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LOS ANGELES -- The voice mail from Annette Bening sounds a touch frantic.
"I'm sorry, but I can't meet at the time we said," she says. "My kid is doing something at her school, and I really want to be there. I just don't want to miss it."
Bening is hardly the character she plays in many of her films.
On screen, she's not exactly the model of domestic bliss: She was more interested in a real estate career than her family in 1999's American Beauty, a murderous girlfriend in HBO's Mrs. Harris and an aging, desperate stage actress who begins an affair with a younger man in 2004's Being Julia.
But in real life, it can be hard persuading Bening to take a role if it will interfere with her duties as a wife and mother of four.
A few hours after her voice mail, Bening sits over a bowl of chicken noodle soup at the Beverly Glen Deli, contemplating what draws her to bad-mom roles.
"Part of it is wanting to do characters you know nothing about," she says. "I relish finding a character who has a totally different frame of reference than my own."
She has found that and then some with her portrayal of Deirdre Burroughs in Running With Scissors, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday before expanding nationwide Oct. 27.
Bening plays a mentally ill mother who signs over guardianship of her son to her psychiatrist, struggles with prescription drug abuse and dabbles in lesbian liaisons.
The film, based on the best-selling memoirs of Augusten Burroughs, is generating talk of a fourth Oscar nomination for Bening, who received nods for Beauty, Julia and The Grifters. She is among the top five vote-getters in Movie City News' annual awards-handicapping survey of Oscar journalists.
But that's no guarantee of commercial success. Though based on a book that has sold more than 700,000 copies, Scissors is a dark drama that includes graphic scenes of drug use, homosexuality and pedophilia -- hardly the stuff of today's blockbusters.
And the memoir is tangled in a defamation lawsuit filed by members of Burroughs' adoptive family, who claim the book is a violation of the family's privacy.
Bening doesn't seem to mind the treacherous waters. She considers the film a work of fiction and doesn't shy from unsavory roles.
"It's not a documentary about Augusten's life," she says. "What drew me is a story that's got something to say about family."
Bening could not have known she was taking the first steps to starting her own family when she landed a role as the gangster moll Virginia Hill in 1991's Bugsy, playing opposite Warren Beatty. The two quickly became an item, married in 1992 and started a family.
Since then, Bening has managed a juggling act between career and family.
And she nearly always sides with family. Bening is a mother who happens to act, not an actress who happens to be a mother.
She turned down the coveted role of Catwoman in 1992's Batman Returns because she was pregnant with their first child, Kathlyn, now 14. She dropped out of 1994's Disclosure to have son Benjamin, 12. She and Beatty also have daughters Isabel, 10, and Ella, 6.
Even now, she refuses to take roles that call for her to be out of California for months at a time, unless it coincides with her kids' summer vacation. She agreed to take the role of Jean Harris, the convicted killer of Scarsdale diet author Herman Tarnower, only after HBO executives consented to shooting in Los Angeles.
Bening admits to occasionally pondering life as the single starlet, "traveling where you want, getting up whenever you feel like it."
But the moments are passing at best.
"I don't think I would do well if I had an empty apartment or house to come home to," she says. "I like the balance that a family gives me."
In Hollywood, "it's easy to just think about yourself. Having a family forces me to be more thoughtful in terms of what I do, and how it's going to affect everyone. Having to think outside your own life can broaden it. Your life gets a lot more meaningful."
And she claims she and Beatty retain a downright normal family life, despite being one of the most famous couples on earth. They're addicted to news shows and spend most Sundays lounging, watching Meet the Press and This Week With George Stephanopoulos.
When Bening isn't working or running the kids to school activities, she's reading novels such as The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud and The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing.
It isn't until she takes hubby shopping that pandemonium breaks out, Bening says.
"The kids and I can go to the mall and not get stopped too much," she says. "Someone might say, 'You look a lot like Annette Bening,' and I'll agree and the kids will giggle and play along."
But when Beatty joins them, "it gets pretty crazy. We were walking through a door once and a woman passed us and saw Warren and just blurted, 'I love you!' He's my husband, and I tease him about being old sometimes, but that's when you remember what an icon he is."
An icon that suddenly finds himself like any other film fan.
"I know I'm biased," Beatty says of her role in Scissors. "But I think this is the best thing she's ever done. I've seen it three times."
Bening knew little about Burroughs' memoirs before receiving the screenplay from Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy, who makes his feature film directorial debut with Scissors.
"All of my friends knew the book and loved it," she says. "But I needed to make sure that this wasn't going to be a movie that made fun of mental illness. I didn't want to play crazy."
Certainly, both book and movie have plenty of odd behavior. The story tells of Burroughs' life under the care of his mother's psychiatrist and chronicles a bizarre household where the doctor fishes feces from the toilet, family members eat dog food and living room furniture is arranged in the front yard. Burroughs also claims a sexual relationship when he was a juvenile with one of the doctor's adult male patients.
Last year, attorneys for the family of Rodolph H. Turcotte, who died in 2000, sued Burroughs and his publisher, St. Martin's Press. The suit seeks unspecified damages for defamation of character and invasion of privacy, claiming that the memoir is a thinly veiled story about the Turcotte family with whom Burroughs lived. No trial date has been set.
"My clients have a deep concern that the film will exacerbate the wrong done to them as a result of the publication of the book," says Howard Cooper, a Boston-based lawyer representing the Turcotte family.
TriStar Pictures, which is distributing Scissors, declined to comment. Burroughs says his lawyers will not allow him to talk about the suit. But he stands by the memoir, the film and the woman who plays his mother, who he says suffered from manic depression.
"I know this story inside out because I lived it," Burroughs says. "But seeing Annette play some of the scenes was very chilling because she got it right in a way very few people could have."
Burroughs says he was struck by the questions Bening asked when she prepared for the role.
"She didn't ask me how my mother used to speak, or what her posture was like," he says. "She asked me questions more from a mother's point of view: What my feelings were growing up, how I coped. I think she was trying to wrap her head around the idea of giving up a child, because it was so foreign to her."
What struck Burroughs most about Bening's portrayal was that she abandoned hysterics in favor of a more nuanced portrait of a woman in the throes of depression and a chemical imbalance.
"In Hollywood, mental illness is played with great histrionics," he says. "You can tell the actor is thinking, 'This will be the scene they'll play when I win my Academy Award.'
"But anyone who has lived with someone who's had a psychotic episode knows it's all in the eyes. There's something vacant, like that person's not there. That's what Annette did that was so accurate. It really had an impact on me."
Bening does not take the praise lightly.
"When you read material that makes you tingly, that gets you excited for acting after years of doing it, then you want to do the part justice."
She's about to go on when she glances at her watch.
"Oh, I've got to get going," she says, bolting from the booth. "I can't be late."
Bening may be a star, but elementary school, she says on her way out the door, waits for no mom.
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