AWARDS/
MARIA BELLO
PETER J. OWENS AWARD
The Peter J. Owens award, named for the longtime San Francisco benefactor of arts and charitable organizations (1936–1991), honors an actor whose work exemplifies brilliance, independence and integrity.
The Peter J. Owens Award is made possible by a grant from the Peter J. Owens Trust at the San Francisco Foundation. Gary Shapiro and Scott Owens, trustees.
An Evening with
Maria Bello
Friday, May 2
7:00 pm
Castro Theatre
429 Castro Street (near Market)
The Film Society pays tribute to the accomplished career of actress Maria Bello, this year’s Peter J. Owens Award recipient. This very special event will feature retrospective film clips followed by an onstage interview and a screening of The Yellow Handkerchief.
Maria Bello: Woman on the Verge
By Andrew Bailey
Those still unaware that Maria Bello is simply the most adventurous, unpredictable and incendiary actor working in the business today need look no further than her 2008 slate, which, for the growing cult of Bellophiles, is akin to a graceful bare-legged Muay Thai kick to the head—yes, people, she is a practitioner.
What other actor can claim the following succulent roles in a single year? In Udayan Prasad’s Louisiana road movie The Yellow Handkerchief (a selection of this year’s festival), Bello transforms the art of forgiveness into a languid Southern swoon as the estranged wife of William Hurt’s paroled ex con. In Alan Ball’s button-pushing Gulf War coming-of-age drama, Towelhead, Bello shifts into layered overdrive as an unequipped but competitive single suburban mom to a half-Lebanese prepubescent bombshell daughter. How about a Hollywood paycheck? Bello lends a mischievous, high-camp makeover to Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn Carnahan O’Connell character in Rob Cohen’s threequel The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor before slaying us all with the Sundance film maudit Downloading Nancy—that movie—in which Bello stars as a suicidal, self-mutilating Baltimore housewife who meets brooding hunk Jason Patrick over the Internet and hires him as personal mercy killer.
Stunned critics called Bello’s Downloading Nancy performance “the definition of fearless.” Tell us something we didn’t already know. Bello’s fearlessness is more shrewdly observed in less obvious works like the romantic dramedy The Jane Austen Book Club, in which she played a lovelorn Sacramento dog breeder, or the studio family trifle Flicka, where she took up line-dancing and made out with country superstar Tim McGraw. Bello counterbalances poignant hard-luck symphonies in Permanent Midnight or Paycheck with witty and fascinating studio gigs that betray a business acumen and an artistic dexterity all her own.
Born to working class parents in suburban Pennsylvania, the half-Polish, half-Italian Bello attended Villanova University with the intention of becoming a lawyer. The acting bug bit during an elective course and following graduation Bello bolted for New York City, toiling in telling off-Broadway fare like The Killer Inside Me, an adaptation of the Jim Thompson pulp noir, and the blissfully Belloesque Small Town Gals with Big Problems. Struggle-era side gigs included West Village waitress—in 1997, Bello, in a sign of great things to come, won kudos from Time Out magazine readers as “the worst waitress in New York City”—before finally landing television work in the never-aired prime-time remake of the 1950s crime show ’77 Sunset Strip. The producers of that show recommended her for a lead role opposite Scott Bakula in the spy comedy-romance Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which ran for eight episodes in 1996, before her three-episode arc on ER paved the way for a full-season cast membership, and a 1997 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Ensemble in a Series Drama.
Bello’s breakout screen performance arrived in 2003, opposite William H. Macy, in the form of emotionally battered cocktail waitress Natalie Belisario in Wayne Kramer’s romantic noir sleeper hit The Cooler. It featured what is perhaps the most joyful and unvarnished screen sex scene in many years—the scene made Bello a star but not strictly for its frank depiction of gritty motel room sex, which was at once giddy, erotic, playful and wise; Bello as Belisario was merely acting her age, and loving it—out the door went the trite and tedious adage that over 35 is the kiss of death for a woman actor. Playing tough yet vulnerable—with a side order of sweetness—resulted in a best supporting actress Golden Globe nomination for Bello’s transcendent turn. Two years later, she eclipsed her own on-screen sexual frankness in two unforgettable scenes in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, one involving a cheerleader outfit, the other a ranch house stairwell, resulting in another Golden Globe nod.
Bello rounded out that same year with a ferocious performance in the action-adventure remake Assault on Precinct 13, playing a police psychologist suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Showing up to the set bearing notes for the director, Jean-François Richet, she offered yet more insight into what makes a Bello performances so deliciously unique and off-kilter: “I think she has to go more off the deep end,” Bello told Richet. “Just because she is a psychiatrist doesn’t mean she has to be so straight. She should be really odd—because I think psychiatrists are really odd people.”
When she’s not playing Really Odd People, Bello is a cofounder of the Dream-Yard Drama Project, a children’s aid foundation promoting literacy and arts education to inner city youth around the world. Her dedicated approach even here, as she explained it to Interview in 1999, sums up her incomparable gift to contemporary screen acting: “My whole thing is, if you know how to get on your knees in the dirt and crawl around and act like a giraffe, any kid will talk to you. I don’t want to be one of those actors who can’t act anymore because they don’t live.”
Andrew Bailey is the San Francisco-based author of the Taschen volume CINEMA NOW.
FESTIVAL SCREENING
The Yellow Handkerchief
Selected Filmography:
2008 The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (forthcoming)
Downloading Nancy (forthcoming)
The Yellow Handkerchief
2007 The Jane Austen Book Club
Nothing Is Private (forthcoming)
Butterfly on a Wheel
2006 Payback: Straight Up - The Director's Cut
Flicka
World Trade Center
2005 Thank You for Smoking
A History of Violence
The Dark
The Sisters
Assault on Precinct 13
2004 Silver City
Secret Window
Nobody’s Perfect
2003 The Cooler
2002 100 Mile Rule
Auto Focus
2001 Born in Brooklyn (TV)
2000 Duets
Coyote Ugly
Sam the Man
1999 Payback
1998 Permanent Midnight
1997–98 ER (TV)
1996 Mr. & Mrs. Smith (TV)
Due South (TV)
1995 The Commish (TV)
Nowhere Man (TV)
Misery Loves Company (TV)
1992 Maintenance
Owens Award previous recipients
2007 Robin Williams
2006 Ed Harris
2005 Joan Allen
2004 Chris Cooper
2003 Dustin Hoffman
2002 Kevin Spacey
2001 Stockard Channing
2000 Winona Ryder
1999 Sean Penn
1998 Nicolas Cage
1997 Annette Bening
1996 Harvey Keitel
Previously Known As Piper-Heidsieck Award
1995 Tim Roth
1994 Gérard Depardieu
1993 Danny Glover
1992 Geena Davis
1991 Anjelica Huston
