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Diane Lane (born January 22, 1965)
is an American film actress born and raised in New York City. Lane made
her screen debut in George Roy Hill's 1979 film A Little Romance, starring
opposite Laurence Olivier. Soon after, she was featured on the cover of
Time.
Lane has had a movie career spanning across three decades and has appeared
in several notable films, including Unfaithful in 2002, which earned her
Academy Award, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations.
Lane is also well known for her 2003 film Under the Tuscan Sun.
Timothy Hutton, Christopher Atkins, Matt Dillon were among the actors Lane
dated during the 1980s, and later rock star Jon Bon Jovi. She was married
to Christopher Lambert, and they had a daughter, Eleanor Jasmine Lambert.
The couple were divorced following a prolonged separation in 1994, and she
married actor Josh Brolin on August 15, 2004.
Lane was born in New York City. Her mother, Colleen Farrington, was a
night club singer and Playboy centerfold (Miss October 1957), who was also
known as "Colleen Price." Her father, Burton Eugene Lane, was a Manhattan
drama coach who ran an acting workshop with John Cassavetes, worked as a
cab driver, and later taught humanities at City College. When Lane was 13
months old, her parents split up. Her mother went to Mexico and obtained a
divorce while retaining custody of her daughter until age 6. Her father
got custody of his daughter after Farrington moved to Georgia. Lane and
her father lived in a number of residential hotels in New York City and
she would ride with him in his taxi.
When Lane was 15 years old, she declared her independence from her father
and ran away to Los Angeles for a week with actor and friend Christopher
Atkins. Lane later remarked, "It was reckless behavior that comes from
having too much independence too young." She came back and moved in with a
friend's family, paying them rent. In 1981, she enrolled in high school
after having taken correspondence courses. However, Lane's mother
kidnapped her and took the young girl back to Georgia. Lane and her father
challenged her mother in court and six weeks later she was back in New
York. Lane did not speak to her mother for three years but they have since
reconciled.
Lane's maternal grandmother, Eleanor Scott, was a three-times married
Pentecostal preacher of the Apostolic denomination, and Lane was
influenced by the theatricality of her grandmother's sermons. Lane began
acting professionally at the age of six at the La MaMa Experimental
Theater Club in New York, where she appeared in an acclaimed production of
Medea. At 12 she had a role in Joseph Papp's production of The Cherry
Orchard with Meryl Streep. Also at this time, Lane was enrolled in an
accelerated program at Hunter College High School and was put on notice
when her grades suffered from her busy schedule. At 13 years old, she
turned down a role in Runaways on Broadway to make her feature film debut
opposite Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance. At 14 years old, Lane was
featured on the cover of Time, which declared her one of Hollywood's "Whiz
Kids."
One of few child actors to make a successful transition into adult roles,
Lane made a hit with audiences in the back-to-back cult films The
Outsiders, starring with future movie stars Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Rob
Lowe, C. Thomas Howell, Emilio Esteves and Patrick Swayze, and Rumble
Fish, starring Dillon, Mickey Rourke, and Nicolas Cage. Subsequently, Andy
Warhol proclaimed Lane, "the undisputed female lead of Hollywood's new rat
pack." However, the two films that could have catapulted her to star
status, Streets of Fire (she turned down Splash and Risky Business for
this film) and The Cotton Club, were both commercial and critical
failures, and her career languished as a result. After The Cotton Club,
Lane dropped out of the movie business and lived with her mother in
Georgia.
Lane returned to the business to make The Big Town and Lady Beware, but it
was not until 1989's popular and critically acclaimed TV mini-series
Lonesome Dove that Lane made another big impression on a sizable audience.
She was nominated for an Emmy Award for the role. She also enjoyed
positive reviews for her performance in the independent film My New Gun,
which was well received at the Cannes Film Festival. She went on to appear
as actress Paulette Goddard in Sir Richard Attenborough's big-budget
biopic of Charles Chaplin, Chaplin.
Lane won further praise for her role in 1999's A Walk on the Moon,
opposite Viggo Mortensen. One reviewer wrote, "Lane, after years in
post-teenaged-career limbo, is meltingly effective." The film's director
Tony Goldwyn and producer Dustin Hoffman wanted Lane for the role of
housewife Pearl even though she did not look or sound Jewish. Goldwyn said
of the actress, "There's also this potentially volcanic sexuality that is
in no way self-conscious or opportunistic. I thought all those things
mattered more than her looking Jewish." Lane earned an Independent Spirit
Award nomination for Best Female Lead. At this time, she was interested in
making a film about actress Jean Seberg in which she would play Seberg.
In 2002, Lane starred in Unfaithful, a drama film directed by Adrian Lyne
adapted from the French film The Unfaithful Wife. Lane played a housewife
who indulges in an adulterous fling with a mysterious book dealer. The
film featured several sex scenes. Lyne's repeated takes for these scenes
were very demanding for the actors involved, especially for Lane, who had
to be emotionally and physically fit for the duration. Unfaithful received
mostly mixed to negative reviews, though Lane earned widespread praise for
her performance. Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman said, "Lane,
in the most urgent performance of her career, is a revelation. The play of
lust, romance, degradation, and guilt on her face is the movie's real
story". She followed that film up with Under the Tuscan Sun, based on the
best-selling book by Frances Mayes.
Lane, in 2008, reunited with Richard Gere for the movie Nights in
Rodanthe. It is the third movie Gere and Lane filmed together. The film is
based on the novel of the same title by Nicholas Sparks. Lane also starred
in Jumper, and Untraceable in the same year. Her latest film is Killshot
with Mickey Rourke, which was given a limited theatrical release before
being released on DVD in 2009.
In 2008, Lane expressed frustration with being typecast and is "gunning
for something that's not so sympathetic. I need to be a bitch, and I need
to be in a comedy. I've decided. No more Miss Nice Guy". The actress has
even contemplated quitting acting and spending more time with her family
if she is unable to get these kinds of roles. She said in an interview, "I
can't do anything official. My agents won't let me. Between you and me, I
don't have anything else coming out".
In 2009, it was announced that Lane will star in Secretariat, a Disney
film about the relationship between the 1973 Triple Crown-winning
racehorse and his owner, Penny Chenery, whom the actress will be
portraying.
Four days before the New York Film Critics Circle's vote in 2002, Lane was
given a career tribute by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A day before
that, Lyne held a dinner for the actress at the Four Seasons Hotel.
Critics and award voters were invited to both. She went on to win the
National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle awards
and was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best
Actress. In 2003, she was named ShoWest's 2003 Female Star of the Year.
Lane ranked at #79 on VH1's 100 Greatest Kid Stars. She was ranked #45 on
AskMen.com's Top 99 Most Desirable Women in 2005, #85 in 2006 and #98 in
2007.
In the early 1980s, Lane dated actors Timothy Hutton, Christopher Atkins,
Matt Dillon, and later rock star Jon Bon Jovi. Lane met actor Christopher
Lambert in Paris while promoting The Cotton Club in 1984. They had a brief
affair and split up. They met again two years later in Rome to make a film
together, entitled After the Rain, and in two weeks they were a couple
again. Lane and Lambert married in October 1988 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
They had a daughter, Eleanor Jasmine Lambert (born September 5, 1993), and
were divorced following a prolonged separation in 1994. While making Judge
Dredd in 1995, Lane began dating the film's director, Danny Cannon.
Lane became engaged to actor Josh Brolin in July 2003 and they were
married on August 15, 2004. On December 20 of that year, she called police
after an altercation with him, and he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge
of domestic battery. Lane declined to press charges, however, and the
couple's spokesperson described the incident as a "misunderstanding". |
