Bello's voice

Just saw the new Mummy film and remain thankful that someone is willing to throw a few bucks my way to watch some of this stuff. The overqualified Maria Bello talks career moves and body image. (Guardian)

At this year's San Francisco film festival, Maria Bello was honoured for exemplifying brilliance, independence and integrity in her work. You couldn't argue with that, or with the festival catalogue's description of her as "the definition of fearless". Look at Bello's performance as Viggo Mortensen's complex, uninhibited wife in A History of Violence, in which she gets more than a little frisky over the thought that her husband might be a brutal assassin. Or her sassy waitress in The Cooler, where her scenes with William H Macy, as the schlub who represents her chance of happiness, were so explicit they made even non-smokers crave a post-coital cigarette once the lights came up. ("When you shake hands with her," warned a friend before I left to interview Bello, "just remember where those hands have been.")