At 65 years old, Annette Bening can say she has achieved it all. Emerging from regional theater, she climbed the steps of fame until reaching Broadway, where she received a Tony nomination, and the following year she made her debut in film, the medium with which she has enjoyed a solid career that extends throughout of 4 decades. Although she has won a Bafta and a Golden Globe, she, who is also the happy wife of Warren Beatty since 1992, has never won an Oscar, an award for which she has been nominated four times.
Those who have seen her in Nyad, the Netflix film in which she shares the bill with Jodie Foster, will have no doubt that Bening deserves a new opportunity, since her transformation into a strong swimmer who recovers her dream of crossing the ocean is formidable. from the beaches of Cuba to those of Florida, when he is already over 60 years old.
In a press conference recently organized by the platform in the middle of awards season, the actress recalled that when documentary filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi sent her the script, she said yes immediately: “I knew who Diana Nyad was, I He listened to public radio, because in the 30 years he stopped swimming he had a career in the media as a commentator. She also knew the work of Jimmy and Chai, amazing directors who have done incredible things in the world of documentaries. Obviously I didn’t think about everything that this role entailed. So I had to get to work,” she noted.
Annette started training immediately, as she spends a good part of the film in the water or in the gym: “I’m a much better swimmer today than when I made the film. I have continued swimming since filming concluded. As a child I spent a lot of time in the water, I did scuba diving, I worked on a boat and I always got along very well with the ocean. But I was never a swimmer like Diana,” she explained and then detailed: “I have also always been in good physical condition, I go out cycling, I do yoga, I have run a lot.”
However, when it came time to film in the water, he realized that the challenge was much greater than he had imagined. “Luckily, I had a great coach, Rada Owan, who swam in the Olympics and got in the pool with me. Since our movie was postponed a couple of times, I had more time to train. The truth is that I swam a lot and went to the gym. I have always exercised a lot to clear my mind. “It’s my way of centering myself, whether it’s doing yoga, running or any other way I’ve wrecked all my joints,” she jokingly commented.
Mother of four children with Beatty, who are now 31, 29, 26 and 23, Annette does not sit still for a moment. When in July of this year the actors’ strike interrupted the filming in Australia of the series Apples never fall, in which she had one of the main roles, she was one of the most intense promoters of the construction of the Academy Museum in Hollywood opened in 2021, he packed his bags and returned to Los Angeles to join the actors union picket lines.
But in addition, she dedicated herself body and soul to her task as president of the board of directors of the Community Entertainment Fund, which depends on the union, and whose mission is to financially help her colleagues in trouble. An expert when it comes to getting donations, and owner with her husband of a fortune estimated at 70 million dollars, Bening put money from her own pocket to raise about seven million of that currency, in a campaign to which Steven Spielberg also contributed. , J.J. Abrams, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Radcliffe and Shonda Rhimes, among many others. The FCE, once called the Actors Fund, was founded in 1882 and has helped the artistic community in the United States since then.
In an interview with Hollywood Reporter conducted in August in the entity’s building in Hollywood, which in addition to being a cultural center provides housing for actors in trouble, Annette admitted that her decision to join union activity had to do with the fact that none of her children already lives at home, adding that a good part of her work is raising awareness.
“The most important thing is that people know that this exists. Not everyone knows about this fund that is available for when work stops. It has worked for 140 years and today it is not only for actors, but for everyone who works in the world of entertainment. We were able to help during the pandemic, distributing more than $30 million to people across the country, and that’s why our mandate ended up changing. “Nowadays everyone who is in the performing arts can check online very quickly if they qualify for emergency financial aid,” he said when the actors’ strike was still months away from ending.
