People used to see her as a “tough cookie,” actress Diane Lane confesses, raking her hand through her thick brown hair.
At least that’s how she remembers being categorized after she starred as the young vamp in “Cotton Club” and the pop singer in “Streets of Fire.”
But there is a different vision of her, too. And that’s how the “cookie” crumbles.
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As the fragile Lorena opposite Robert Duvall in “Lonesome Dove” and the delicate young student she portrayed, at 13, in her first movie, “A Little Romance,” she proved that there is a winsome vulnerability to her that no amount of pretty posturing can erase.
But she’s back in her tough cookie suit. Swathed in rubberized tights and wearing a high-impact crash helmet, she plays a cop “just doing her job” opposite Sylvester Stallone in the futuristic comic-book movie “Judge Dredd.”
The film marks a change for Lane, whose career has bounced from live theater to a string of Francis Ford Coppola movies and memorable turns on TV.
She truly is a child of the theater. At age 6 she dragged her father, a drama coach, to an audition. “He said, `You go up to the top floor and let me know how it goes,’ ” she remembers.
She earned the part with the experimental troupe, Cafe LaMama, and toured for years as part of the traveling thespians, without either parent accompanying her.
Lane seems surprised when people find that incredible. “It was the sweetest time. Looking back on it, it was a very divine little childhood that I had,” she says. “I felt empowered that my parents trusted me. You become part of this clan of people traveling around the world. They did trust me and that was a very cool thing. Remember, this was 1972. It was still peace, love and understanding; make love not war.”
Lane, 30, literally matured on screen before our eyes. Her very first movie, “A Little Romance,” cast her opposite Laurence Olivier, and her roles in Coppola’s “The Outsiders” and “Rumblefish” set her adrift with several teens who became the top male actors of today, including Nicolas Cage and Matt Dillon.
After “Cotton Club” and “Streets of Fire” were released, everyone predicted superstardom for Lane. It didn’t happen.
“But what was that popping sound?” she leans forward as though she were listening, “a tire going flat on the way to a prom? I took it with a grain of salt. Now I take it with a boulder of salt because, frankly, I haven’t been in a hit yet. If this is one, thank you. I’m ready.”
She isn’t one of those shattered young performers who finds life off-camera empty and unfulfilling. In fact, after “Cotton Club,” she quit movies for two years.
“I loathed that brass-ring mentality of success at any cost,” she says. “I wanted to work for my own sense of integrity, for my own reasons–not for panicking over popularity. And when I finally did a commercial film like this, it was because it’s going to be such a romp, a total A-1, five-star classy version of it. If I’m going to do a mini-series on TV, then, by golly, let it be a good one. If I’m going to do an adaptation of a play, let it be with some people I really want to work with. I still manage to keep my standards high enough to not shoot myself in the leg.”
Unlike many Hollywood types, Lane knows exactly where she stands. “I was always in the middle range of actresses, in terms of price or fame or popularity or whatever those figures are that people sit around and calculate,” she says. “So I didn’t have that much to lose or that much to scramble back to. I was pacing myself.”
She also longed for a change: “I just needed to say no. I had been working since I was a child, until I was 19. I basically said, `I’m going to be in Georgia and if anything fabulous comes along–which there wasn’t–I’ll get all excited.’ But I can be really difficult and picky.”
She moved to Georgia, got reacquainted with her mother (who had been a lounge singer and actress), bought a house and began fixing it up. “I got really good with a caulking gun,” she says.
Nearly two years ago Lane had a daughter, Eleanor, with her husband, actor Christopher Lambert (“Highlander”). The two have since divorced. The most difficult time, she says, was when she was first pregnant and realized “that I wasn’t going to be able to stay in the marriage. That was pretty hard, to be on a slow bake for nine months knowing that.”
Next up for Lane will be another turnabout when she stars as the innocent wife in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” opposite Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange, airing on CBS this fall.
The opportunity to play Lange’s sister was an unadulterated thrill, she says. “We both have these flat profiles and funny noses, and she’s very worldly. I get like a fan about Jessica,” she grins. “Working with her was everything I hoped it would be, the perfect answer to `Judge Dredd.’
“It was the total polar opposite, very redemptive emotionally, from the strenuous crash, bang, wallop and feeling a little like a satellite on my own movie set. The other was very embracing work, very intimate. And it was rehearsed like a play, a classic piece of literature. I got to watch Jessica work every day. I’d pay to be in it.”
Even though her “comeback” seems well in hand, Lane says it isn’t a matter of planning. “As soon as you think you’ve got it figured out, that’s when you’re wrong. I’d rather be a little lost than find myself knocked down off a high horse.”