![]() Within days, the infant was ensconced in a motel room’s bureau drawer, a makeshift crib, in Bishop, CA, where her father was working on the movie. In his memoir, Things I’ve Said, But Probably Shouldn’t Have (2007), Dern’s father, actor Bruce Dern recalls that he was making the Western Will Penny (1967) when his wife, actress Diane Ladd, gave birth to their daughter. Taken together, the roles are master classes in acting. ![]() Dern nails the particular shadings of both perfectly: Bobbi, the cheerfully supportive earth mother living under the shadow of her former marriage to an abusive man and coping with cancer in Wild, in contrast to Big Little Lies’ Renata, a Type-A business executive whose maternal instincts are far more ferocious. In both Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild (2014) and the TV show Big Little Lies (2017), Dern plays a mom, but the difference between these two women could fill an ocean. Two recent roles, one for which she was nominated for an Oscar and another for which she won a Prime-Time Emmy and a Golden Globe, demonstrate Dern’s extraordinary range. Over the next three decades, she would play radically different young women in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990), a drug-addled wastrel in Citizen Ruth (1996), a lethal dental hygienist in the blackly comedic film noir Novocaine (2001), and the deeply flawed heroine trying to take her life back in her series Enlightened (2011-2013). The first impression she made, not quite even an ingenue, was in a party scene in Foxes (1980) as a girl in thick glasses trying to appear worldly as she discusses birth control. In a career that began before she was old enough to drive, Laura Dern has played a dazzling array of women.
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