Bening's family moved to San Diego, California in 1965. In junior high, she played the lead in The Sound of Music. She finished high school in three years and attended San Diego Mesa College. She completed her drama degree at San Francisco State University. Bening then studied at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, and joined its acting company. In 1985, she moved to New York where she won a Tony Award nomination for her debut performance in Coastal Disturbances. However, she endured a five-year struggle before breaking into film.
Her first film was Manhunt for Claude Dallas, a made-for-TV movie which came out in 1986. Her first major feature film role was in The Great Outdoors (1988). She garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Grifters (1990) and Best Actress in a Leading Role for American Beauty (1999).
Bening met actor Warren Beatty on the set of the film Bugsy (1991) and the two started a secret romance. On March 12, 1992, she married Beatty. The couple has four children.
In 2005, Bening won the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy playing a 1930s stage actress in a mid-career crisis in Being Julia (2004).
Annette: Somerset Maugham often wrote about this idea, this kind of relationship, and he wrote about it with such a personal kind of ache, from what I understand, that was reflected in many of his relationships and so he really understood it.
Annette: It’s not an American story, and when you look at it you can really tell, because it doesn’t have that sort of puritanical overtone to it, the relationship between the husband and the wife doesn’t really fall into those boundaries, and yet its obviously a mutually satisfying relationship in those kind of ways.
Annette: I had one grandfather that lived to be 100, and I was around older people a lot when I was a kid, I was lucky.
Annette lay back in her chair and closed her eyes and quietly started to describe it for us, her hand making arcs in the air as she sank into that hideous past.
When Annette returned to the scene, I was quietly horrified at what she was doing; all the exquisite moments were gone, replaced by a godawful shyness and awkward, embarrassing and utterly over-the-top acting.
Annette's Deborah was already a profound well of secrecy and deceit, but now at bottom was a heartwrenching creature, a woman whose girl-within had been driven so deeply down this pit by her father's nightly predation that the tender young mother and timid wife—whom that girl has become—can barely breathe.
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