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Diane Lane - actress - Interview

Interview, May, 1999 by Elizabeth Weitzman

Diane Lane is one of those actresses no one quite thinks of as a star - yet she keeps popping up with an ace performance every few years to remind us that Hollywood has been missing out big-time

For a while, it seemed Diane Lane had It all: an Off-Broadway career by age six, a breakout film (1979's A Little Romance) and the cover of Time at fourteen, and twin roles as the gorgeous good girl In Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 odes to teen trauma, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Yet after two poorly received films the following year (Streets of Fire and Coppola's The Cotton Club), she practically faded from view.

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So the rules of the game dictate that the ex-child star - on the cover of this magazine twice before she was twenty - should now he nothing more than a trivia question. Once In a while, though, even in L.A., talent remains uncorrupted. As a working actress rather than a celebrity, Lane has continued to shine quietly. Over the last decade, she's chosen a determinedly varied selection of roles, most notably as a sad-eyed prostitute in TV's Lonesome Dove (1989), a gallant survivor in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994), also for TV, and as a flustered housewife in My New Gun (1992). But while her performances have always been meticulously and memorably rendered, they've usually been overlooked. Fortunately, there's yet another chance to recognize Lane's gifts In the current A Walk on the Moon, a bittersweet romance set during the summer of 1969. Lane, now thirty-four, brings a melancholy grace to Pearl Katrowitz, a young wife and mother struggling between the past she knows and the future she desires. It's a transition Lane herself, having already defied the rigid ways of her profession, appears more than ready to face.

ELIZABETH WEITZMAN: TO suburban kids like me, you always seemed so sophisticated. You appeared to have everything - specially freedom.

DIANE LANE: I was raised by free-spirited people, though my father gave me a very strong work ethic. When I was about seven, I started touring the globe as part of New York's La MaMa theater company - without my parents! I'd be traveling all over with people who were essentially hippies, and they'd be like, "Who's going to take care of Diane today?"

EW: Would you ever let your [five-year-old] daughter do that?

DL: She has to choose her own path. I've always had this unresolved desire to prove that I could get a Ph.D., or contribute something else to the world. So I'd wish for her that she could find a way to satisfy that female thing of having your beauty acknowledged without having to earn your living with it.

EW: Do you think of L.A. as a sexist place?

DL: A lot of strong women in Hollywood have left footprints ahead of me. Shirley MacLaine was my hero when I was twelve. I really don't see much sexism, but then, I don't expose myself to it because I set my own course. There are things you have to do. You have to look good. We are in the dream business out here.

EW: Do you worry about maintaining artistic Integrity, since you need to remain visible to stay on top?

DL: The industry's memory is quite short, it's true. I'm fascinated by how Hollywood has changed since I started. Today it's about immediate delivery. There's less risk and less art. I'm in a very picky state right now, but I've done it all. When someone said, "You've gotta do a Stallone picture. It'll increase your foreign stock," I said, "Ooh, qu'est-ce que c'est, foreign stock?" I bought that line and did that film [Judge Dredd, 1995], but whether or not it increased my foreign stock remains to be seen. [laughs]

Independent films have a very different cachet than success films. When I think success, I put a dollar sign where the last s goes. They're both equally intoxicating, but the minute you get artistic cachet, God forbid you should do a high-profile money picture. Is there shame in doing something for the income? That's an idea that's really up for grabs to interpret.

EW: When you were sixteen you told Interview, "I've always felt like I had to keep working." Was that drive self-imposed?

DL: I was an only child, and La MaMa provided a home and a family. Also, it was so empowering. I had to follow grown-up rules: Don't lose your passport, don't fall asleep backstage, don't pee in your pants. [laughs] Those are actual dots on my history map. It gave me a real identity I felt no one could take away. People would stick the mike under my mouth and ask [sotto voce], "Do you feel you've missed your childhood?" And I'd say, "What childhood?" I never believed there was some cutoff point where my childhood ended or adulthood began.

EW: At thirteen, you said you felt twenty-one.

DL: That sounds right, because I feel about fifty now! No, it's nice to have such a long history. And I'm still connecting the dots.

EW: Were you ever afraid you might follow the fate of those where-are-they-now child actors?

DL: I never was. But I often thought I'd take my football and go home, because it was the only card I had to play. You can't control anything, but you can leave. After Cotton Club I took two years off; between the projects and the expectations, I'd really been worked into the ground. And then I made a movie again and everybody said, "It's her comeback!" And I thought, Ack! You're kidding, right?

Diane Lane - actress - Interview

Interview, May, 1999 by Elizabeth Weitzman

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