Feature: ‘Hello, You’re Gorgeous’
Diane Lane recalls smoking and skating in her old neighbourhood
Diane Lane tossed a wistful look over her shoulder, the Queensboro Bridge looming directly behind her. “We used to skate there, under the arches,” she said. “We would take the corner and go flying around the cathedral. We nearly knocked over some nuns.”
“There was a park nearby where we’d practice smoking cigarettes, and a Lamston’s on the block,” she said, referring to the old variety shop. “I used to shoplift there.” With that, she raised her fingers to her lips, the gesture familiar from her films, as if struggling to suppress some errant thought.
All that was a long time ago, well before Lane, 50, was cast in her teens in A Little Romance, the movie that made her an instant sensation, and decades before she inscribed herself in filmgoers’ imaginations as Richard Gere’s guiltily philandering wife in the 2002 erotic thriller Unfaithful.
A former New Yorker, Lane was coasting the other day on wheels of nostalgia. She had returned to Manhattan for the premiere of Trumbo, a dourly comic account of Hollywood in the dark days of red-baiting, in which she plays the stoically suffering wife of the blacklisted screenwriter James Dalton Trumbo.
She had decided to make the most of her time in Manhattan, revisiting the haunts of her youth. Strolling down First Avenue, where she lived as a girl, she exhaled mightily, relieved to see that Dangerfield’s, the comedy club, still stood on its familiar turf at the corner of East 61st Street.
Yet she couldn’t quite shake a sense of dislocation. “I’m a native New Yorker,” she said, “but I don’t know my way around here anymore.”
New Yorkers seemed to know their way around the star.
“Well hello, Diane Lane, you’re gorgeous,” a carrot-topped New York City traffic captain named Carol Torres crooned, approaching her beatifically.
In the next instant, Torres was embracing Lane, who returned her hug spontaneously, the two laughing and chattering as if their acquaintance dated from the Pleistocene age.
In fact they had never met, but the encounter proved, Lane insisted, that “New York is the friendliest place. Not everybody knows that”.
Women are not necessarily her core audience. As she spoke, a young man whizzed by on his bicycle, and, referring to another of her romantic hits, shouted with a grin, “Loved you in Under The Tuscan Sun.”
“That’s flattering,” Lane said, “especially since it comes from a man.”
Moments later she was politely accosted by Ronen Shaolian, a fashion consultant, who managed to get in a word before the actress sprinted across the street to pose sultrily for a photograph. “I’m a very spiritual person,” Shaolian told her, ignoring his bulldog that tugged at its leash. Referring to one of the steamier scenes in Unfaithful, he added, breathless: “That acting of passion in your movie was amazing.”
Humid sex scenes have no place in Trumbo. Lane’s unswervingly loyal and mostly uncomplaining character bears little resemblance to the wayward wives she has played in the past.
The notion of standing by your man may not resonate with her personally. “I’m playing a character,” she said. “One that’s seen though the male lens, the male filter and the male author.”
Then, as if she had said too much, she hastened to add: “I’m not biting the hand that feeds me, believe me.”
She strolled as she spoke, stalking the block in a curve-enhancing pencil skirt and five-inch heels. “These pumps aren’t made for walking,” said Lane, who earlier that day had appeared on the Today show. “They’re made for posing or sitting in a television studio.”
If she felt unsteady, it didn’t show, so distracted was she by a steady stream of passers-by. “New Yorkers walk around in their own universe,” she said. “They’re not self-conscious. They’re not aware that they’re visible. They maintain their space. They’re just doing their thing.”
By contrast, in Los Angeles, where she lives, people exit their cars, sure that all eyes are upon them, looking around and, as she suggested, possibly feeling a little unmoored. “That’s when they remember, ‘Oh, right, I’m a biped’,” she said.
She is not homesick, so she says. “But there’s something that happens to me only in New York,” she said. “I can feel my talons in the earth.
“I’m deeply connected to all that this is,” she added, growing pensive once more. “Anywhere else is sort of iffy.”