Annette Bening's laws of attraction

Annette Bening sits in a back room of L.A.'s chic Pinot Bistro restaurant, away from prying eyes, talking in a relaxed, unguarded way about everything from portraying a lesbian in her new movie, The Kids Are All Right, opening in some cities next weekend, to marrying legendary Hollywood sex symbol Warren Beatty.

“I followed my heart,” Bening says of Beatty, 73. “I don't think it keeps you away from pain, but I do think it is the only way to live. And we're still here.” They've been married for 18 years and have four children, ages 10, 13, 15 and 18.

At 52, with no makeup and cropped hair, the three-time Oscar nominee remains beautiful. And outspoken.

In The Kids Are All Right, in which she plays the lesbian partner of Julianne Moore, the couple's relationship is thrown into crisis when their teenage children seek out their biological father, played by Mark Ruffalo. Bening says she had no trouble pretending to be in love with Julianne Moore.

“Why should I?” she says. “I've pretended to be attracted to a lot of other people in movies — but they just happened to be men. You don't have to be a killer to have played one; you don't have to be a bus driver to play one.”

In the casting of roles, the question of whether an actor is straight or gay is inconsequential — or at least it should be, she says. “Hopefully, we will get to a point in our culture where everybody gets to play what they want and it's not about that.”

In The Kids Are All Right, events take a devastating turn when Moore's character has an affair while Bening's character goes into fight mode in a powerful scene with Ruffalo.

With the infidelity in the movie, the talk turns personal. How does Bening, the wife of a notorious Hollywood lothario, feel about monogamy?

“I have always been that kind of person,” she says. “It's my nature. When I was young and my friends were out dating a lot of people, I would think, well, that makes sense, but it wasn't me.”

This year, her husband's past became fodder for tabloid headlines after publication of an unauthorized biography claiming Beatty bedded 13,000 women in his heyday, a claim Bening calls “made up.”

“It was unfortunate,” she says. “When someone is writing trash for money, then you take it as such.”

So what was it about bad-boy Beatty that straight-arrow Bening found so irresistible?

“I loved his intellect and his wit. And the fact he is engaged in life and trying to understand the world, trying to make sense of his own experience, attracted me and still does.”

She laughs, then throws in a little zinger: “I suppose if he were just a big bore sitting in a corner, I wouldn't find him so attractive.”

We're interrupted by an alarm on her cellphone; it's 2:30 p.m., and glamorous movie star Annette Bening is being whisked away — not to a glittering premiere or a fitting for a designer gown.

She has to drive her kids' carpool.