Description:
Laura Dern was born on February 10, 1967 into a moviemaking
family - her father is Bruce Dern and her mother is Diane Ladd. Dern was exposed
to movie sets and the movie industry from infancy, and obtained several bit
parts as a child. Her parents divorced when Dern was two and Dern lost contact
with her father for several years as a result.
Her parents' background and her own early taste of the moviemaking
world soon convinced the young Dern to pursue acting herself. Like so many young
actors, her decision may have been influenced by social awkwardness -- the child
of 60s counterculture parents, she was steeped in Eastern mysticism and political
radicalism, and was seen as an oddball by her more conservative classmates.
Her gawky physical appearance didn't help - even before her teens, she had achieved
most of her impressive 5' 10" height, was rail-skinny (other than precociously
wide hips), had huge feet and a slouching posture, and for all this was often
teased by classmates. Perhaps the nine-year-old Dern found refuge by studying
acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute.
The first success for the young Dern came in 1980, with a role
in Adrian Lyne's Foxes (1980), a teen movie starring Jodie Foster. She followed
this with several small parts, or parts in small movies, such as Ladies and
Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1981) and Teachers (1984), as a student who
has an affair with a teacher. (Her mother objected to her active presence on
movie sets at age thirteen, which required Dern to sue for emancipation so she
could play her role in "The Fabulous Stains"). Her next roles, as
the blind girl who befriends the deformed boy in Mask (1985), and as a teenaged
girl whose sexual awakening collides with a mysterious older man in Smooth Talk
(1985), gave her career an important boost. Dern appeared to have made it with
a leading role in David Lynch's acclaimed Blue Velvet (1986), but it was four
years before her next notable film, and this was the bizarre Wild at Heart (1990),
also directed by Lynch.
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