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BEVERLY HILLS -- Annette Bening is more than worthy of being honored as one of Premiere magazine's Women in Hollywood Icons, says her doting husband, Warren Beatty.
"We've got to pick a more extravagant adjective than 'worthy,'" he said Wednesday night as he escorted his wife down The Beverly Hills Hotel's red carpet for the 13th annual award ceremony. His suggestion: "incomparable."
Humbled by her husband's praise, Bening missed a step as she continued down the carpet. "Did I just step on you?" she asked him.
"That's all right," he said, pulling her closer.
Bening appears with Gwyneth Paltrow in Running With Scissors, in theaters Oct. 20. The two will re-team next year for Dirty Tricks, in which Bening plays colorful White House correspondent Helen Thomas during the Watergate era.
Paltrow, apologizing for being jetlagged and weary from breast-feeding her 5-month-old son, Moses, said she admired Bening's decision to put her career on hold to raise her children. "When I filmed (Running With Scissors), I only had (daughter) Apple, but I still thought, 'How does Annette do this with four kids?,'" Paltrow said. "She has always been a model for me. She's what I aspire to be."
Paltrow has done only small roles for three years. "But I'm ready to go back (full time) now," she said. "I want to find something right."
Rachel Griffiths honored her new Brothers & Sisters TV mom, Sally Field. Griffiths -- not thrilled to discover she was wearing a Hugo Boss gown identical to one worn by guest Christina Applegate -- recalled growing up in Australia and watching Field on television. "We got the Flying Nun and Gidget," said Griffiths, joking that she brought a surfboard to work their first day of shooting Brothers. "And the second day, I wore a habit."
Field brought son Sam, 18, as her date. In anticipation of her award, she confessed to polling strangers on a Santa Monica promenade, asking whether they had any idea who she was. The results were mixed.
Judi Dench praised honoree Cate Blanchett, her co-star in Notes on a Scandal (in theaters Dec. 22). Dench said they had plenty of fun on the set. "I don't like to work with anybody who doesn't have a sense of humor. We had a huge physical fight between us, and we laughed a lot at the end of it."
Edward Norton, calling himself "the only Y chromosome among the presenters," honored Evan Rachel Wood as an emerging talent, while Anjelica Huston paid tribute to a pregnant Sofia Coppola.
Huston remembered meeting a teenage Sofia on the set of 1987's Gardens of Stone, directed by Sofia's father, Francis Ford Coppola. "Beautiful little girl," Huston recalled. "Always graceful and shy."
Coppola had a different recollection: "She told me I would grow into my nose someday."
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