A luminous, willowy blonde, Laura Dern is a rare hybrid of character actress and movie star. With role models like father Bruce Dern, mother Diane Ladd and godmother Shelly Winters, it’s little wonder that she grew up unafraid to tackle unglamorous roles, acquiring a reputation as a risk-taker who lives and dies by the “authenticity” of her work. Conceived during the filming of Roger Corman’s “The Wild Angels” (1966, in which both parents acted), she remembers seeing at an early age her father’s severed head bounce down the stairs when “Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1965) played on TV. Dern became further enthralled by her own ice cream-eating episode in Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974) not to mention watching Alfred Hitchcock put her father through his paces on the set of “Family Plot” (1976). She began studying at the Lee Strasberg Institute at the age of nine and was ecstatic to land a bit part as an irksome party crasher in Adrian Lyne’s “Foxes” (1980).
Dern first registered as a troubled pregnant teen in “Teachers” (1984) and was then so convincing as a blind girl in love with the disfigured protagonist of “Mask” (1985) that many audience members believed she really was sight-impaired. Before Hollywood could lock her in as a “symbol of purity”, filmmakers Joyce Chopra and David Lynch came along and rescued her from such typecasting, exploring her aura of latent dangerous sexuality in films that exposed the darker side of American small-town life. Chopra’s “Smooth Talk” (1995), adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates short story, cast her opposite a sinisterly seductive Treat Williams, playing the brooding, alluring, teenage tease who’s just beginning to discover the power of lust. Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (1986) poised her provocatively between innocence and the outlandishly weird: her smart, sweet Nancy Drew, the good twin to Isabella Rossellini’s lewdly masochistic chanteuse, one half of the Madonna-whore complex. Despite the character’s blue-eyed wholesomeness, she is the catalyst that propels the film into its most disturbing disclosures.
