Diane Lane
Diane Lane is an acclaimed American actress. Her accolades include nominations for an Academy Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, several Screen Actors Guild Awards, several Satellite Awards, and an ICON Award.
Lane made her film debut in the George Roy Hill film A Little Romance. She had already been professionally acting on stage since 1971, at the age of six. Later, she acted in the movies Streets of Fire and The Cotton Club.
Lane returned to acting to appear in The Big Town, Lady Beware, and the Western miniseries Lonesome Dove, for which she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
Lane earned further recognition for her role in A Walk on the Moon, for which she was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. This was followed by several film roles of varying degrees of success, such as My Dog Skip, The Perfect Storm, The Glass House, and Hardball.
Lane received critical acclaim for her performance as an adulterous wife in the erotic thriller Unfaithful, which earned her a nomination for Academy Award for Best Actress. She then acted in the romantic comedy-drama Under the Tuscan Sun, which earned her a second Golden Globe Award nomination. For much of the rest of the decade, she alternately appeared in romances such as Must Love Dogs and Nights in Rodanthe, and thrillers such as Fierce People, Hollywoodland, and Untraceable.
Lane has appeared in four films directed by Francis Ford Coppola: The Outsiders ; Rumble Fish ; The Cotton Club ; and Jack. She also appeared in one film directed by his wife Eleanor Coppola: Paris Can Wait.
Lane had a recurring role as Martha Kent, the adoptive mother of Superman, in Man of Steel, and subsequent films of the DC Extended Universe.
Lane's later roles have included leads in the thriller Let Him Go, which was a top box office hit during the COVID pandemic, the Ryan Murphy series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, the Scott Z. Burns anthology series Extrapolations for Apple TV+, the animated Pixar films Inside Out, and Inside Out 2, the Netflix series A Man in Full, and the dystopian thriller film Anniversary, for which she received a Best Lead Actress Satellite Award.
In October 2025, Lane was awarded the ICON Award at the Newport Beach Film Festival.
Early life
On, Lane was born in New York City. Her mother, Colleen Leigh Farrington, was a nightclub singer and Playboy centerfold, who was also known as Colleen Price. Her father, Burton Eugene Lane, was a Manhattan drama coach, who ran an acting workshop with John Cassavetes, worked as a cab driver, and later taught humanities at City College.In 1965, when she was just 13 days old, her parents separated. Lane's mother went to Mexico and obtained a divorce, while retaining custody of Lane until she was six years old. Lane's father received custody of her after Lane's mother moved to Georgia. Lane and her father lived in a number of residential hotels in New York City, and she rode with him in his taxi.
In 1980, when Lane was 15, she declared her independence from her father and flew to Los Angeles for a week with actor and friend Christopher Atkins, with whom she starred the following year in the film Child Bride of Short Creek. Lane later remarked: "It was reckless behavior that comes from having too much independence too young." She returned to New York and moved in with a friend's family, paying them rent.
In 1981, Lane enrolled in high school after taking correspondence courses. However, Lane's mother kidnapped her and took her back to Georgia. Lane and her father challenged her mother in court, and six weeks later, she was back in New York. Lane did not speak to her mother for the next three years, but they eventually reconciled.
Career
1971–1977: Career beginnings in the theater
Lane's grandmother, Eleanor Farrington Scott, was a Pentecostal preacher of the Apostolic denomination, and Lane was influenced theatrically by the demonstrative quality of her grandmother's sermons.In 1971, at age six, Lane began acting professionally, landing her first acting role in the La Mama Experimental Theatre Company production of Medea, in which she played Medea's daughter. From then until 1976, she performed with La MaMa, E.T.C. in New York and toured with them abroad. Some of the plays she performed in include The Trojan Women, Electra, Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan, Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding, Paul Foster's The Silver Queen, and Shakespeare's As You Like It. Most of these plays were directed or adapted by Andrei Șerban and Elizabeth Swados.
In 1977, when Lane was 12 years old, she had a role in Joseph Papp's production of The Cherry Orchard with Meryl Streep and Irene Worth. At this time, Lane was enrolled in an accelerated program at Hunter College High School, but her grades suffered due to her busy schedule.
From 1976 to 1977, Lane appeared in The Cherry Orchard and Agamemnon at New York's Vivian Beaumont Theater. After participating in the first production of Runaways when it was off-Broadway,
1979–1999: Film career beginnings and breakthrough
When Lane was 13, she turned down a role in Runaways on Broadway to make her feature-film debut opposite Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance. Lane won high praise from Olivier, who declared her "the new Grace Kelly". At the same time, Lane was featured on the cover of Time, which declared her one of Hollywood's "Whiz Kids".In the early 1980s, Lane made a successful transition from inexperienced actress to confirmed roles. She appeared as the teen-age lead in the tear-jerker Touched by Love, was cast as the young female outlaw Little Britches in the 1981 Lamont Johnson film, Cattle Annie and Little Britches, with Amanda Plummer in her own debut role as Cattle Annie. She played the role of Heather in Six Pack with Kenny Rogers. Lane starred as Corinne Burns, leader of a punk rock band in 1982's Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, with Laura Dern and punk musicians Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, and Paul Simonon from the Clash. The film has become a cult classic.
Lane's breakout performances came with back-to-back adaptations of novels by S. E. Hinton, adapted and directed by Francis Ford Coppola: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, both in 1983.
Both films featured memorable performances from a number of young male actors who later became leading men in the next decade, including Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Leif Garrett, C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Mickey Rourke, and Nicolas Cage. Lane's distinction among these heavily male casts advanced her career while affiliating her with young male actors. Andy Warhol proclaimed her, "the undisputed female lead of Hollywood's new rat pack".
File:Robert Duvall Diane Lane 1989.jpg|thumb|upright=1|Lane with Robert Duvall at the 41st Emmy Awards.
However, Streets of Fire and The Cotton Club, were both commercial and critical failures, and her career languished as a result. After The Cotton Club, Lane dropped out of the movie business and lived with her mother in Georgia. According to the actress, "I hadn't been close to my mom for a long time, so we had a lot of homework to do. We had to repair our relationship because I wanted my mother back."
Lane returned to acting to appear in The Big Town and Lady Beware, but she did not make another big impression on a sizable audience until the popular and critically acclaimed TV miniseries Lonesome Dove, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award for her role.
In 1989, having taken a decade-long hiatus from the theater to build her film career, Lane returned to the stage to play Olivia in Twelfth Night at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lane came very close to being cast as Vivian Ward in the blockbuster hit Pretty Woman, which had a much darker script at the time, but due to scheduling conflicts, she was unable to take the role. Apparently, costume fittings were made for Lane before the role fell to Julia Roberts.
Lane was given positive reviews for her performance in the independent film My New Gun, which was well received at the Cannes Film Festival. She went on to appear as actress Paulette Goddard in Sir Richard Attenborough's big-budget biopic of Charles Chaplin, Chaplin.
Over the next seven years, Lane would star in ten movies, notably Judge Dredd and Jack. Lane earned further recognition for her role in the film A Walk on the Moon, which also starred Liev Schreiber, Viggo Mortensen, and Anna Paquin. One reviewer wrote: "Lane, after years in post-young-career limbo, is meltingly effective." The film's director, Tony Goldwyn, described Lane as having "this potentially volcanic sexuality that is in no way self-conscious or opportunistic". Lane earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Female Lead. At this time, she was interested in making a film about actress Jean Seberg in which she would play Seberg.
2000–2011: ''Unfaithful'' and further acclaim
Lane had supporting roles as Mark Wahlberg's love interest in The Perfect Storm, as well as Frankie Muniz's talkative mother in My Dog Skip.Lane then starred in the psychological thriller The Glass House and the baseball movie Hardball.
Lane starred in Unfaithful, an erotic thriller directed by Adrian Lyne and adapted from the French film The Unfaithful Wife. Lane played a housewife who indulges in an affair with a younger, French book dealer. The film featured several sex scenes, and Lane's repeated takes for these scenes were very demanding for the actors involved, especially for Lane, who had to be emotionally and physically fit for the duration. Although Unfaithful received mixed reviews, Lane herself earned high praise for her performance. Besides winning Best Actress at the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle, she also received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress, the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role. Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman extolled her work: "Lane, in the most urgent performance of her career, is a revelation. The play of lust, romance, degradation, and guilt on her face is the film's real story."
Following Unfaithful, Lane starred in Under the Tuscan Sun, a romantic comedy-drama based on the best-selling book by Frances Mayes, for which Lane won a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical.
This was followed by lead roles in Fierce People, Must Love Dogs, and Hollywoodland.
Lane reunited with Richard Gere for the romantic drama Nights in Rodanthe. It was the third film that Gere and Lane had filmed together, and was based on the novel of the same title by Nicholas Sparks.
While promoting Nights in Rodanthe, she expressed frustration with being typecast: "I am gunning for something that's not so sympathetic. I need to be a bitch, and I need to be in a comedy. I've decided. No more Miss Nice Guy." Lane had even contemplated quitting acting and spending more time with her family if she would be unable to get these kinds of roles. She continued: "I can't do anything official. My agents won't let me. Between you and me, I don't have anything else coming out..."
That same year, Lane also co-starred in Jumper and Untraceable.
Lane then appeared in Killshot with Mickey Rourke, which was given a limited theatrical release in 2008, before being released on DVD in 2009.
Despite her concerns with being typecast, Lane signed on to Secretariat, a Disney film about the relationship between the 1973 Triple Crown-winning racehorse and his owner, Penny Chenery, whom Lane portrayed.
Lane then starred in Cinema Verite, an HBO movie about the making of the first reality television show, An American Family. Lane earned Emmy, Screen Actors Guild, Satellite, and Golden Globe award nominations for her portrayal of Pat Loud.
The following year, Lane was featured in the PBS documentary Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which was produced by Show of Force along with Fugitive Films, showcasing women and girls living under very difficult circumstances and bravely fighting to challenge them.