[caption id="attachment_134862" align="alignright" width="330"] Bello and "Prisoners" co-star Hugh Jackman (photo: Getty Images)[/caption]

Maria Bello is gorgeous, strong and talented—and she's also openly gay. The 46-year-old actress has come out publicly as a lesbian in a column in Friday's edition of the New York Times, "Coming Out as a Modern Family," in which she discussed opening up about her current relationship to her 12-year-old son, Jackson.

"I was with someone romantically and I hadn't told him," Bello says writes. "I had become involved with a woman who was my best friend, and, as it happens, a person who is like a godmother to my son."

Jackson's father is TV executive Dan McDermott, whom Bello calls "the best father and the most wonderful man I've known."

Her current partner, Clare, was a friend long before anything romantic evolved. "I came across a black-and-white [photo] of my best friend and me taken on New Year’s Eve," recalls Bello. "We looked so happy, I couldn’t help but smile. It didn't occur to me, until that soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could perhaps choose to love each other romantically."

She says her feelings for Clare "aren’t the same as the butterflies-in-the-stomach, angst-ridden love I have felt before; they are much deeper than that."

Born in Norristown, Pennysylvania in 1967, Bello recently appeared in the critically acclaimed drama Prisoners,  alongside Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, and is known for roles in Grown Ups, The Cooler, A History of Violence, Coyote Ugly and the American version of Prime Suspect. Her next film is the Paul Haggis-directed romance Third Person, which co-stars James Franco, Mila Kunis, Olivia Wilde, Liam Neeson, Adrien Brody and Kim Basinger.