In 1938 London, popular theater actress Julia Lambert is growing disillusioned with her career as she approaches middle age, prompting her to ask her husband, stage director Michael Gosselyn, and his financial backer Dolly de Vries to close her current production to allow her time to travel abroad.

Always hovering in the background and offering counsel is the spirit of her mentor, Jimmie Langton, the theatrical manager who gave Julia her start and made her a star.

Julia confesses to Evie, her personal maid and dresser, that she would love to let herself go and retire so she can stop eating salad and drink as much beer as she likes.

Despite loving Micheal, Julia misses the passion they once had, and wants to fill the void left by her former lover, Lord Charles, who recently broke off their relationship.

On opening night, Julia waits for a crucial scene with only she and Avice, then discards her drab wardrobe and appears onstage in an extravagant ensemble.

She improvises her lines and movements on the stage, confusing and embarrassing Avice, who understands Julia's intention and recovers, even garnering laughter and applause from the audience.

Julia then improvises a dramatic, comedic speech in which her character confronts Avice's for pursuing affairs with both "Ben" (Tom) and "Sir Phillip" (Michael), and demands she choose between them.

The soundtrack features a number of popular songs of the era, including "They Didn't Believe Me" by Jerome Kern and Herbert Reynolds; "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries" by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson; "Mad About the Boy" by Noël Coward; "I Get a Kick Out of You" by Cole Porter; "She's My Lovely" by Vivian Ellis; "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" by Sholom Secunda, Jacob Jacobs, Sammy Cahn, and Saul Chaplin; and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" by Otto A. Harbach and Jerome Kern.

Jimmie Langton also often appears as a figment of Julia's imagination giving advice or reacting to her actions, a device which is not present in the original story.

The website's critical consensus states, "Annette Bening delivers a captivating performance in Being Julia, a sophisticated comedy that follows a 1930s stage diva who experiences an identity crisis at age 40".

Scott called the film "a flimsy frame surrounding a brightly colored performance by Annette Bening, whose quick, high-spirited charm is on marvelous display .

Ms. Bening walks right up to the edge of melodramatic bathos (the hallmark of the kind of plays in which Julia stars) and then, in a wonderful climactic coup de théâtre, turns it all into farce.

"[5] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, "Annette Bening plays Julia in a performance that has great verve and energy, and just as well, because the basic material is wheezy melodrama.

The pleasures are in the actual presence of the actors, Bening most of all, and the droll Irons, and Juliet Stevenson as the practical aide-de-camp, and Thomas Sturridge, so good as Julia's son that I wonder why he wasn't given the role of her young lover.

"[6] In the San Francisco Chronicle, Carla Meyer described the film as "a one-woman show" and added, "There are several notable actors in it, most of them quite good, but it's the glorious Annette Bening who hoists this flawed production on her mink-wrapped shoulders and makes it work .

This is a film that, above all else, needed to be steeped in Britishness, in the very particular mores and manners of the time; as a Canadian production mostly shot in Budapest by a Hungarian director and an American star and a number of Canuck thesps, this just doesn't happen.

The majority of the seriocomic doings, while superficially diverting, provide neither indelible wit nor the gravitas of a genuinely meaningful comedy of manners (see Oscar Wilde), leaving a relatively wispy impression in its wake.

"[8] In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers awarded the film two out of a possible four stars and commented, "Annette Bening can act - watch American Beauty or Bugsy or The Grifters - but she works too hard to prove it in Being Julia .

Chewing up the scenery in lipsmacking form, she savours the ribald dialogue like an overripe wine, spitting venom and self-pity in equally bilious measures, lending much needed weight to this contrived fluff.