Profile of Laura Dern on Famous Like Me

Laura Elizabeth Dern (born February 10, 1967 in Los Angeles, California) is an American film and television actor. She is the daughter of actor Bruce Dern and actress Diane Ladd. Granddaughter of Alan Ladd and her Great Grandfather was Utah Governor George H. Dern.

Her best known film is Jurassic Park. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as the title character in Rambling Rose.

Dern was previously in relationships with fellow actors Treat Williams, Jeff Goldblum, Kyle MacLachlan and Billy Bob Thornton, and now is in a long-term relationship with blues musician Ben Harper with whom she has two children.

Laura Dern was born into a moviemaking family. Dern was exposed to movie sets and the movie industry from infancy, and obtained several bit parts as a child. Her parents divorced when she was two and she lost contact with her father for several years as a result.

Her parents' background and her own early tastes of the moviemaking would soon convince the young Dern to pursue acting herself. Like so many young child actors, her decision may have been influenced by social awkwardness—the child of 1960s counterculture parents, she was steeped in Eastern mysticism and political radicalism, and was seem an oddball by her more conservative classmates. Her gawky physical appearance didn't seem to help - even before her teens she had achieved her 5'10 height, was rail skinny (other than precociously wide hips), had huge feet and a slouching posture, and for all this was often teased by her classmates. Perhaps the nine-year-old Dern found refuge by studying at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute.

The first success for the young Dern was in 1980, with a role in Adrian Lyne's Foxes (1980), a teen movie starring Jodie Foster. She followed this with several small parts, or parts in small movies, such as Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains and Teachers, as a student who has an affair with a teacher. (Her mother objected to her active presence on movie sets at age thirteen, which required Dern to sue for emancipation so she could play her role in The Fabulous Stains.) Her next roles, as the blind girl who befriends the deformed boy in Mask (1985), as the teenaged girl whose sexual awakening colides with an older man in Smooth Talk (1985), gave her career an important boost. She appeared to have made it with a leading role in David Lynch's acclamed Blue Velvet (1986), but it was four years before her next notable film, and this was the bizarre Wild at Heart (1990), also directed by Lynch.

The following year, Dern starred in Rambling Rose (1991), which wound become her signature performance, as a sexually precocious, free-spirited young housemaid in the South in the 1930s. Dern earned an Oscar-nomination for her performance, and so did her mother and co-star Diane Ladd.

Dern continues to win prominent roles on the big screen, often in smaller, highly regarded human dramas such as October Sky (1999), I Am Sam (2001) and We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004), although she is perhaps widely known for her role as Ellie Sattler in the movies Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic Park III (2001), or for her guest performance on Ellen (1994), as the woman to whom Ellen finally comes out as a lesbian.

Dern's pre-teen gawkiness mature into lithe beauty, but this doesn't prevent her from fearlessly throwing herself into a wide variety of roles which are sometimes unflattering, an excellent example being her unflinchingly comic portrayal of an intensely annoying loser whose pregnancy becomes a social and political football in Citizen Ruth (1996). This results in Dern being one of the most interesting actors working in Hollywood today.

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