Press materials for Being Julia refer to it as a "coming of age film," a phrase usually reserved for movies about innocents crossing the threshold into adulthood. Title character Julia Lambert is many things, but innocent is not one of them.

A grand dame of the 1930s London stage, Julia is gifted, glamorous and accustomed to being the absolute center of attention, offstage as well as on, the kind of woman who's always playing to the balcony, even at the breakfast table. In short, being Julia has become a nonstop performance: exhilarating but exhausting, especially now that she's "coming of middle age"-a crossroads for anyone, but a crisis for an actress who's grown older without really growing up.

What's unusual about Being Julia, not to mention wonderful, is that Hungarian director Istv?n Szab? and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (working from the W. Somerset Maugham novel "Theatre") don't treat Julia's age as a tragedy, nor shame her for her vanity. Instead, they give the diva her due. Better yet, they give Annette Bening her best part in years, and being Bening, she knows exactly what to do with it. She preens, she pouts and she wears bias-cut gowns with the best of them. She also shows us a woman yearning for a new role in life, although she's far from certain what it might be.

"I'm near to the breaking point," she declaims in her throaty contralto to her husband, Michael (Jeremy Irons), who's also her longtime director and well accustomed to her histrionics. "I want something to happen."

"What?" Michael asks.

Sighs Julia, "I wish I knew."

Her wish is soon granted in the unlikely form of Tom (Shaun Evans), a callow young American who declares himself Julia's biggest fan and soon becomes her lover. Their affair puts the spring back in Julia's step and the zing back in her acting, until Tom begins seeing a lovely young actress on the side and succeeds in having her cast in Julia's latest play. That Michael also becomes enamored of the same ing?nue just adds to Julia's misery.

Romantic love, so celebrated on the stage, can only disappoint in real life, and so Julia returns to her true love: her work, coached along by the ghostly figure of her former acting teacher Jimmy Langton (Michael Gambon), who emerges from the shadows of the theater to offer notes and to symbolize Julia's emerging sense of self. "You've got to grab the audience by the throat," Jimmy tells her, "and say, 'Pay attention to me.' "

Which, in the film's final act, is exactly what Julia does. The play's the thing she uses to turn the tables on her various friends and lovers, and in the process she finds the role of a lifetime-which turns out to be her own life. As befits a backstage drama, Being Julia is well acted from top to bottom, but it is Bening who commands our attention, grabbing us by the heart as well as the throat and reminding us, just in case we'd forgotten, what a great actress she is.