Inside Warren Beatty’s Happy Life out of the Spotlight with Annette Bening

Plenty of Hollywood lotharios keep on grabbing headlines well into old age but, at 88, Warren Beatty leads a quiet life largely out of the spotlight — and, considering how he started out, it’s nothing short of miraculous.

For decades, Beatty was the embodiment of Hollywood charisma — a leading man whose smoldering looks, sharp intellect, and knack for both acting and directing made him one of the most fascinating figures in the entertainment industry.

From his breakout role in Splendor in the Grass (1961) to the cultural shockwave of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to the critically acclaimed hit Bugsy (1991) — the very set where he finally found enduring love with Annette Bening — he was never far from the camera, or the headlines, even famously dating Madonna while they worked on Dick Tracy (1990) together. And yet, he’s still mostly kept pretty quiet. In a rare interview in 2016, he even denied the insane rumor that he’d slept with 12,775 women, declaring it mathematically impossible. “If you stopped and thought about it, I’m now a married person of 24 years, and I believe in doing the right thing,” he told Vanity Fair. “And I’ve never been secretive that I had a rather religious youth, and that I didn’t begin this until late — you know, the age of 20. So I would have had to have been with something like three or four people a day, and nobody twice, ever!”

Beatty now lives a remarkably low-key life with Bening, who he married in 1992, consciously stepping out of the spotlight to focus on raising their family in as normal a fashion as they could, considering their huge fame. The success and accolades Beatty earned in the first half of his incredible career have meant that, in his older years, he’s been able to pick and choose projects when he’s in the mood.

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“I was lucky,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2016. “I didn’t have to make movie after movie after movie. I could take my time. I also had a life. I got caught up in the urgencies of life. “You might say that I luxuriated in that thing that fame affords, which is access.”

Beatty’s control over his multi-hyphenate movie career (actor, writer, director … ) has allowed him to vanish whenever he wants to — and return when he has something to say. Mostly, though, these days, Hollywood’s most elusive former bachelor is basically just that nice old guy down the street who loves reading, relaxing and spending time with his loved ones. He’s clean-living too. “If you see pictures of me smoking, I was acting,” he told Vanity Fair in 2016. “What I do like very much is the smell of cigar smoke.”

The occasional cigar aside, the truth is that even at the height of his fame, Beatty never seemed entirely comfortable with the trappings of celebrity life. While his romantic entanglements with the likes of Natalie Wood, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, and, of course, Madonna were huge sources of gossip (and, certainly, a ton of fun!) those who knew him well still described him as reserved and deeply intellectual.

It could be that the high-profile relationship with Madonna — they dated for 15 months from 1989 — ultimately made the megastar realize he preferred to keep his private life, well, a little more private. After all, in the Queen of Pop’s 1991 pre-reality-TV documentary movie, Truth or Dare, Beatty famously said, “She doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it’s off-camera? What point is there existing?”

Warren Beatty and Madonna in 1990 Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images

As it turned out, his next relationship, with Bening, was a keeper, and spelled a turning point in his public persona. As the story goes, the pair met for a business lunch — at the time, he was 53, and she was 32 — to discuss Bugsy and, afterwards, he called director Barry Levinson and said “I love her, and I’m going to marry her.” He told the New York Post in 2014, “It took about 10 minutes [to fall in love with her]. Maybe five. I was so elated to meet her, and yet at the same time, I began to mourn the passing of a way of life.”

Beatty and Bening’s first child, Stephen, was born in 1992, and they got married two months later before going on to have three more children: Ben, born in 1994, Isabel, born in 1997, and Ella, born in 2000. Since his rapid transformation from playboy to family man, he’s kept his personal life away from the public eye. “I have four children and any one of them is more interesting than any 12 movies I’ve done,” he told People in 2016. “I had my life before them and my life since them.”

Ultimately, it seems as if, after all those years of partying and making movies, Beatty realized that fatherhood and family life were what he really found rewarding — especially with someone as grounded as Bening. The acclaimed star’s own mother, Shirley Bening, said Beatty was attracted to her daughter “because she doesn’t behave like an actress, she’s still herself.”

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Speaking to GQ in 2016, Beatty said he’s glad he took his time to settle down. “Had I gone ahead earlier and gone through 143 divorces, I would have felt very guilty,” he said. “I think I would have handled it badly, More importantly, it wouldn’t have been these kids or this wife … I’m so much more interested in my wife and kids than anything else.”

The same year, he also told People about how much fatherhood meant to him. “That’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me,” he said. “And their mother. That’s bigger than fame, and it came not a moment too soon.” When picking up the Kirk Douglas Award the same year, he elaborated further. “I became a devoted husband and father 25 years ago, and I have to say they have been the most enthralling years of my life, with our four fantastic kids,” he said. He added: “We have these four, what I like to call small eastern European countries that we negotiate with, and we send ambassadors, and we negotiate, and they’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me — they, and her.”

In recent years, the pair have become empty nesters — and, after so many years devoted to family, it was quite a shift. “I think we’re both still adjusting to the quiet at home,” Bening told AARP in 2019. Beatty even said it had reignited his Hollywood ambitions. “There’s something about the empty nest that makes you say, ‘Well, maybe I should go out and make a movie!’” he told People in 2018.

However, around the same time, he also likened making movies with, well, puking. “I have sometimes compared it to vomiting,” he said on The Graham Norton Show in 2017. “I don’t like to vomit and I rarely vomit, but something builds up, you think about it for a long time, you try to avoid it, but finally you think you will feel better if you go ahead and throw up.”

Warren Beatty and Joan Collins in 1959 Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

When Bening appeared in Life Itself in 2018 alongside Olivia Wilde and Oscar Isaac,  the couple stepped out for a rare red carpet appearance at the premiere, and Bening was happy to chat about their enduring marriage. “He’s 21 years older than I am and we’ve always been at different stages of life,” she told The London Times. “He’s got a lot of experience. But we’re very different in many ways. The crucial thing is that while we want many of the same things in life, we’ve thrived because we approach things very differently.”

Over the years, Bening has shared a few other tidbits about their marriage. On The Kelly Clarkson Show in 2022, she was asked how they celebrate Valentine’s Day. “It’s pretty no-pressure,” she said. “Valentine’s is pretty low-key. He will generally make me like a little Valentine with just a little red felt pen and make a little heart. He’s very economical in his message.” She added that one of the most successful movie stars of all time is, perhaps unsurprisingly, tough to pick gifts for. “There’s nothing to buy for him,” she said. “He’s one of those men, you cannot find anything … So, no, it’s usually something small; it’s a little note, it’s a flower.”

In 2024, Bening spoke on The Drew Barrymore Show about their deep connection. “I think marriage is like the greatest thing and greatest challenge to really make it all work and to stay together,” she said. “And that is the thing that I am so, so proud of with us.”

Although the couple still live in Los Angeles — Beatty himself designed their sprawling Mulholland Drive home — these days public appearances are rare. In fact, Beatty hasn’t been photographed in public since 2022, when he appeared at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood. The last movie he directed and starred in, Rules Don’t Apply, was released even longer ago, in 2016, and it attracted negative reviews and disappointing box office numbers. In fact, Beatty was even sued by his own producer for overspending on marketing.

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Around this time, Beatty admitted to flirting with the idea of a career shift to politics, but in the end, he decided that making — and watching — movies about it was more appealing. “I’ve grown to think that to run for office is more like running for crucifixion,” he told People in 2016. “I will confess to having been flattered at being kicked around as a possibility, but I had seen so many close friends go through such agonies.” One such friend was John McCain — despite Beatty’s stance as a lifelong Democrat, he was close friends with the late Republican senator, and even a pallbearer at his funeral in 2018.

Beatty’s most memorable appearance in the past decade was, of course, at the 2017 Oscars, when he and his Bonnie and Clyde costar Faye Dunaway declared La La Land the winner of Best Picture when the award was supposed to go to Moonlight. It wasn’t Beatty’s fault — they were given the wrong envelope — but it’s fair to say that it probably confirmed everything he loathed about life in the spotlight. “I guess you could say it was chaos,” he said on The Graham Norton Show later that year.

More recently, in 2025, when Beatty and Bening’s youngest daughter, Ella, made her Broadway debut alongside Sarah Paulson in Appropriate, Beatty stayed home, with Bening representing the couple alone.

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Despite the Hollywood legend’s low-key profile, Beatty has stayed engaged with the world in his ninth decade, reading voraciously and keeping up with the news. “He still reads the New York and Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood trade magazines,” a friend told Closer in 2025. “He’s an activist at heart so he still gets riled up about politics. He’s not the leading man anymore, but he has no regrets.”

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Lily Collins, who worked with Beatty on Rules Don’t Apply, also spoke to Vanity Fair in 2016 about how the enigmatic icon stays relevant. “Warren is not his age,” she said. “He’s timeless, he’s fearless, he’s just . . . very singular. He stays up with the times because of his kids, or just because he loves what he does. There’s no one quite like him. Annette and Warren have created this amazing family who are, for all intents and purposes, ‘normal,’ and that’s a testament to how they both raised them.”

All things considered, it sounds like Beatty has lived a life of two wonderful halves: global fame and beautiful women early on, and devoted, low-key family life from his fifties onwards. And since making movies always felt like vomiting, in the end falling so instantly in love with Bening gave Beatty the great midlife transformation he didn’t know he needed.

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Annette Bening