Knight Ridder Newspapers

Annette Bening likes complexity, at least in the characters she chooses to play.

Bening, 47, is considered one of America’s finest actresses, with a career defined by emotionally complicated roles: sexy con artist Myra Langtry in “The Grifters”; the chilly, driven Carolyn Burnham in “American Beauty”; and stage diva Julia Lambert in “Being Julia.”

But in HBO’s new “Mrs. Harris” (8 p.m. EST Saturday), Bening takes on the role of a woman of true contradictions: socially prominent Jean Harris, convicted of murdering Dr. Herman Tarnower, her longtime lover and creator of the Scarsdale Diet.

“Over the years, a number of actresses had looked at the case as something that had the potential for a really interesting story,” Bening says. “But nobody could do it – partly because Jean wasn’t a very sympathetic woman, and people wanted to have a heroine. Jean was much more complicated than that.”

Late on a March evening in 1980, Harris – then headmistress of the exclusive Madeira School in suburban Washington, D.C. – walked into Tarnower’s Westchester, N.Y., home. A short while later, Tarnower was dead, shot four times by Harris.

The resulting murder case evolved into one of the first modern-day celebrity trials, a media circus that attracted reporters from across the country and mesmerized the public. Much of that fascination stemmed from the contradictory portraits of Jean Harris that emerged during the trial: Was she a woman scorned who never meant to kill her lover, or was she an aging femme fatale who committed premeditated murder?

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To this day, no one is quite certain, even though books have been written on the case by such skilled observers as journalist Shana Alexander – her “Very Much a Lady” is the basis for the film – and essayist Diana Trilling.

Bening notes that even those sympathetic to Harris – including Alexander, who “became her real champion” – had problems warming to the woman.

“Even in her book, at the end, Alexander does a pretty searing analysis of Jean,” Bening says. “Trilling, who wrote the other major book on Jean, was incredibly critical of Jean and wasn’t sympathetic to her at all.”

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Bening suggests that Harris was never “a people-pleaser,” and many who knew her at the Madeira School “didn’t like her at all.” But at the same time, others had a fondness for her: “We all have people like that in our lives: people who others don’t like but we have a soft spot for.”

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A graduate of San Francisco State University who began her acting career at the American Conservatory Theater, Bening has reached a point in her life where she can afford to be picky about her roles.

Bening has been nominated three times for Oscars, won a Golden Globe for “Being Julia” and received a Tony nomination for Tina Howe’s “Coastal Disturbances.” Married to actor-director Warren Beatty since 1992, she is the devoted mother of four (Kathlyn, the oldest, is 14) and has spent some of her time in recent years working on Beatty’s political causes.

Currently, Bening is playing Madame Ranyevskaya in Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. It is a rare return to the stage for her – although, she says, she hopes to do more now that her children are older.

“Because I have this full life, I’m pretty selective,” she says. “Some of my choices are entirely pragmatic. If they want me to go to Luxembourg in the middle of the winter, that isn’t going to work, because I have my kids. In the end, I just stumble along with these things as I go, and there is no grand plan.”

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What pulled Bening into “Mrs. Harris” was that the writing – by noted playwright Phyllis Nagy, making her film debut – “was so original even though it was a story that could have been sensationalized so easily.”

“It had a black-comedy tone to it, and the way she intermixed dramatizations of events with courtroom transactions was an interesting way of trying to tell a story people have been trying to tell for years.”

Bening started out with no intention of trying to speak with the 82-year-old Harris, now out of prison after serving 12 years for Tarnower’s murder. “I didn’t want to pry,” she says. “There was so much information about her available.”

But Harris decided she wanted to have a few words, and “I just thought, “Well, if she wants to talk to me, I’ll talk to her.’ She was curious. She was sort of, “Why would you want to make a film about us?”‘

Bening says that Harris talks about Tarnower “like you would expect someone in their 80s to talk about someone who they had been married to and who passed away.”

“It’s completely fascinating to talk to her, and she spoke very highly of him in the phone call. They traveled extensively together, and she talked about that. And she said that when they were dancing, he made her feel like Ginger Rogers.”

In the end, Bening came away convinced that Harris “found herself living a nightmare. The margin of behavior that we all live within she found herself outside of.”

“It was that kind of relationship that you feel is out of your hands, something you’re not the author of,” Bening says. “It just takes hold of you.”

While the film has its flaws and tonal problems, Bening captures much of that in her lovely performance. Her Jean Harris is self-aware, yet out of control; brittle and ready to snap, yet sympathetic and moving.

With solid support from Ben Kingsley (very convincing as Tarnower) and a fine ensemble – notably veteran scene-stealer Cloris Leachman as the good doctor’s reptilian sister – Bening provides the spark that drives “Mrs. Harris,” keeping its darkly funny irony from degenerating into campy humor.

“We are all that complicated,” Bening says of the woman she plays. “None of us can claim to be all pure in our instincts, and none of us are totally evil. There’s this gray area where most of us live.”

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MRS. HARRIS

Airing: 8 p.m. EST Saturday, HBO

Cast: Annette Bening, Ben Kingsley, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Frances Fisher, Chloe Sevigny, Mary McDonnell

Writer-director: Phyllis Nagy

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(c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

Visit MercuryNews.com, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.mercurynews.com.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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Annette Bening

AP-NY-02-23-06 1611EST