Diane Lane: A Career with a View

Lane rises to fiddle with an antique wooden table that opens to reveal a roulette wheel and chessboard inside, and comments that this was the sort of parlor accessory that people had before they were able to glue themselves to TV and video screens. She sounds momentarily wistful for an era that neither of us has ever known. "Christopher just wasn't there enough, emotionally or physically," she goes on. "I met him when I was 19 and in Paris. I didn't speak any French and he spoke no English." She pauses, before cracking, "And when I finally figured out what he was talking about, I said, Oh dear." She laughs and closes the book on this subject by explaining, "Everything crystallized with my pregnancy, when I just had no bullshit tolerance. I knew [the marriage] was not going to work, and I did not want to wait around for another six years. Then I would be 36 and pissed off. Now I'm 30 and I still have my life ahead of me. Nothing horrible happened. The third or fourth time I told him I wanted a divorce, he said OK."

We are now in Lane's bedroom, luxuriously wall-covered in Carpathian elm (which resembles the same polished, burled wood that's used for constructing Rolls-Royce dash-boards). She wants to show me a really cool mechanism that allows a TV set to materialize from inside her dresser, but can't find the remote that controls it, so she points to a rack of rainbow-colored Spinneybeck baseballs that looks like one of those stupid Jeff Koons conceptual art pieces, but is, in fact, a bonafide retail display. "This was a gift for Christopher, but I don't think he deserves it," she says with put-on brattiness. "Unless he fights me, I won't part with this."

Lane whips a harmonica off her dresser, blows a stuttery bar of blues harp, and suggests that we catch the sunset from her living room. She positions me on the sofa so that I get a better view of the vibrant pinks, azures and golds, then fills our glasses with more of Coppola's claret.

Truth is, Lane is rarely around these days to enjoy this view. The last couple of years, she's been in career-rebuilding mode, as far as the big screen is concerned. After arriving at 14 in the charming A Little Romance and establishing her ingenue status with the early Coppola films, Lane voluntarily removed herself from Tinseltown's short list back in the mid-'80s. "[Hollywood was] really rooting for me then," she explains. "I didn't wig out or anything. I just wasn't comfortable with what I was doing. They send the pretty girl out on the junket because Richard Gere can't come. I felt that people were telling me what to do and that I was volunteering for something that would get way out of control. I said, 'Take me out of this race. I see a lot of rat shit around.' I backed off, went to live with my mom in Georgia, and told them not to call me." Lane hesitates, then adds, "There was no response. Nothing stopped. Six more girls came into town."

After a couple of years, Lane decided she liked Hollywood's out-sized paychecks. Following a spate of forgettable projects like Lady Beware and Vital Signs, she reestablished her career by receiving an Emmy nomination for Lonesome Dove, setting herself up for the TV dramas that have given her some of her best performances, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1995), and gradually won increasingly prominent roles in more promising big-screen fare, including honorable failures like the sly indie My New Gun, the megabucks Chaplin and Walter Hill's Wild Bill. Coming up this summer will be Jack, the Big-ish Coppola film in which Lane co-stars alongside Robin Williams. "I ran into Francis at a party for the reopening of the Beverly Hills Hotel--a $1,000 per seat event to which I had gotten a free ticket," says Lane, scooting over to sit on one of the kitchen counter's four sky-blue stools ("Quasi South Beach," she dismissively calls them, chalking up their purchase to Lambert). "Francis said. 'Wow, you're still here?' I said the same thing to him. Neither of us had changed very much."

Coppola sent her the Jack script and suggested she read for the role of the mother of Robin Williams's acceleratedly aged 10-year-old character. "I went in and he had this gizmo, about the size of your tape recorder, that was a video and monitor in one." says Lane, now opening the door for the pizza delivery man and proceeding to divvy up slices. "He's not supposed to tape the audition, but he's FFC--he can do whatever the hell he warns. Then I went home and it never occurred to me that I would get the movie. Thirteen years after the fact, I told Francis. I still can't believe that he hired me for The Cotton Club."

Ironically, during Lane's current run of higher-profile film roles, it is her most widely panned celluloid experience that has proven to be one of the most pivotal. While playing opposite Sylvester Stallone in I995's Judge Dredd -- she deftly skirts commenting on it -- the newly single Lane met and fell for her current boyfriend, Dredd director Danny Cannon. "It was really one-on-one risque behavior," Lane concedes, refilling our glasses with the last of the wine, "I told Francis about it and he thought it was a really uncool thing to do. I actually don't know how Danny managed to direct the movie." She contemplates this for a moment, then answers her own question. "You just compartmentalize, dear."

"Well," I say, "having to keep everything so discreet must have been interesting,"

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