Alumna Annette Bening Back Home for San Diego Film Festival Award

SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE -- Ellen McLaughlin, are you out there? If so, Annette Bening — your former student at Pershing Junior High School in the early 1970s — would like to invite you to be her guest Sept. 29 when she receives the Gregory Peck Award for Excellence in Cinema at the San Diego International Film Festival. “I knew I wanted to be a classical actress, and I got more and more interested in the craft and learning about it. I don’t think it was until I was in college that it occurred to me I could be in movies. That thought had never crossed my mind before that. I’d known anybody who did that and it seemed like an unbelievably far off thing. “Once I was into studying more seriously at San Francisco State and then at [American Conservatory Theatre], then I got more interested in the potential of, at some point, getting into screen acting. I really wanted to be in a repertory company. I wanted to be on stage; that was more my burning desire, especially when I got into ACT.”