Five Oscar nominations, zero wins: Annette Bening's remarkable near-miss career
Annette Bening has been up for five Academy Awards, two Tonys and a Primetime Emmy without winning any of them, which puts her in the rare club of actors nominated for the full Triple Crown who never collected it. She has a BAFTA and two Golden Globes, though, and a stage career dating back to 1980.
Bening was born in Topeka, Kansas, on May 29, 1958, the youngest of four children of a church soloist and an insurance salesman. The family moved to Wichita the next year and later to San Diego, where she played the lead in The Sound of Music at junior high. After finishing school in 1975 she spent a year cooking on a charter fishing boat in the Pacific before studying theatre at San Francisco State University.
The stage came first. She joined the Colorado Shakespeare Festival company in 1980, took on Lady Macbeth at the American Conservatory Theater, and in 1987 reached Broadway as a young photographer in Tina Howe's Coastal Disturbances, which brought a Tony nomination and a Theatre World Award. Her screen debut, in The Great Outdoors with Dan Aykroyd and John Candy, followed a year later.
Playing the con artist Myra Langtry in The Grifters (1990) earned her first Oscar nomination. She then played Virginia Hill opposite Warren Beatty in Bugsy. Her role as Carolyn Burnham, the materialistic wife in Sam Mendes's American Beauty (1999), won her the BAFTA for best actress while the film took five Oscars, including Best Picture; she herself was only nominated. Being Julia (2004) and The Kids Are All Right (2010) each delivered a Golden Globe and another nomination that went unconverted.
She returned to Broadway in 2019 after a 32-year gap, starring in Arthur Miller's All My Sons, and picked up a second Tony nomination. That year she also played Senator Dianne Feinstein in The Report and joined the Marvel universe in Captain Marvel. Her fifth Academy Award nomination came for playing the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad in the Netflix film Nyad, alongside Jodie Foster, which premiered in Toronto in 2023.
Source: Annette Bening
