Annette Bening Reclaims an Original Hollywood Bad Girl

While preparing to play Gloria Grahame in the new movie, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,Annette Bening noticed something alarming about the classic Hollywood actress’s filmography.

Grahame won an Oscar for her performance as a shallow Southern belle in The Bad and the Beautiful. She was saved from disgrace by Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, starred as a woman on the receiving end of Humphrey Bogart’s rage in In a Lonely Place, and played “The Girl Who Cain’t Say No” in Oklahoma!

“She of course was a great femme fatale, and she did get typecast as the bad girl,” Bening said of Grahame, at a Vanity Fair screening of the film Tuesday night at NeueHouse in Hollywood. “A lot came with that. As I was watching her movies, one of the things that hit me was how often she was slapped and hit and beat up, especially because she was the bad girl in quotation marks. And that was part of that period of filmmaking.”

In Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, which Paul McGuigan directs from a script based on Peter Turner’s 1986 memoir, Bening plays Grahame from 1978 to 1981, at the end of her life, as her fame and health faded. In the film, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September and opens in limited release December 29, Jamie Bell co-stars in the role of Turner, a young Liverpool actor who became Grahame’s lover and comforter.

Asked how Grahame’s career was shaped by the social codes of her era, Bening cited the 1954 Fritz Lang film noir Human Desire, in which Grahame plays the young, vibrant wife to a violent, hard-drinking Broderick Crawford. “He beats her up,” Bening said. “He doesn’t just hit her once. How different it is now. It’s not that that doesn’t happen in movies, but now we have a different way of experiencing that. We frame it in a different way. Things have changed a lot. The stereotypes of women in storytelling have changed a lot. It isn’t just the bad mother or the good mother or the bad girl or the good girl. Somewhere in between, there’s a lot more nuance.”

Bening found that nuance in an unlikely love story about the eccentric actress, who was in her fifties and working in small-scale U.K. theater productions when she met Turner, then in his late twenties. By this point in her life, Grahame had married four men, including her In a Lonely Place director Nicholas Ray, and—scandalously, just years later—Ray’s son. With a reputation for floozy-dom on screen and off, Grahame found a measure of peace with Turner, who was oblivious to her real and big-screen histories. In Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,the two dance to disco in Grahame’s small rooming-house apartment in England, lounge on the beach near her tiny trailer in Malibu, and dine out at a New York City theater district restaurant where Grahame’s picture and name are embossed on the lampshade.

“Annette said she didn’t want the movie to be about an old lady dying in a room, cause Gloria would have hated that,” McGuigan said, at the NeueHouse Q&A, which Turner and Bell also attended. In creating the look for his movie, McGuigan said he deliberately referenced Grahame’s 1950s filmography, choosing the old-school method of rear-screen projection over C.G.I. for car scenes and a beach sequence inspired by In a Lonely Place. Grahame’s New York apartment in the film is meant to evoke her character’s apartment in The Big Heat.

For Bell, who wasn’t born when the events of the film took place, some scenes required extra research. Though he broke out as an aspiring ballet dancer in Billy Elliot, Bell found he needed to prepare for a scene that required him to do the hustle, which was neither choreographed nor rehearsed. “When it got to that day, I was like, ‘Shit, I haven’t rehearsed any period-appropriate dances,’” Bell said. “So I was in my trailer three minutes before we started shooting madly Googling Saturday Night Fever clips, searching for something that would be appropriate.”

The film’s end result, Turner believes, would please Grahame. Previous attempts to adapt his memoir for the screen had always floundered, he said, in the 30 years since it was first published—a phenomenon he wondered if Grahame was influencing from beyond the grave. “We were waiting for Annette,” Turner said. “We have one great actress playing another great actress, and both of them can give each other so much.”

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Rebecca KeeganRebecca Keegan is a Hollywood Correspondent for Vanity Fair.