Name : Diane Lane
Birth Date : January 22, 1965
Birth Place : New York, New York, USA
Height : 5' 6
Nationality : American
Occupation : Actress
Years active : 1979–present
Claim to fame : As Connie Sumner in "Unfaithful" (2002)
FAMILY
Father : Burton Eugene Lane
Mother : Colleen Farrington
Spouse : Christopher Lambert (actor, 29-Oct-88 - 1-Mar-94), Josh Brolin (actor, since 15-Aug-04)
Relation : Danny Cannon (film director, 1995), Jon Bon Jovi (singer), Timothy Hutton (actor),
Christopher Atkins (actor)
Son : Trevor Brolin (step, b. 26-Jun-88)
Daughter : Eleanor Jasmine Lambert (b. 5-Sep-93), Eden Brolin (step, b. 1994)
BIOGRAPHY
Golden Globe and Oscar-nominated actress Diane Lane grew up in the spotlight of New York’s downtown theater scene and, following several teen film appearances as a favorite of director Francis Ford Coppola – including such roles in “Rumble Fish” and “The Outsiders,” she was heralded as Hollywood’s most promising young starlet. But Tinseltown generally failed to match Lane’s classical training with deserving roles, and the young actress found herself facing a career centered on her sex appeal. Instead, Lane opted for the stronger female characters often found in TV movies and independent films, eventually enjoying the bulk of her critical success in more mature roles after the age of 35, when the hit adulterous drama, “Unfaithful” (2002) landed the actress firmly on the A-list map after more than 20 years of quality work to her name.
Diane Lane was born on Jan. 22, 1965, in New York City, NY. The only daughter of stage actor and drama coach Burt Lane and model-singer Colleen Farrington, Lane was raised by her father in New York following her parents divorce when she was still an infant. Growing up around the theater scene, it was not long before Lane joined in on the action. At the age of six, she held down a role in "Medea," staged by the famed La Mama Theater Company. Her remarkable preteen years also included appearances in “The Cherry Orchard” alongside Meryl Streep, international touring with La Mama, a lead in the Tony-nominated musical "Runaways,” and various productions with the New York Shakespeare Festival. At the age of 13, she made her film debut with "A Little Romance" (1979), as a precocious American girl who experiences first love with an equally gifted French boy, abetted by an eccentric Englishman. That she shared screen time with none other than Sir Laurence Olivier and proved a strong and engaging presence in holding her own against the acting great helped propel her career and made her the "It” girl of the moment. Only a year later, the 14-year-old found herself celebrated on the cover of Time magazine and declared “the next great young actress.”
Predictions of Lane’s breakout success were a bit premature, as the actress opted for less mainstream projects including PBS’ “Great Performances” series and the feature film “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains” (1981), a rarely seen but much beloved cult classic in which she and Laura Dern helm a punk band. Cameos by future punk legends like Steve Jones and Black Randy only added to the film’s future allure as an alternative culture time capsule. She offered strong supporting roles in the western “Cattle Annie and Little Britches” (1981) and TV movies “Child Bride of Short Creek” (NBC, 1981) and "Miss All-American” (CBS, 1982). Then she caught the eye of renowned director Francis Ford Coppola and her life changed overnight.
The “Godfather” helmer tapped Lane’s all-American looks and self-reliant spirit for a pair of S.E. Hinton adaptations, both released in 1983 – "The Outsiders" and “Rumble Fish." In both, she starred opposite Matt Dillon in portraits of 1950s teen life that were a startling contrast to the idyllic suburban image of the times represented in popular retro TV shows like “Happy Days” (ABC, 1974-1984). Coppola’s subsequent casting of Lane in "The Cotton Club" (1984), however, proved a misstep. At only 18, she was clearly too young to play a world-weary gangster's moll who tempts a musician into an affair, and there was a palpable lack of chemistry between her and co-star Richard Gere.
“The Cotton Club” failed to create a career-making role for the clearly talented Lane, as did Walter Hill's muddled musical "Streets of Fire" (1984), where she starred as a rock singing diva. Having already experienced so many career ups-and-downs by the age of 20, the financially stable actress took a big screen hiatus to regroup and rethink her career. She was obviously gorgeous enough to parlay her looks into an endless stream of throwaway roles as wives and girlfriends in blockbusters, but this child of the serious dramatic stage knew that it would not be enough to satisfy her creativity. Of her handful of appearances throughout the remainder of the 1980s, the undisputed standout was the award-winning TV film adaptation of Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove” (CBS, 1989). Lane was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of the dissatisfied and ambitious prostitute who accompanies a group of men on a cattle drive.
Continuing to plow ahead with introspective performances, Lane co-starred as the daughter of a man who may have been a Nazi sympathizer in the 1990 HBO drama "Descending Angel" and made the most of her limited screen time playing silent film star Paulette Goddard in Richard Attenborough's reverent biopic "Chaplin" (1992). A co-starring role alongside then-husband Christopher Lambert in “Knight Moves” (1992) was generally overlooked, but the wistful “group of friends” drama “Indian Summer” (1993) showcased a wonderful side of Lane’s talent and appeal, though the small film did not attract a large audience.
Generally, television tended to provided the best offers for an actress not willing to rely on her sex appeal, and Lane gave a pair of fine performances as the young version of the "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" (CBS, 1994) and as Stella to Alec Baldwin's Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (CBS, 1995). The role of a fierce, post-apocalyptic peace keeper in the film adaptation of “Judge Dredd” (1995) may have seemed an appealing challenge for the actress, but the resulting Sylvester Stallone vehicle was a dismal mess. A reunion with director Walter Hill as a luminous woman from the past of "Wild Bill" (1995) showcased her gifts, but that film proved a box-office disappointment as well. Lane reteamed with Coppola as the mother of a boy with a rare genetic disease in "Jack" and played a competent Secret Service agent in the thriller "Murder at 1600" (1997) before hitting a career high-mark with "A Walk on the Moon" (1999). Tony Goldwyn's directorial debut allowed Lane to fully realize her screen potential with her portrayal of an unsatisfied 1960s wife and mother who embarks on an affair with a free-spirited and younger man (Viggo Mortensen). The film earned Lane some of the best reviews of her career and helped make inroads toward rejuvenating her standing in Hollywood.
Lane returned to the small screen for a co-starring role opposite Bill Pullman in the TV remake of "The Virginian" (TNT, 2000) before a high-profile role as Mark Wahlberg's land-bound girlfriend in the well-received "The Perfect Storm" (2000). She followed up with a relatively minor role in the critically-lauded sleeper "My Dog Skip" (2000). But it was "Unfaithful” – a psychological and often erotic look at a woman who embarks on a torrid affair with a young lover and ultimately results in tragedy – that Lane was finally cast in a role that perfectly showcased her remarkable talents. Her sensual, natural and conflicted performance — better, actually, than the movie itself — won her heaps of accolades, including an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. Now firmly established as a bankable leading lady – and at an age when most actresses were seeing their careers wind down – Lane's follow-up was the lighter-weight romance "Under the Tuscan Sun" (2003), based on the popular book by author Frances Mayes, in which Lane played a 35-year-old San Francisco writer who makes an impulsive home purchase in Tuscany and discovers romance as she renovates her dilapidated new house. The role earned her a second Golden Globe nomination. Offscreen, Lane’s own love life was reignited with a new marriage to actor Josh Brolin. Onscreen, she undertook her first out-and-out romantic comedy, starring opposite John Cusack in the flop “Must Love Dogs” (2005), as a recently divorced kindergarten teacher looking for love.
Lane again found herself in the critical crosshairs for “Hollywoodland” (2006), an intriguing look into the tawdry life and mysterious death of “Superman” actor George Reeves. Lane stood out as C-list actress Toni Mannix, wife of MGM executive Eddie Mannix, whose affair with the actor was of interest to investigations surrounding Reeves’ apparent suicide. The fact that Lane had to portray a woman much older than herself was not lost on critics.
Lane’s next outing as a film lead was the 2008 thriller “Untraceable” in which she essayed an FBI cybercrime specialist investigating a serial killer. The film was generally panned by critics for wasting its talented cast in a vehicle seemingly built for excessive violence. Lane was slated to appear in three more films over the busy year, including the sci-fi drama “Jumper,” the Elmore Leonard adaptation “Killshot” and “Nights in Rodanthe,” in which Lane co-starred alongside Richard Gere (for the third time) in a romantic tale of a stormy weekend at a country
CAREER
Lane's maternal grandmother, Eleanor Scott, was a thrice-married Pentecostal preacher of the Apostolic denomination, and Lane was influenced by the theatrical quality 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 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. Lane won high praise from Olivier who declared her 'The New Grace Kelly'. At the same time Lane was featured on the cover of Time, which declared her one of Hollywood's "Whiz Kids."
In the early 1980s, Lane made a successful transition from child actor to adult roles. Her breakout performances came with back-to-back adaptations of young adult novels by S. E. Hinton, adapted and directed by Francis Ford Coppola: The Outsiders in 1982 and Rumble Fish in 1983. Both films also featured memorable performances from a number of young male actors who would go on to become leading men in the next decade (as well as members of the so-called "Brat Pack"), including Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, C. Thomas Howell, Emilio Estevez, the late Patrick Swayze, Mickey Rourke, Nicolas Cage, and Matt Dillon. Lane's distinction among these heavily male casts advanced her career while affiliating her with this young generation of male actors. Andy Warhol proclaimed her, "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. According to the actress, "I hadn't been close to my mom for a long time, so we had a lot of homework to do. We had to repair our relationship because I wanted my mother back".
Lane returned to acting to appear in The Big Town and Lady Beware, but it was not until 1989's popular and critically acclaimed TV miniseries Lonesome Dove that Lane made another big impression on a sizable audience, and was nominated for an Emmy Award for her role. She was given 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, 1992's 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, described Lane as having "...this potentially volcanic sexuality that is in no way self-conscious or opportunistic." 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 and 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 stated that "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.
In 2008, Lane reunited with Richard Gere for the romantic drama Nights in Rodanthe. It is the third film Gere and Lane filmed together. The film was based on the novel of the same title by Nicholas Sparks. Lane also starred in Jumper, and Untraceable in the same year. She then appeared in 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 stated that she was "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 2010, Lane starred in Secretariat, a Disney film about the relationship between the 1973 Triple Crown-winning racehorse and his owner, Penny Chenery, whom Lane portrayed.
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.
MOVIES LIST
A Little Romance (1979)Touched by Love (1980)
Great Performances (1981)
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1981)
Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981)
Child Bride of Short Creek (1981)
National Lampoon Goes to the Movies (1982)
Six Pack (1982)
Miss All-American Beauty (1982)
The Outsiders (1983)
Rumble Fish (1983)
Streets of Fire (1984)
The Cotton Club (1984)
Lady Beware (1987)
The Big Town (1987)
Priceless Beauty (1988)
Lonesome Dove (1988)
Vital Signs (1990)
Descending Angel (1990)
Knight Moves (1992)
My New Gun (1992)
The Setting Sun (1992)
Chaplin (1992)
Indian Summer (1993)
Fallen Angels (1993)
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1995)
Judge Dredd (1995)
Wild Bill (1996)
Jack (1996)
Mad Dog Time (1996)
The Only Thrill (1997)
Murder at 1600 (1997)
Gunshy (1998)
Grace & Glorie (1998)
A Walk on the Moon (1999)
My Dog Skip (2000)
The Virginian (2000)
The Perfect Storm (2000)
Hardball (2001)
The Glass House (2001)
Unfaithful (2002)
Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Fierce People (2005)
Must Love Dogs (2005)
Hollywoodland (2006)
Untraceable (2008)
Jumper (2008)
Nights in Rodanthe (2008)
Killshot (2009)
Secretariat (2010)
AWARDS
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.
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