Laura Dern, forever wild at heart: Why the Oscarwinning actress feels privileged to be redefining family
She was born into the industry, but Laura Dern’s route to the top had much more to do with her passionate love of her craft and her indie spirit than her famous parents. Whether she’s outrunning a raptor, taking a baseball bat to her husband’s toy collection (you go, Renata!) or exploring the nuances of a quiet conversation, this Oscar winner has us mesmerised.
The divorce lawyer turns on the recorder and stalks quietly into the space where her client sits, apprehensive and tense. Her tone is by turns empathetic and no-nonsense as she coaxes the tearful woman to tell her side of the story. But underneath her gentle, supportive veneer, the steely, manipulative undercurrent hums.
This scene, from Marriage Story, is Laura Dern at her best, delivering a layered performance worthy of the Supporting Actress Oscar (and the Golden Globe, the SAG, the BAFTA) she walked home with on 10 February this year – her 54th birthday.
Laura is currently riding the wave of what the media has dubbed ‘the Dernaissance’ with two major movies released in the past year: Greta Gerwig’s re-imagining of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women also received a handful of Oscar nods. Says Gerwig: ‘I knew that she would be loving, and she would be warm, and that she would be the mother we wish we had, and that she also would be able to be the person who says: “I’m angry almost every single day of my life” and we’d know that that was true.’
It’s the same skill that allows her to portray both the duality of the brittle, bullish, Renata Klein in Big Little Lies and the silkily manipulative Nora Fanshaw in Marriage Story.
What made Marriage Story so real, said Laura, was that every person on set had a divorce story to tell. ‘There was no one on this movie that hadn’t had their family “reconfigured”, if you will, so we all share that. It feels deeply personal to all of us. As Noah [Baumbach] said about the story when we first talked about it, “I want to tell a love story where endings are not failures”. That really moved me and struck me deeply. To my amazing divorced parents, and my amazing step-parents, and my amazing children – who came from love despite an ending in a marriage – [I say] we’re so privileged to redefine what family looks like.’
Laura dated Kyle McClachlan, Jeff Goldblum and Billy Bob Thornton before marrying indie musician Ben Harper in 2005. They were married for eight years and have two children together: daughter Jaya and son Ellery. Ben filed for divorce in 2010 and they briefly reconciled in 2012 but the divorce was finalised in 2013. The two now share custody of Ellery and Jaya, although male model Ellery is 18 now and not a minor any longer.
It’s clear that Laura is big on family, especially her children. ‘It’s great getting to know their DNA,’ she says, ‘and all the options that are afforded to them because of their DNA – through my family and their dad and his family… I am so moved by family.’
She tells a story of how her son Ellery’s friends were discussing Big Little Lies. Ellery wasn’t sure what to say, so he kept quiet. Eventually, he confessed to watching it but said little more, and they took his silence to mean he hated it. ‘It’s not that,’ he admitted. ‘It’s just… my mom is Renata Klein,’ said Ellery. People sympathised with him – they thought his mom was like Renata!
Laura sometimes wonders whether she should be embarrassed or pleased when fans compliment her on how well she embodies Renata. ‘I’m starting to relate to [Renata] more and more, so that’s troubling,’ she says, laughing. ‘She’s definitely there in my psyche.’
But there is an upside too. ‘All of these relationships, like my relationship with my kids or my friends or the characters I play – they teach me so much about myself, about how to use my voice, about how to channel anger and accept myself when the rest of the world says, “You’re too complicated, I don’t want to be at the party with you”.’
Laura feels that Nora and Renata share some personality traits. In season 2, Renata smashes up her husband’s toy room with a baseball bat after he loses all their money and has an affair. ‘She is very rightful in her rage, very high-functioning, very boundaried, and a hardcore pro,’ says Laura. ‘She’s someone who knows when to let loose, which means she’s choosing to go crazy. That’s such a fun character to play.’
Born to actor parents (Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern), Laura grew up in the company of Hollywood’s power players: playwright Tennessee Williams is her mother’s cousin, Shelley Winters is her godmother and her parents’ circle of friends included the likes of Jack
Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Gregory Peck and Gena Rowlands.
Laura really fell in love with acting when she overheard a conversation between Ellen Burstyn, her mum and director Martin Scorcese during the filming of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. ‘I remember watching my mother and Ellen have a scene in a bathroom together – two women talking – and watching Scorcese improvise and create and navigate human emotion with them, I fell in love with that.’
She basically grew up on movie sets. Her first listed movie was White Lightning. ‘I was five years old, and I was meant to be an extra walking past, but then the cameras started rolling and a man walked towards my mother holding a shotgun. I ran to her and held on to her leg, trying to protect her.’ The scene made it into the movie, and kicked off her career.
At 16, Laura petitioned for emancipation from her parents for professional purposes. David Lynch had cast her in his iconic Blue Velvet. ‘I went in, he didn’t ask me to read, he’d never seen me in a movie. We talked about life, nature, meditation… and I was then offered the role.’ It was the start of a lifelong friendship and collaboration spanning three decades and a host of critically acclaimed projects, most notably Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks.
Laura’s career trajectory was carefully planned, and the result of her parents’ advice. ‘In the ‘80s, other people became famous very quickly. But I look back on my career – and I look back on what I learned from my parents… My father said to me then, “If you make those artistic choices now, when you’re in your 50s, 60s, and 70s you’ll be working forever, doing incredible roles in films because you’ll have surpassed this idea of being pigeonholed into a thing, instead of creating a body of work”.’
It also says a lot about her that she was the person Ellen DeGeneres chose to come out to on that groundbreaking episode of the sitcom Ellen. The fallout from that episode meant she didn’t find work for a year – but Laura has no regrets.
‘I will never forget it. I was literally holding her as she started to say the words, and I felt her whole body shaking and her voice started to crack… It changed my life, so I’m forever grateful.’
Laura was nominated for an Oscar for her lead role in Ramblin’ Rose in 1991, but it was her role as paleobotanist Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park in 1993 that catapulted her into the mainstream. ‘I love Ellie Sattler the most of all the characters I’ve played,’ she says. ‘Steven [Spielberg] really wanted to make a feminist, iconic badass amid the big boys in a big action movie.’
Laura and some members of the original cast reprise their roles for the third instalment of the reboot, due for release in 2021.
So what’s next? ‘What comes with this moment in life, for me, is a kind of sense of boldness that I thought I had in my 20s, that I was actually nowhere near,’ she says. ‘Now I feel like I’m ready to be an actor, now I feel I want to tackle anything!’
Watch Marriage Story on Netflix. Laura Dern also stars in a new thriller, Cold Pursuit, starring Liam Neeson. ❖
‘I’m starting to relate to Renata more and more, so that’s troubling,’ she says, laughing. ‘She’s definitely there in my psyche.’