She looks around the 1950s diner. “I love the booths, I love the atmosphere, and…” she smiles, pointing at portraits of stacks of salt beef and rye, “I love the pictures of the sandwiches.” It’s a surprise, perhaps, that such Hollywood royalty can sit at a booth in an unassuming deli without anyone bothering her.

For almost 30 years, Bening – a four-time Oscar nominee, a Bafta winner for American Beauty and twice a Golden Globe recipient (for Being Julia and The Kids Are All Right) – has been bending ideas of family.

“It’s a familiar dynamic to me – playing people’s mums,” she says. The strength of her leading ladies could have something to do with the amount of practice she’s had in real life. Despite her celebrity status, behind closed doors Bening has kept it traditional, even while married to Hollywood ladykiller Warren Beatty. The pair have four children together, the youngest born when Bening was 42. Their relationship began on the set of Bugsy in 1991. “That changed my life,” she says. They had a child the following year. The story goes that Beatty promised Bening he wouldn’t ask her out until they’d wrapped shooting. “That’s not true at all!” she says. “This seems to be a new thing of his, but it’s so not what happened. We were both single and it wasn’t like we were doing anything wrong. Though we did hide it.”

They still do. Contrary to their blockbuster status, the couple are private. You won’t find Bening on social media. “No! Nu-huh,” she says. “That’s easier for me. But I feel for other people who have to be on there.” Privacy acts as a safeguard against certain conversations. A self-identified feminist, Bening argues that women are never assessed for their work alone. “Women in showbusiness have to deal with people talking to us about our children. Men generally don’t.” She doesn’t feel a sense of having compromised her career for family life. When Beatty and Bening did Love Affair together, they were trying for their second child.

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