephen Frears's powerful, entertaining screen adaptation of Jim Thompson's novel The Grifters (1990), and her artful turn as a con artist gained her the... Next

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