How did Laura Dern become involved in lung cancer advocacy. What personal experiences shaped her commitment to this cause. How is she working with the American Lung Association to raise awareness about lung cancer. What are the key facts about lung cancer that everyone should know.

Laura Dern’s Personal Connection to Lung Cancer

Laura Dern, the acclaimed actress known for her powerful performances, has a deeply personal connection to lung cancer that has fueled her advocacy work. Her grandfather succumbed to the disease when she was just six years old, leaving an indelible mark on her life. This early experience with loss planted the seeds for her future involvement in lung cancer awareness and prevention efforts.

In addition to her family history, Dern’s portrayal of Bobbi Lambrecht in the film “Wild” further deepened her understanding of the devastating impact of lung cancer. Lambrecht, the mother of author Cheryl Strayed, passed away from lung cancer mere weeks after her diagnosis. This role provided Dern with a profound insight into the swift and merciless nature of the disease, compelling her to take action.

The Shocking Reality of Lung Cancer Statistics

As Dern delved deeper into the world of lung cancer advocacy, she encountered some startling statistics that underscored the urgency of her mission:

• Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer among both men and women
• It claims nearly twice as many women’s lives as breast cancer
• Only 1% of women have lung health on their health radar

These facts served as a wake-up call for Dern, highlighting the critical need for increased awareness and education about lung cancer risks and prevention strategies.

Partnering with the American Lung Association

Driven by her personal experiences and newfound knowledge, Laura Dern forged a partnership with the American Lung Association (ALA) to amplify the fight against lung cancer. Her involvement with the organization has been multifaceted and impactful:

1. LUNG FORCE Initiative: Dern played a crucial role in launching the LUNG FORCE initiative in 2014, which aims to unite women against lung cancer and for lung health.
2. COVID-19 Action Initiative: In 2020, Dern redoubled her efforts by supporting the ALA’s COVID-19 Action Initiative, raising funds for research and highlighting health inequities exposed by the pandemic.
3. National Board of Directors: Dern serves as an Advisor to the ALA’s National Board of Directors, lending her expertise and influence to shape the organization’s strategies and outreach efforts.

Challenging Misconceptions About Lung Cancer

One of Dern’s primary goals in her advocacy work is to challenge common misconceptions about lung cancer. She emphasizes that while smoking is a significant risk factor, it’s not the only cause of lung cancer. Environmental factors, such as air pollution, also play a role in lung health risks.

How can we broaden our understanding of lung cancer risk factors? By recognizing that:

1. Non-smokers can develop lung cancer
2. Environmental pollutants contribute to lung cancer risk
3. Genetic factors may increase susceptibility to the disease

The Importance of Early Detection and Screening

Dern stresses the critical importance of early detection in improving lung cancer outcomes. She advocates for increased awareness about lung cancer screening options, particularly for high-risk individuals.

Why is early detection crucial in the fight against lung cancer?

1. It increases the chances of successful treatment
2. It allows for less invasive treatment options
3. It can significantly improve survival rates

Lung Cancer Screening Guidelines

The American Lung Association recommends lung cancer screening for individuals who meet the following criteria:

• 55-80 years old
• Have a 30 pack-year smoking history
• Currently smoke or have quit within the last 15 years

Addressing Health Inequities in Lung Cancer

Through her work with the American Lung Association, Dern has become increasingly aware of the health inequities surrounding lung cancer. She has been vocal about the disproportionate impact of lung cancer on communities of color and underserved populations.

How do health inequities manifest in lung cancer outcomes?

1. Limited access to healthcare and screening services
2. Higher exposure to environmental pollutants in certain communities
3. Disparities in treatment options and quality of care

Dern’s advocacy work aims to shed light on these inequities and push for more equitable access to lung cancer prevention, screening, and treatment resources.

The Power of Celebrity Advocacy in Raising Awareness

Laura Dern’s involvement in lung cancer advocacy demonstrates the significant impact that celebrity voices can have in raising awareness about critical health issues. Her personal connection to the cause, combined with her public platform, allows her to reach a wide audience and inspire action.

How does celebrity advocacy contribute to public health initiatives?

1. It increases media coverage of important health issues
2. It helps to destigmatize diseases and encourage open conversations
3. It can inspire donations and support for research and awareness campaigns

Looking to the Future: Dern’s Ongoing Commitment

Laura Dern’s dedication to lung cancer awareness and prevention shows no signs of waning. Her ongoing partnership with the American Lung Association and her role as an Advisor to the National Board of Directors indicate a long-term commitment to the cause.

What are the key areas of focus for future lung cancer advocacy efforts?

1. Increasing funding for lung cancer research
2. Expanding access to screening and early detection programs
3. Addressing environmental factors that contribute to lung cancer risk
4. Promoting lung health education in schools and communities

The Role of Public Education in Lung Cancer Prevention

Dern emphasizes the importance of public education in the fight against lung cancer. By increasing knowledge about risk factors, prevention strategies, and the importance of early detection, we can empower individuals to take control of their lung health.

How can we improve public education about lung cancer?

1. Incorporate lung health information into school health curricula
2. Develop targeted awareness campaigns for high-risk populations
3. Utilize social media and digital platforms to disseminate accurate information
4. Partner with community organizations to reach diverse audiences

The Intersection of Environmental Advocacy and Lung Health

As an environmentalist, Laura Dern recognizes the intricate connection between environmental factors and lung health. Her advocacy work often highlights the impact of air pollution on lung cancer risk, particularly in urban areas like Los Angeles, where she was raised.

How does environmental advocacy support lung cancer prevention efforts?

1. It promotes policies to reduce air pollution and improve air quality
2. It raises awareness about the health impacts of environmental toxins
3. It encourages sustainable practices that benefit both the environment and public health

The Role of Clean Air Initiatives

Clean air initiatives play a crucial role in reducing lung cancer risk and improving overall lung health. Dern’s advocacy work often emphasizes the importance of supporting these initiatives at both local and national levels.

• Promoting renewable energy sources to reduce air pollution
• Supporting stricter emissions standards for vehicles and industries
• Encouraging urban green spaces and tree-planting programs
• Advocating for better indoor air quality standards in buildings

The Emotional Impact of Lung Cancer: Dern’s Perspective

Through her personal experiences and her role in “Wild,” Laura Dern has gained a deep understanding of the emotional toll that lung cancer takes on patients and their families. She often speaks about the importance of addressing the psychological aspects of lung cancer diagnosis and treatment.

How can we better support the emotional well-being of lung cancer patients and their loved ones?

1. Providing access to mental health resources and support groups
2. Encouraging open communication between patients, families, and healthcare providers
3. Promoting holistic approaches to cancer care that address both physical and emotional needs
4. Reducing stigma associated with lung cancer to foster a more supportive environment

The Power of Storytelling in Lung Cancer Advocacy

As an actress, Dern recognizes the power of storytelling in creating empathy and understanding. She often uses her platform to share personal stories of those affected by lung cancer, helping to humanize the statistics and inspire action.

Why is storytelling an effective tool in health advocacy?

1. It creates emotional connections that motivate people to take action
2. It helps to break down complex medical information into relatable narratives
3. It can challenge stereotypes and misconceptions about the disease
4. It provides hope and inspiration for those currently battling lung cancer

Collaborating with Healthcare Professionals

In her role as an advocate, Laura Dern often collaborates with healthcare professionals to ensure that her messaging is accurate and aligned with current medical knowledge. This partnership between celebrity advocates and medical experts is crucial in providing the public with reliable information.

How does collaboration between advocates and healthcare professionals benefit lung cancer awareness efforts?

1. It ensures that advocacy messages are scientifically accurate
2. It helps to translate complex medical information into layman’s terms
3. It provides credibility to awareness campaigns
4. It fosters a multidisciplinary approach to lung cancer prevention and treatment

The Importance of Continued Research

Dern’s advocacy work also emphasizes the critical need for ongoing lung cancer research. She supports initiatives that fund innovative studies aimed at improving prevention, detection, and treatment strategies.

• Developing more effective screening methods
• Exploring new treatment options, including immunotherapy and targeted therapies
• Investigating the genetic factors that contribute to lung cancer risk
• Studying the long-term effects of environmental pollutants on lung health

The Global Impact of Lung Cancer: Broadening the Perspective

While much of Laura Dern’s advocacy work focuses on the United States, she also recognizes lung cancer as a global health issue. Her efforts often highlight the need for international collaboration in addressing this widespread disease.

How can we approach lung cancer as a global health challenge?

1. Sharing research findings and best practices across countries
2. Developing global strategies for reducing air pollution
3. Addressing disparities in access to lung cancer screening and treatment in developing nations
4. Creating international awareness campaigns to reach diverse populations

The Role of Technology in Lung Cancer Prevention and Treatment

As part of her advocacy work, Dern often discusses the potential of emerging technologies in the fight against lung cancer. From artificial intelligence-assisted diagnosis to personalized treatment plans based on genetic profiling, technological advancements offer new hope in lung cancer care.

How is technology shaping the future of lung cancer prevention and treatment?

1. AI-powered imaging tools for more accurate and early detection
2. Telemedicine platforms improving access to lung cancer specialists
3. Wearable devices monitoring lung health and environmental exposure
4. Precision medicine approaches tailoring treatments to individual patients

Empowering the Next Generation of Lung Cancer Advocates

Laura Dern’s commitment to lung cancer advocacy extends to inspiring and empowering the next generation of advocates. She often speaks about the importance of engaging young people in the fight against lung cancer and promoting lung health from an early age.

How can we cultivate the next generation of lung cancer advocates?

1. Incorporating lung health education into school curricula
2. Encouraging youth involvement in community health initiatives
3. Leveraging social media and digital platforms to engage young audiences
4. Providing mentorship opportunities for aspiring health advocates

The Intersection of Policy and Advocacy

Dern’s advocacy work also touches on the importance of policy changes in addressing lung cancer. She supports efforts to influence legislation that can improve lung cancer prevention, detection, and treatment on a systemic level.

• Advocating for increased funding for lung cancer research
• Supporting policies that expand access to lung cancer screening
• Promoting stronger environmental regulations to reduce air pollution
• Encouraging workplace policies that protect employees from lung health hazards

Through her multifaceted approach to lung cancer advocacy, Laura Dern continues to make significant strides in raising awareness, challenging misconceptions, and inspiring action. Her personal connection to the cause, combined with her public platform and partnership with the American Lung Association, positions her as a powerful voice in the ongoing fight against lung cancer. As she looks to the future, Dern remains committed to broadening the conversation about lung health, addressing health inequities, and ultimately working towards a world where lung cancer no longer claims so many lives.

Laura Dern: Our New Ambassador

Laura’s story is a familiar tale to many of us. For years, the health impacts of smoking cigarettes was buried by Big Tobacco and not fully understood. By the time the American Lung Association exposed the lies we had all been told, millions of Americans were addicted to tobacco.

“A few years ago, I had the privilege of playing author Cheryl Strayed’s mom in the film adaptation of Cheryl’s book Wild. Cheryl’s mother Bobbi also died of lung cancer. And in doing research for the role, I discovered that lung cancer is the #1 cancer killer among women,” Laura remembers. “I want to ensure that no one ever has to lose a loved one from lung disease. And that’s when I started working with the American Lung Association.”

Laura helped the American Lung Association raise awareness about lung cancer as we launched our LUNG FORCE initiative in 2014. She, along with family friend Valerie Harper, were part of our launch, sharing their personal stories and connection. Sadly, Valerie passed away from lung cancer in 2019, which reinvigorated Laura to continue her work with our organization. In 2020, she doubled-down on her commitment when the lung disease COVID-19 stopped the world in its tracks.  

Through our COVID-19 Action Initiative, Laura helped us raise funds for COVID-19 research and raise awareness about the health inequities that COVID-19 exposed. During our telethon benefiting the COVID-19 Action Initiative, Laura reminded viewers that “the Lung Association is now bringing their century-plus of experience combatting lung disease to bear on COVID-19.  While this disease doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, black or white, some people are more likely to come in contact with it and are more likely to die from it. Its toll on communities of color has been disproportionately horrific.”

During that telethon, Laura also shared her enhanced partnership with the Lung Association as an Advisor to our National Board of Directors. We are so grateful for Laura’s commitment to lung health and her continued partnership over the years.  

Laura Dern Lung Cancer Killer, Smoking Risk Factors

Laura Dern is not one to shy away from difficult topics. On the now-infamous 1997 Ellen episode in which Ellen DeGeneres’ character came out as a lesbian, Dern played Ellen’s love interest. Later, Dern revealed that she couldn’t find work for the next year and a half because of homophobic backlash. In last year’s Wild, the film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of the same name, Dern played Strayed’s mother, Bobbi Lambrecht, who died of lung cancer mere weeks after her diagnosis. Dern’s own grandfather passed away from the disease when she was six; that experience is a major reason why Dern is now focusing on raising awareness about lung cancer.

We sat down with the Oscar-nominated and Golden-Globe-winning actress to discuss her new partnership with the American Lung Association’s “Lung Force” campaign to fight the number-one cancer killer of both men and women. Yes, that’s right: Shockingly, lung cancer takes nearly twice as many women’s lives as breast cancer. Read on for Dern’s words and for more information on this misunderstood disease.

Why is lung cancer a personal issue for you?
“I had a grandfather die of lung cancer. I hadn’t really been that aware of it, [but then] Valerie [Harper] is a dear friend of my mother’s, and that was the first family friend that I had heard about [who had it], and it metastasizing… With grief, I’ll admit that I was really naive about lung cancer in terms of connecting it to [only] smoking… I’m an environmentalist who has done a lot of research for my children’s health. [I was] raised in Los Angeles — one of the top-three smog capitals of the world — and [was] very aware of lung health in terms of what the environment does to us. Yet I didn’t correlate it as a great concern for women [in terms of cancer risk].”

What’s the current level of awareness around the disease?
“Only 1% of women have their lungs on their health radar… The message is loud and clear to all of us that we have to have a mammogram, but I know no woman who’s getting chest x-rays. [Ed. note: Find out if you are a candidate for lung cancer screening here.]

David Lynch Is Basically a Chain-Smoking Cheerleader

David Lynch is a great American cheerleader. The auteur, responsible for oddball classics like Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, apparently struts around sets with an ever-present megaphone in hand, gleefully shouting at his actors throughout scenes, complimenting their nail-color choices, and giving them pet nicknames like “Tidbit” and “Buttercup.” In an interview with W magazine, actresses Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Patricia Arquette, and Hailey Gates all share stories about their time on set with the eccentric filmmaker, painting a portrait of an exuberant, chain-smoking, psycho cheerleader.

All three noted Lynch’s penchant for using a megaphone, even if there’s just “three people in the room,“ Gates, who will star in the upcoming Twin Peaks revival, notes.

Watts, who starred in Mulholland, says it’s like “he’s in the scene with you.”

“He’s on his megaphone, even when he’s like two feet away from you. Such a freak. He’ll often direct you in the scene,” she says, before doing a truly bang-on, snarling impression. “‘Say it again! Rip his head off! Just go for it, Naomi! Just take him by the balls!’ ”

Laura Dern, who starred in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, has had similar experiences, especially when Lynch sat just inches away from her during a love scene for the latter film. Every time she got the giggles during the scene, Lynch would pinch her feet to get her to stop.

“He was always right there . . . as we were rolling, he’d be able to somehow whisper in my ear then go back and hide,” she adds, an anecdote that would be terrifying if transposed to another director. David Lynch—mysterious cheerleader of whimsy and whispering.

Dern also shared Lynch’s nicknames for his stars. She’s Tidbit; Watts is Buttercup; and Arquette is Solid Gold (which, no offense, is clearly the best one of the bunch). Together, they sound like a Lynchian version of The Powerpuff Girls—except their powers are limited to having surreal dreams and always keeping a fresh pack of cigarettes on deck.

Paris Jackson:

Vanity Fair It Girl

Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.

Paris Jackson, photographed in Los Angeles.

Laura Dern 2021: dating, net worth, tattoos, smoking & body measurements

On 10-2-1967 Laura Dern (nickname: Laura ) was born in Santa Monica, Los Angeles , California. She made her 12 million dollar fortune with The Fault in Our Stars, 99 Homes. The actress, director & writer is currently single, her starsign is Aquarius and she is now 54 years of age.

Laura Dern Facts & Wiki

Where does Laura Dern live? And how much money does Laura Dern earn?

Birth Date	10-2-1967
Heritage/origin	American
Ethnicity	White
Religion – believes in God?	Christian
Residence	She owns a house in Los Angeles , California.

Laura Dern Net Worth, Salary, Cars & Houses

Houses

Cars

RELATED:These 10 Whopping Homes & Cars Of Celebrities Look Amazing!

Laura Dern: Single, Dating, Family & Friends

Who is Laura Dern dating in 2021?

Shall the American actress, director & writer Laura Dern find love in 2021?

These Are The 15 Hottest Wives And Girlfriends Of Hollywood!

Family

Family photo of the actress, director & writer famous for The Fault in Our Stars, 99 Homes.

Names of father, mother, kids, brothers & sisters:

Friends

Skin, Hair & Eye Color

This cool beautiful talented actress, director & writer originating from Santa Monica, Los Angeles , California has a slim body & long face type.

Laura Dern – 2021 Dark brown hair & alternative hair style.

50 Celebrities That Were Caught On Tape Without Makeup On!

Height, Weight, Body Measurements, Tattoos & Style

Height	179 cm
Weight	60 kilo	Clothing style	alternative
Favorite colors	pink
Feet size	11
Dress size	6-8
Bra-size	34B
Waist size	63. 5
Buste size	87
Butt size	84
Does Laura Dern have a tattoo?	NoThese 50 Celebrity Tattoos Went Horribly Wrong

Does Laura Dern have official Social Media profiles?

Follow this page to stay up to date about the latest gossip and rumors (plastic surgery, scandals, new photos or videos and so on) of Laura Dern!

BURNED OUT – Chicago Tribune

The first thing you notice watching Gary Merrill in the 1950 movie ”All About Eve” is that smoke pours from his nose like steam from a sidewalk grate on a cold day.

One of the reasons it`s the first thing you notice is that smoking-once a staple in American movies-is something you rarely see on the big screen anymore.

The cigarette is vanishing from movies, just as it is vanishing from society at large, and while there is no question that society at large is better off, the situation in the movies is more problematic.

”All About Eve” is a case in point. It would be hard to imagine this story of treachery and ambition on the New York stage without cigarettes. Although we might laugh at the way they are used to suggest the height of artistic sophistication, we cannot help but marvel at the cigarette dexterity on display.

In one scene, Merrill talks for several minutes, smoke pulsing from his mouth at every word. In his hand is a cigarette, cupped in masculine fashion against his palm. He pauses reflectively, taking a drag from his filterless cigarette, then proceeds.

Across the room, Bette Davis and Hugh Marlowe listen quietly, holding cigarettes of their own and contributing to the thick haze that hangs about the set. Marlowe and Davis hold their cigarettes idly, in deference to the fact that Merrill and his cigarette are holding court at the moment.

It is a scene typical of the way cigarettes once reigned as a powerful stylistic device in Hollywood. They were part of the language of movies. We recognized them as a symbol of how a particular character was feeling. Depending on the setting, the way an actor handled a cigarette could convey toughness, intensity, anxiety, exhaustion, sadness or distress.

As mystery writer Robert B. Parker once noted, there is nothing like a cigarette for making dramatic gestures. Bette Davis knew that. The cigarette was part of her repertoire. If she tilted her head forward, dropped those lids to half mast, and blew a languid stream of smoke in your direction, you knew she was preparing a wilting verbal assault.

A practiced smoker can use the cigarette the way a champion fencer uses the foil. Too often, however, contemporary movies have become a repository for the cigarette-impaired.

Most actors today are visibly uncomfortable with cigarettes, and probably would not use them at all were it not for product placement deals cut with tobacco companies that help pay the production bills.

Elizabeth McGovern is responsible for one of the worst smoking performances in recent screen history. McGovern plays a militant lesbian hooker, and a smoker, in ”The Handmaid`s Tale.” Trapped in a male-dominated, fundamentalist and totalitarian society, her use of cigarettes is an easy symbol of her rebelliousness. She should have smoked with zeal.

Instead, we see McGovern pulling the smoke half-heartedly into her cheeks, then twisting her mouth to one side of her face and blowing the offending fumes off to one side. She doesn`t even inhale!

If there is one thing to be said in McGovern`s favor, it is that at least she put the cigarette in her mouth. Timothy Hutton in ”Q & A” simply holds a lighted cigarette in his hands, without ever bringing the butt to his lips. The cigarette is a vestigial prop, performing no actual function, and used only as decoration.

Cigarettes are also used more and more to denote character flaws. Smoking is being symbolically associated with psychosis, poverty, and antisocial behavior.

Gates McFadden plays a businesswoman in ”Taking Care of Business,”

stereotyped as bitchy, ruthless and cutthroat. She constantly fiddles with a cigarette-obviously considered important to her character. Oddly, she never lights it.

Cigarettes and cigars are also used to evoke a certain period. Most contemporary movies are like new office buildings-smoke free. A period movie, however, requires cigarettes for authenticity; old-fashioned packs are featured prominently in ”Avalon,” set in the 1940s and `50s. Harry Connick Jr. tucks a cigarette behind his ear while playing the piano in the WWII-era movie ”Memphis Belle.” Again, little smoking actually occurs in either movie.

Period pictures are not the only thing keeping screen smoking alive. Tobacco companies pay handsomely for the right to have their products featured prominently in a motion picture.

Blocked from placing their products in television and billboards, manufacturers have turned to movies with a gusto that borders on pathetic desperation.

”Miami Blues” provides one example. Alec Baldwin plays a murderer who goes on a bloody crime spree in Miami. During a jewelry store heist, a cashier grabs a machete and slices off the fingers of Baldwin`s left hand.

Baldwin wraps the fingers in a rag and takes them home. There, he sets about sewing them back on. During the bloody operation, he takes time out for a cigarette. The pack of Merits is positioned conspicuously in the foreground. Killers: Smoke Merit, And Sew Your Own Fingers!

Clearly, the decline in artistic cigarette manipulation has occurred despite the best intentions of the manufacturers.

The more likely culprits are the actors themselves. Like the general population, more of them are quitting. Many have probably never smoked at all. Non-smoker Laura Dern reported that she suffered ”nicotine poisoning” after inhaling three packs of Marlboros in one hour while in character as the chain- smoking Lula in ”Wild at Heart.”

Lives are being lengthened, but a tradition is being lost. What kind of movie would ”Casablanca” have been without a cigarette drooping from the lips of Humphrey Bogart`s world-weary Rick Blaine, without the accomplished smoking wizardry of Paul Henreid, a member of my personal cigarette smokers`

hall of fame?

Henreid was a man who understood the artistic potential of the cigarette. A pro, a true artist. Clean, economical, stylish. A master of the cigarette, and of all the accouterments-case, lighter, match.

Where are the Henreids of tomorrow? Drinking fruit juice and eating sprouts, I`m afraid.

Oh well. We`ll always have Paris.

Likeable Facts About Laura Dern, Hollywood’s Daughter

We’d be hard-pressed to name six living actresses who have had a more acclaimed and memorable career than Laura Dern. Whether she’s appeared in blockbusters like Jurassic Park or arthouse classics like The Master, Dern’s contributions to Hollywood cannot be ignored. With such a lucrative career in film and television that’s still going strong to this day, she’s surely racked up a ton of interesting facts and anecdotes. Here are 42 facts about Hollywood mainstay Laura Dern.

1. A Star is Born

Laura Elizabeth Dern was born on February 10, 1967, in Los Angeles. She is the daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, both of them acclaimed actors in their own right.

2. You Can’t Stop Me!

Despite the occupations of both her parents, they were both unwilling to encourage Dern into following in their footsteps. Allegedly, when she was 11 years old, Dern began contacting agencies to pursue an acting career without the permission of either of her parents.

3. I’ll Do it!

One of the first successes in Dern’s filmography is the bizarre arthouse film Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch. However, she wasn’t the first person considered to appear in her role. Dern was only cast after the mother of Molly Ringwald—famous for being part of the Hollywood group named as “The Brat Pack”—refused to let her daughter appear in a film with such graphic adult content.

4. Matriarchal Household

Laura Dern was only two years old when her parents divorced. Following that incident, Dern was mostly raised by her mother and her maternal grandmother.

5. Runs in the Family

Laura Dern is actually related to quite a few noteworthy American figures. One of her great-grandfathers was George Dern, who served as the Governor of Utah and the Secretary of War under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Additionally, Dern’s great-great-uncle was poet and writer Archibald MacLeish, who was also a Librarian of Congress.

As if that wasn’t enough, the famous playwright Tennessee Williams was her distant cousin.

6. Could Have Fooled Me!

As some of you might remember, Laura Dern gave a much-lauded performance as a blind girl in the film Mask. David Lynch, who cast her in his film Blue Velvet, hadn’t seen that film when he cast Dern, but her co-star, Isabella Rossellini, had. Rossellini was allegedly so convinced by Dern’s performance that she questioned Lynch as to why he’d cast a blind actress to play a role that hadn’t been written as being blind!

7. Traumatized Teenager

In 2017, Laura Dern was one of many people who rallied behind the #MeToo movement which sought to shed light on harassment within the workspace, particularly Hollywood. Dern revealed that she too, was a victim of harassment and assault when she was only 14 years old.

8. Pending 2020 Results…

Laura Dern has been nominated for three Academy Awards. The first was for Lead Actress in the 1991 film Rambling Rose. The other nomination was for her supporting performance in the 2015 film Wild, and most recently, she was nominated in the Supporting category again for Marriage Story.

9. Praise Her with Great Praise

Laura Dern has had more luck with the Golden Globe and the Primetime Emmy Awards than she has at the Oscars (so far). In 1982, she became the youngest Miss Golden Globe up to that point. Since then, Dern was nominated for seven Golden Globes, winning four of them for her performances in Enlightened, Big Little Lies, Recount, Afterburn and Marriage Story.

Dern also won an Emmy for her work on Big Little Lies, and has been nominated for six others throughout her career.

10. Swim at Your Peril

Among the roles that Dern has turned down includes Andy Huben in At Play in the Fields of the Lord. In case you’re wondering why we brought this rejection up in the article, Dern had a very particular reason for not taking the role of Andy. She found out a disturbing detail about filming. She learned that the film production would require her to swim in a river that was filled with parasites.

Surprisingly, the production ended up moving forward when Daryl Hannah agreed to take the role.

11. What a Coincidence!

In 1993, Laura Dern made one of the biggest films of career: The Steven Spielberg-directed Jurassic Park. Interestingly, the very same year that Dern appeared in Jurassic Park, her mother, Diane Ladd, co-starred in the lesser-known film Carnosaur, which is about a geneticist (Ladd) who resurrects dinosaurs and plans to replace humanity with them.

12. Seems Simple Enough!

Given how common her first name is in North American society, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that Dern has portrayed three different characters who are named “Laura. ” The films in question were Downsizing, Certain Women, and J.T. LeRoy.

13. Regular Co-Worker

As of 2019, Laura Dern has worked with avant-garde auteur David Lynch on three of his films and one TV show. She first worked with him on his successful film Blue Velvet in 1986. They reunited for the film Wild at Heart in 1990, and again in 2006 to make the film Inland Empire. Since they seem to have a requirement to work together at least once per decade, Dern also joined Lynch in 2017 for his long-awaited third season of Twin Peaks.

14. Love and Marriage

In 2000, Dern attended a music concert which included American musician Ben Harper. The two were able to meet face-to-face at the concert, sparking a romance. After dating for several years, and having two children in the process, Dern and Harper married in 2005—but their union was doomed to a heartbreaking end.

15. Love’s Dead Between Us

Sadly, Dern and Ben Harper didn’t remain married for long. In 2010, Dern cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for her file for divorce. While the two of them did reunite to try and make it work a second time, they were unsuccessful. Harper and Dern were officially divorced in 2013.

16. Accidental Inspiration

If you’re wondering how David Lynch came up with the title for his 2006 film Inland Empire, look no further than Dern. It started with a conversation she was having with Lynch, when she mentioned that her then-husband was from the region east of Los Angeles County known as Inland Empire. Lynch was apparently unable to focus on the rest of the conversation because he was so fixated on the words “Inland Empire.”

17. It’s a Mystery to Me

It’s fitting that Dern would be cast in the lead role of David Lynch’s Inland Empire, since she was the person who inspired the title. Reportedly, Lynch invited Dern to act in the film by calling her and asking, “Do you want to come and experiment?” Even to this day, Dern maintains that she doesn’t fully know what Inland Empire is really about.

Most people who have seen it would likely agree.

18. Feeling Like a Kid Again

In 2017, Laura Dern co-starred in Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi. As you can imagine, Dern was very excited to work on a Star Wars film, and her excitement got in the way of her performance. During the scenes where her character shoots a blaster, Dern allegedly couldn’t resist saying “Pew!” whenever she pretended to shoot at someone.

To be fair, we can’t imagine we’d have stronger restraint if it was us in her shoes!

19. That’s How Good an Actor I Am

One of Dern’s two Academy Award-nominated performances can be found in the film Wild, where she plays the mother of the protagonist played by Reese Witherspoon. However, in real life, Dern is only nine years older than Witherspoon.

20. New Mom

As of 2019, Dern has two children. Her son, Charles, was born in 2001, while her daughter, Harris, was born in 2004.

21.

You’re a Star!

On November 1, 2010, Dern received her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Anyone interested in looking for it should go to 6270 Hollywood Boulevard.

22. Lucky Me!

Among the actresses that Dern beat out to play Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park were Helen Hunt and Gwyneth Paltrow. Dern herself wasn’t aware of the competition that she’d beat out until she appeared on The Today Show and saw clips of the aforementioned actresses’ auditions.

23. Come Join Us!

In recent years, Dern co-starred in the acclaimed mini-series Big Little Lies alongside actresses Zoe Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon, and Shailene Woodley. Interestingly, Dern was partly responsible not only for Woodley to take a role in this series, but to also continue with acting at all. At the time, Woodley was strongly considering retirement from acting until she got the script for Big Little Lies.

A phone call with Dern, her co-star from The Fault in Our Stars, and encouragement from Dern’s part sealed the deal, and Woodley signed on.

24. Stay Alert, Stay Safe

Dern has used her platform and her status as a well-known actress to support several charities and philanthropic organizations. Dern has advocated for Down syndrome awareness, as well as supporting Healthy Child Healthy World, which was an attempt to raise awareness about the various toxic substances that children can ingest or imbibe without anyone realizing it.

25. A Fair Response

While shooting her confrontation with the velociraptor in Jurassic Park, Dern was so overcome by the look of the model in the scene that she was genuinely sobbing with fear. To be fair, the scene really is terrifying to watch.

26. Does This Count as Method Acting?

One surprising advantage of having an actress for a mother is that she can play your mother on screen as well. Such has been the case with Dern and her mother, Diane Ladd. Ladd has played the role of Dern’s mother five times thus far, on both film and television. To be more specific, this occurred in the television series Enlightenment and the films Wild at Heart, Citizen Ruth, Daddy and Them, and White Lightning.

27. Making Oscar History

While they didn’t play mother and daughter in the film Rambling Rose, Dern and Diane Ladd became the first mother-daughter pair to be Oscar-nominated in the same year for the same film. As of 2020, it’s also the only time that such a specific incident has occurred. Who knows when it will happen again?

28. No Daddy/Daughter Collaboration?

By contrast to her work with her mother, Laura Dern has yet to act alongside her father, Bruce Dern, on film or on television. Though to be fair, given her tense family situation, we can’t blame her for being a bit distant from her father. One connection they do share is that they’ve both worked with Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood.

Bruce co-starred with Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High, and Laura co-starred in A Perfect World alongside Eastwood.

29. Wait, That Was Her?

We already mentioned that Dern portrayed the onscreen daughter of her mother Diane Ladd’s character in White Lightning, but we didn’t mention that White Lightning was Dern’s feature film debut. Admittedly, she didn’t get an onscreen credit for her work on the film, but then again, it was a bit part that she did when she was six years old.

30. A First for Everyone

Another detail about White Lightning, Dern’s feature film debut, was that the film starred actor Burt Reynolds. Reynolds and Dern reunited many years later for Citizen Ruth, which also happened to be the feature film debut of writer/director Alexander Payne.

31. Just This Once

Anyone familiar with Dern’s filmography will know that she prefers playing intellectual, three-dimensional characters in films. However, one outlier is the character she plays in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Dern allegedly struggled with portraying such a sexual character as Lula, but she trusted Lynch to direct her through the film, even breaking her “no nudity” clause for the sake of the film’s story.

32. Sounds Like a Fun Production

Most of us probably don’t want to know just when and where we were conceived by our parents, but in Dern’s case, the time and place is public knowledge. In 1966, Roger Corman released his counterculture biker film The Wild Angels, starring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, and Diane Ladd. Ladd became pregnant during the production of that film.

33. Life Imitating Art

As some of you might recall, Dern’s character in Jurassic Park is mercilessly hit on by Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum. The flirting must have worked wonders because Dern went on to not only date Goldblum but also become his fiancée. However, after two years of engagement, they broke things off.

34. How Tragic…

Dern actually had an older sister who was born in 1961. However, Dern never got to know her older sister, because she drowned at just 18 months.

35. Get a Think Piece Ready!

During a special roundtable event for comedy actresses, Laura Dern pointed out that while she was promoting her new show Enlightened, where she plays a self-destructive and very flawed protagonist, she received a lot of concern from female journalists about whether or not her character would give working women a bad name.

By contrast, Dern pointed out that the men talked about how much they identified with her character and didn’t seem to take any issue with her character’s worst traits.

36. Positive Reinforcement

Dern’s first bit of acting encouragement came from none other than film director Martin Scorsese. Scorsese cast the six-year-old Dern in a bit part in the film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and her scene featured her eating an ice cream cone. Unfortunately for Dern, the scene needed to be filmed 19 times, meaning that she had to go through 19 different ice cream cones!

When she didn’t make a fuss or even get sick, Scorsese reportedly declared that Dern was a natural-born actress in the making.

37. Let’s Give it a Try!

While she was filming Wild at Heart, Dern was encouraged by David Lynch to smoke four cigarettes at once in one big inhale. This action caused her to pass out, much to Lynch’s shock. To be fair, what did he expect?

38.

Milking it for All It’s Worth

Remember when you Tweeted about how that one actor or actress deserved to get an Oscar nomination for a performance they did? Well, that wasn’t enough for Dern’s frequent collaborator, David Lynch. In 2006, he worked with Dern on the film Inland Empire, and Lynch strongly felt that Dern had given one of the best performances of the year.

In true Lynch fashion, he planted himself on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea in Los Angeles. With him was a large poster of Dern’s face with the message “For your consideration” printed on it. He also brought a live cow with him, as well as the cow’s handler Mike Fanning. Unfortunately, this Oscar campaign was unsuccessful, but let nobody say Lynch isn’t memorable!

39. Time to Split

We’ve mentioned that Laura Dern and her mother Diane Ladd were at odds over her acting aspirations, but things finally came to a head when Dern wanted to work on the film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. Diane Ladd objected to her daughter being involved, and Dern went to disturbing lengths to follow her dreams.

She proceeded to emancipate herself from her parents in order to pursue her acting career independently. She was only 13 years old at the time, but the lawsuit resulted in her receiving emancipation.

40. What’s the Real Story?

There remains some contention as to how far Laura Dern had to work against her mother’s wishes to emancipate herself. It might appear that Dern’s mother was staunchly opposed to her daughter pursuing acting, but Dern refuted this claim when she got older. Dern even claimed that both her parents were fully supportive of this decision, which was done purely for professional reasons.

41. How Times Change

In 1994, Dern was one of the celebrities who appeared on episodes of Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom Ellen. Specifically, Dern appeared in the episodes where DeGeneres came out, which was a controversy and a very big deal back in those days. Of course, now, Ellen’s one of the biggest talk show hosts alive, and continues to be an iconic figure in the LGBTQ community.

42. How Dare You Help a Woman Embrace Her True Self?!

Surprisingly, Dern spent years being blackballed behind the scenes in Hollywood for her participation in the episodes of Ellen which dealt with LGBTQ themes. She revealed on Degeneres’s talk show that she didn’t work for a year after the episode aired, but that she has no regrets about her appearance in the ground-breaking show.

And if you think Dern’s case was an isolated incident, think again. Oprah Winfrey also made an appearance in those episodes, and she went on to say that she’s gotten more hate mail towards her for those episodes than the rest of her entire career.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22

Laura Dern Doesn’t Need Our Approval

Laura Dern
Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

vulture.com/_components/clay-paragraph/instances/ck3hrwvfr00b5ypyetdtz83sh@published” data-word-count=”75″>After shooting the 1985 film Smooth Talk, Laura Dern’s co-star Treat Williams, who was twice her age, said something prescient: “I think the next few years are going to be hard for Laura. She’s not as salable a persona. She’s not so easy to categorize. So I see a longer path for her, but ultimately a more rewarding one … There’s something much deeper in her than you can find in most actresses her age.”

This is to say that, when most actors her age zigged, Dern, who was then 16, zagged. She turned down a role as the love interest in a Brat Pack-era movie in favor of doing a smaller part in Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask about a child suffering from lionitis. Instead of completing a BA at UCLA, she took part in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which then led to her role as Lula, the sexually confident woman voraciously in love with Nicolas Cage in Lynch’s follow-up, Wild at Heart. Whether she was playing the drug-addled mother at the center of a national abortion controversy in Alexander Payne’s 1996 film Citizen Ruth, the prickly social-justice warrior Amy Jellicoe in Enlightened, the 2011 HBO series she co-created with Mike White, or the furious one-percenter Renata Klein in Big Little Lies, her choices have always felt slightly ahead of their time.

So it’s fitting that we at Vulture would bestow our first totally real and extremely legitimate honorary degree in culture to Laura Dern. In a one-hour conversation at Vulture Festival in New York, we discussed the path she’s carved out for herself, including her work with Lynch, the fallout from shooting Ellen DeGeneres’ coming-out episode, and imagining what her career would have been like if she had been male.

Congratulations on your degree! Do you feel wiser?
Definitely. When I was 17, I went to college [at UCLA], and on day two, I got cast in a movie. And I was desperate to do this movie. They said, “You can’t get a leave of absence, it doesn’t work that way, you can’t leave.” So I went to the head of the film department. They said, “We want to read the script, we want to hear how long it’s gonna take.” So I gave them all the information, and at the end, they read it and said, “Not only are you giving up your college career if you go make this film, but we can’t believe you would want to do this movie anyway.” That movie was Blue Velvet, and now, when you go to get your master’s in film at that school, three movies are musts — one of them is Blue Velvet. But I never got a degree until now.

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Your mother is Diane Ladd; your father is Bruce Dern; your godmother was Shelley Winters. I assume your childhood was very normal for you, but could you paint a picture of what it was like growing up around really committed and serious actors while becoming interested in acting yourself?
We all normalized our childhoods. You know, we had to. So however complicated it was given the dynamics in the household, we only learn as adults what was going on with deeper understanding. So with that said, I feel like mine was as normal and as crazy as everybody else’s now that we’re grown-ups having dinner. I find myself radically lucky because I was raised not only by people who considered themselves craftspeople at a job, but at a time pre-social-media and pre-actors-on-the-cover-of-magazines. There were models who were on the covers of magazines, and actors who you saw on Johnny Carson. That was it. There was Film Comment or American Film Magazine, and maybe an actor would do an interview and that was it. And so, I never grew up around a glamorous childhood. My parents didn’t make a great living, just like anyone in the arts. The kids of artists in L.A. were not the wealthy kids at school. We were workers. And I’m really grateful for that. It really prepared me for an understanding of the ebb and flow of the career of an artist.

What do you make of the shift in pop culture powered in part by stan culture on social media. Actors are on the covers of magazines now. Do you think it has been bad for the craft?
I wouldn’t say it’s bad for the craft, but it can be bad for an individual, right? It’s hardest for a really young person to come into great success now than maybe before because our standards have changed. We’re now measuring success on a number of followers. We’re having conversations with 14-year-olds who are famous from a Netflix or HBO show about branding and marketing them. That, for a young artist, is a real slippery slope, and I’m very impressed at the people who can navigate it healthfully. In whatever any of us do — journalists, actors, writers — if you’re in the arts, it’s a thing you don’t measure. There’s not a finish line. You don’t get graded; you just gotta do your thing, and there’s no right or wrong in this elusive exploration of the truth. That felt really cool. And now suddenly, it’s like, “Oh, well they only have this many,” or “it only made that much,” or “there’s only that viewership, and well it’s not paid whatever.”

You always seemed to have this really precocious clarity about the work you wanted to do. In an interview in 1986, you said, “I’m getting quite a few offers, but many of them are teen exploitation films, which I don’t want to do. There are a couple things that I’d love to do, but I’m still a little young to play 30. I can’t do those Meryl Streep-type roles yet. What matters most is I play someone totally different than what I’ve done before. I always want to play bright people. I’d like to play someone involved in politics, sort of a woman’s version of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and I’d like to play a strung-out drug addict who sleeps with a different guy every night. My God, I’d like to play everything.” I’m curious to hear you talk about what your expectations were at that age, and how that compares with what has happened in reality. Did it meet your expectations? Has it yet to? Did your expectations change? 
All of that and more. It’s funny — what’s naïve when we’re 16, 17, and what is still us. I still try to play things I’ve never played, or really want to play the opposite the next time. It was a particular passion of mine at that age because it was the first time I started talking to my dad about career choices as an actor. He felt burdened by having been typecast and pigeonholed because he was the guy who killed John Wayne in this film The Cowboys. He was on the cover of Life magazine, “The Man Who Kills John Wayne.” He loved it and it was great, but then he was the bad guy in movies for a while. So he gave me that cautionary tale. That has really served me when I’ve been lucky enough to have a choice.

But where has it not? I don’t know. I think there’s a sea change, culturally, that we’re all waking up to. Many have been awake for a very long time, but as a culture, we’re waking up together. It’s about representation and gender and diversity parity, and we’re having these conversations in the arts, but they’re having these same conversations in marketing. And the reason they are isn’t because [of] #MeToo. “We’re all awake now. We want to do the right thing.” No, it’s because the consumer is saying to everyone, “We want to buy ourselves. We want to buy our own stories. Whether we’re watching TV or we’re buying an anti-wrinkle cream, we don’t really want a 19-year-old who’s also been airbrushed to sell it to us. I want a 60-year-old woman!”

I’m not 60. it’s not a bad thing, I’m just not ready yet. [Laughs.]

What were some of the things you turned down, when you were trying to manage the limited choices you had at the time?
Turned down, or hoped I wouldn’t get, even though I auditioned for them. You know what I mean? There were those moments too.

vulture.com/_components/clay-paragraph/instances/ck3hrydx3002a3h671umjlvnr@published” data-word-count=”37″>Like what?
Well, never say names. Only because, like, it was meant to go to that actor, and I feel like then it muddies the water of like — don’t you guys hate that, when somebody’s like, [scoffs]?

No, I love tea.
I mean, it’s interesting, but it’s also a little mean. “Oh, it’s so interesting she did that, but I turned that down.”

Well, if you say it like that!
I read an actress’s interview recently; she did say it like that. It was like, You don’t have to let everybody know how many things you’ve been offered! Listen, hand-me-downs are awesome! But definitely there were choices. The one biggest choice was, there was a Brat Pack-era film where I got offered the girlfriend part, the lead female. It was a big deal, and it was going to be great in terms of success. That was clearly the role. And then I got offered this small role to work with Peter Bogdanovich in Mask. And if I didn’t have my parents, I wouldn’t have known how lucky I was to work with Peter Bogdanovich. Because the agent goes, “Well that’s no money; that’s lots of money.” And you’re a kid and you don’t know for sure. I was 15. Those kinds of choices really helped shape the trajectory of where I hoped to go and partly where I am now. But in the quote, it’s clear I want to play everything. I have no judgment, and I think that’s true. I’ve loved all my characters, even the drug addict who slept with a different guy every night.

Citizen Ruth?
Yeah. And I don’t think, at 17, I realized just what I was asking for. I was like, “No, she takes cute drugs.” With other actresses we talked about some of the parts where it was like, “she’s so cute!” while she’s whoring herself out or whatever — in an adorable way. The always forgiving girlfriend who has no voice in the relationship, and he goes and sleeps with like, the nasty girl, but then he comes back to her, and she’s so lucky — I was ready to play [those kinds of parts] because I was auditioning for everything. But something inside you is like Ugh, this is not the story I want to tell, because this doesn’t feel true. 

Citizen Ruth
Photo: Miramax Films

You were emancipated at the age of 17 …
Sixteen, and it’s an uninteresting story, because everybody’s like, “Oh my God!” The drugs and alcohol in her home was so painful for her that she had to flee or whatever. Because it’s used properly for teenagers that need to get away. But mine was honestly about having the ability to work and make my own decisions in terms of work and hours and all of that.

I read that your roommate was Marianne Williamson at the time?
That’s true, yeah. Amazing.

What was that like?
Amazing. Marianne was teaching A Course in Miracles at the time, and in our living room there were prayer group sessions and everything. She is such a fierce advocate for not only the truth and cutting through things to find the truth, but also, focusing on healing. She should be a voice in this country because we need voices like that. In our living room, she helped start Project Angel Food, which was extraordinary. It was the mid-’80s and people were dying of AIDS. She’s always been on the frontlines like that. She’s radical and hilarious. I was 17, she was in her 30s, I think, at the time. So it was like, amazing and hysterical that my overprotective mother, who was like, “You’re gonna go out there and find a roommate and be on your own, and I don’t know if you’re ready.” And I was like, “Mom, trust me.” And I was like, “Ahhh, I’m gonna get my own apartment, I’m gonna be wild,” and I basically roomed up with a minister! Who was very free and helped me grow as an individual, but it wasn’t like, you know, ragers every night.

Do you support her candidacy for president?
I support every candidate for president in the Democratic party right now in that I like it loud, I like conversation happening, and I think the more it’s happened with a number of people as opposed to focusing on our one shot, the dialogue is getting more honest. As we’re educating ourselves, it’s separating out what feels true and what we need. I had the good fortune of meeting Beto [O’Rourke] recently, listening to him speak in an intimate environment. He’s so brilliant and thoughtful. We also need his voice in this country. So if someone asked me, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could go Avengers on this?” I would agree. I just want there to be a candidate, and at the Democratic National Convention, literally the person says, “Thank you, I accept the candidacy,” and the curtains open up, “and I’m bringing all these folks to D.C. with me, and this is my cabinet. And there’s eight of us, and we are the loudest voices here right now, and we’ve got a lot to clean up, so let’s do it together.” Wouldn’t that be cool? ’Cause there are several great minds. I know we’ve all felt it. We’re watching the debates and we’re like, maybe that person isn’t president, but God, they’d be an amazing steward of the environment; what an incredible person to get their head around education in this country. All these voices are interesting in the right position.

I was thinking about films like Smooth Talk, Wild at Heart, and Rambling Rose that you did when you were younger, and how your characters are often attracted to the danger of their own sexuality, but also this male figure. In an interview in 1990, shortly after Smooth Talk and Wild at Heart you said you felt that your characters Connie and Lula, were both in control in those scenes. But they’re both scenes of male aggression. I’m curious if you still feel that way looking back.
No, I don’t. I think they were doing everything to try to make themselves in control. And so I was right in saying that because that’s what I felt for the character. But as an audience, no. I turned 16 right around when we had just started Smooth Talk, and I was probably 17 when it was released. So, I was still at an age when I was naïve enough to miss the movie I was making. It was based on a Joyce Carol Oates short story that is incredibly dark, and she’s clearly sexually assaulted at the end of this short story. It’s clear she is never coming home, either. And it’s devastating. Amazingly, I felt that the exploration of the character’s control was there, and I was being directed by a woman who is a radical and really interesting documentary filmmaker, Joyce Chopra from New York. So that was what her focus was — this girl’s need to feel all-powerful while this man is coaxing her out of her home. Is it a 30-minute scene?

Yes, it’s a 30-minute scene at her house, where he’s trying to get her to come out and take a drive with him.
Which is amazing. And at the end, she finally decides to go with him. In her mind, to protect herself. How does she not? Either they’re going to pull her out of that house or she’s going to choose to go. But I didn’t understand that then. I thought it was like, this guy’s attracted to her and he really likes her and he was coaxing her and he was flirting. There’s another guy in the car. The mother in me missed it. Now I’m a mother.

When it comes to Wild at Heart, it is interesting. It is an assault. Absolutely an assault. It’s so violent. [Willem Dafoe] plays the most frighteningly hideous character I’ve ever seen on screen. I’m terrified of him still, and he’s super nice. I never touch him, and I have an orgasm. That’s the David [Lynch] exploration of it. He was looking at how a woman’s going to try to take control and set a boundary. They’re weird, complicated scenes, and I think differently about them now, because I’m a grown up. But both of them were deeply thought out and deeply discussed with me in a really protective, generous way, by both filmmakers.

From left: Laura Dern in Wild at Heart and Smooth Talk. Photo: Samuel Goldwyn FilmsPhoto: American Playhouse

From left: Laura Dern in Wild at Heart and Smooth Talk. Photo: Samuel Goldwyn FilmsPhoto: American Playhouse

It’s also interesting to put them in context with the 2018 film The Tale, which was based off of the filmmaker Jennifer Fox’s experience reflecting back on what she thought was a consensual relationship when she was 13. She comes to realize, as an adult, that it’s not. Did doing that film help you recontextualize certain scenes you did, or your career?
I mean, certainly it added to it. Life changes our stories. Like, oh now I’m 40, and he wasn’t a nice person. I actually forever have justified that behavior and said, “No you don’t understand,” like “He came from addiction” or “That was complicated,” and you sit with a girlfriend who is now 40 and say, “No, I was abused. That’s what happened in that relationship.” We all have those stories, whether they’re ours or our friends, our lovers, our sisters. We now are grown-ups looking back. So life has taught me a little bit more about boundaries in what I would say was a pretty boundaryless world — an artist’s world anyway — and starting young and seeing a lot, and luckily being protected. But still seeing a lot.

A couple of years ago we celebrated the 20th anniversary of Ellen DeGeneres’s “The Puppy Episode,” in which she came out, both as a character on the show, and as a person to the country. You played Susan, who is an out lesbian and helps Ellen realize she’s gay. You’re the focus of attraction. It’s a pretty pivotal character, and I wanted to hear the backstory of how that happened, and your own reaction to the ask.
Greatest thing I could’ve ever been part of, honestly. An incredible honor. She was a big fan of Citizen Ruth, and she asked me, would I come join this effort? Not just to play a role, because there were several of us. Oprah, who played her therapist in the episode, obviously the cast of her show. I was excited. I didn’t think twice about it. It was a great opportunity. And then the calls started coming in once I’d said yes, from a couple of advisers in Hollywood who were out gay men, [telling me] to not do it. A lot of people in my life really worried. And I was like, “This is ridiculous.” This is where I grew up in a bubble and didn’t realize we weren’t there yet or something. The first time I became aware was, Oprah and I were having a snack, and suddenly a flood of cops swarmed the set and the stage while we were rehearsing. They’re like, “There’s been a bomb threat, we’re sweeping the stage.” And they start literally rushing us off the stage.

We only did it for what, ten days? We all spent the next couple of years really struggling in work and safety. It was radical to experience that. It was the only time I ever experienced having to have to have full security detail. But what was amazing, which I will never forget, that when she looked in my eyes, she said it was the first time she said “I’m gay” out loud. We didn’t rehearse it, so when she said it to me, and was looking in my eyes and holding my hands and I felt her shaking … the gift — it makes me want to cry — the gift of that, the intimacy of what that means, was such insight for me. And I’ll carry it for the rest of my life. It’s shaped and continues to shape who I am as an advocate, as an activist, as a parent. It’s a profound thing when you see someone bring their truth, but also all the layers of shame and fear that have been put onto you because of feeling like the other, whatever your experience is. So I’m forever grateful.

My understanding is that you didn’t work for a year after that. Was that the most significant dry spell in your career?
It was significant. It was significant because I was doing successful independent movies, and, only months before that, I was in Jurassic Park, the most successful movie ever. So it was like, you’re being offered this, you’re being offered that — and it just stopped. Which is kind of wild. By good fortune of the long path of a career, you can look back and say, how great to have it be felt, how backward we are. I took time off when I had my son, and I feel like, in a way, it gave room for less opportunity. I will say, for women, it’s hard to take time off by choice, because then you feel like you have to start all over when you’re coming back to something.

From left: Ellen DeGeneres and Dern in the coming-out episode of Ellen.
Photo: ABC

Did you ever wonder what your career would be like if you were male?
I had done a screen test for a movie with a great actor who I really admired. I was in my early 20s, and he said, you remind me of Charles Laughton. I was taken aback. I didn’t love that until I realized that was just the most incredible compliment ever, as I learned more about Laughton and his ability to transform and play so many different characters. So many of us females would’ve had a lot more opportunity a lot younger to play the mess.

I remember when I started doing press [for Enlightened], my first interview was with a female journalist, and she was like, “Ew, how are you comfortable playing someone so ugly? Like are you sure you want to do that? And how did HBO decide to do that? I mean she’s angry all the time, she’s so unlikable. Anger on a woman, I don’t know.” And while she’s saying this, we had just started the other show on HBO, which she then touted as extraordinary, [starring] this sexy iconic male. His name was Tony Soprano. But I was mad, so I was gross. That’s incredible, isn’t it? So, yeah. I think I could’ve been Tony Soprano if I were a guy. Or Tom Hanks, who can be affable and a beast and adorable. It doesn’t matter. There’s much more fluidity in the career of a male actor.

Do you feel like Enlightened happened too soon?
Yes. The idea was to make it, and then we’d all wake up and we’d see our cultural apathy so that we never again would let them get away with anything. This character [Amy Jellicoe] came to mind when I was working on a film about the recount, and I was like, “No one’s getting in the streets, no one’s irate, what’s happening? Where have we gone, where’s our determination, our marching, fighter spirit?” That feeling was like, well, who does? Who burns all bridges, becomes a whistle-blower, doesn’t care if her family hates her? She may be complicated at home, but she will get in the face of corporate America and say, “No more, I’m exposing you.” That was the idea. And the people who enjoyed it were like, “Oh yeah, we’re there.” But now, this year, this moment particularly, everywhere I go, people are bringing it up, like, “Oh my God, I just found Enlightened, we are Amy Jellicoe. We are all Amy.” There’s more fighter spirit and revolution awake in us because we really are, in the quote of Paddy Chayefsky from Network, mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore. And that’s great news. That’s why Enlightened is a good fever-pitch place to go when you’re feeling like her, which I do a lot of the time.

I think I could’ve been Tony Soprano if I were a guy.

Would you bring the show back?
We talked about it. [Co-creator] Mike [White] and my fantasy always was three seasons, and we only did two. There was a real mapped-out third place to go. It was a very different show, which now is very normal. But it seemed so radical only a few years ago. The bummer was we got cancelled based on live ratings, because that’s the way we measured TV. And a year later, we were measuring TiVo ratings. And now, luckily, all of it’s in the algorithm, and so all these companies can know success based on the fact that some people watch it eight months later, some people binge-watch.

About six months later, we had an incredibly successful show. Three months after the decision, Time magazine named it the best television show ever. And it was just crazy. And then all the other reviews came out with top ten shows, and it was number one. Over Breaking Bad, which was a masterpiece, and shows that had immense success and many seasons. But if Amy were a male character …

You’ve worked with David Lynch over the course of a long period of time. How has your relationship evolved since you first met 30 years ago?
I was 17 on Blue Velvet. It just gets better and better. He’s incredible! He’s everything you want him to be. I’ll tell you the best story. We had one of the great nights of my life last weekend, where we gave out the honorary Oscars this year: the Governors Awards. David Lynch received one, and myself, Kyle MacLachlan, and Isabella Rossellini gave him his Oscar. The whole room goes insane. The quintessential moment I’ve had with David in all of these years was, he was holding his Oscar, and we walked back for a smoke. He needed a smoke. And as we went outside, he was holding it and I said, “How do you feel?” and he goes, “Wow, this is so pretty. But you know, we’re just lucky.” Which people say, you know. And I was accepting it in the way I’ve heard other people say it. He goes, “I mean, Tidbit, they’re not our ideas. We’re just lucky if we catch them.” And I’m just like, “Yeah, well, that’s David Lynch.” They’re not our ideas. Things move through us. We didn’t make them up. I just think that’s really beautiful.

So when he begins Twin Peaks: The Return, for instance, does he just call you up? Do you go to the Chateau Marmont and does he just pitch you, “Hey, I wanna bring the show back”?
You go to his house for a cappuccino, and he says, “You’re gonna do something, I can’t tell you what it is. But I need you to find a leopard coat from a thrift store, and you want a yellowish-white lipstick.” I was like, “Okay, how do you want my hair.” And then he started to describe my hair, and I was like, “What is it for?” “I can’t tell you!” “Is it a movie?” “I can’t tell you!” Um, “What does the character …” [Laughs.] So that’s where it began. And I got to the thrift shop, and I came back and I tried wigs on for him, and then we started building. Then he gave me a sense of my scenes, then I realized who I was playing, which was kind of fantastic. And to play a character that was so known from Twin Peaks …

But never seen.
But never seen, was amazing. I basically just spend my time saying “fuck you” a lot. And it was amazing, and to be back with David and Kyle and, you know, Naomi Watts. It’s a family. We all get to just be together, whenever he’s ready to play again.

That’s the most you’ve acted in scenes with him, right? What was that like?
So intense. It was amazing and fun and hilarious, and we had my favorite moments in it. But we also had this very violent moment together, and I have to tell him this very emotional monologue and then get shot at the end of it. We did it in one take, and I just like was locking eyes with him, telling a long story to him of how this thing happened. It was so wild to be looking in the eyes of the person who’s been directing me, right here, for so many years.

I did want to get your thoughts on the conversation Martin Scorsese began when he said Marvel movies aren’t cinema. As someone who has done franchise films and independent work, where you do you fall on what’s happening in movies? In some ways, it feels like an actor needs to do both to stay relevant.
Well, he’s a genius and he can say whatever he wants. And I will listen. They did that beautiful documentary about the ’70s, and at end, he said, “I miss the people.” I would think that’s what he’s speaking to in the comment. There’s a lot of worry about people not going to the cinema for the people. I mean we’re here promoting this movie, Marriage Story, and it’s such a beautiful movie, and I have loved being at the screenings so that I can be in the cinema with other people, sharing the heartbreak of longing and divorce and a love story and childhood and all the things that Noah explores. The reminder of sitting in a cinema, just to have this churchlike experience of experiencing something together. And a spectacle is different. It gives you a different experience. A horror film, a Marvel film, a Star Wars film. And I love all of it. Being in Star Wars, are you kidding? Having the great pleasure, as an actor, as a human being, to see Adam Driver in Marriage Story and Adam Driver play Kylo Ren? I want him to do both of those things. He’s brilliant. And they’re brilliant in totally different ways.

But, if I may, one thing he points out that is important is, you know, franchises buy out your multiplex, and then, yes there are films we see at home, but we don’t want to lose church. We have this film Little Women coming out, Christmas Day! We want to go and have that experience with that shared collective. I do think that’s a big worry. And I’m so grateful for Netflix, who is protecting the Paris Theatre and making sure that their auteurs are getting the release they want, which was very important to Noah, very important to Marty Scorsese. Our movie’s going to be in theaters for a month, guaranteed, before it livestreams. So, we’re all finding what the balance is, and how to do this, so that we can keep these stories alive forever, and movie theaters alive forever.

Last question. An easy one. Which Big Little Lies character are you?
I probably was Jane, and if we ever did it again and it gets in me even a little bit more, I’m becoming Renata. Because I so agree with her on so many fronts. We all need Renata in us somewhere. That line, “I will not not be rich” — people come up to me all the time quoting [it] now, but they say it as though it’s theirs. I’ve had other lines from movies, where people are like, “Oh I love when you said dadadadada,” or, “when your character did that.” They come up and go, “I will not not be rich!” in my face. I’m like, “You needed that. It’s not mine, it’s yours.” It’s everybody’s, which is what’s great about Renata. She’s waking up the things we want to say but don’t.

Alexander Payne’s first feature film Citizen Ruth came out in 1996 starring Dern as the title character — a deadbeat mother who has left her children in the care of her brother. In the movie she gets arrested for huffing drugs and passing out in public. At the hospital she learns she’s pregnant, and the judge offers her leniency if she gets an abortion. She then gets caught as a symbolic fight between anti-abortion Christian fundamentalists and pro-choice activists.

Williamson started Project Angel Food in 1989 as an outreach program dedicated to helping people with terminal illnesses like HIV.

Dern was 16 when she shot Smooth Talk, a coming-of-age film about her character Connie. The film centers around a 30-minute scene between herself and Arnold (played by Treat Williams, who is twice her age), who has been stalking her and shows up at her house while she’s home alone. His friend is in the car as he keeps trying to get her to come and take “a drive.” In the end, she agrees.

Wild at Heart, released in 1990, is Dern’s second collaboration with David Lynch, co-starring Nicolas Cage. There’s a complicated scene between her character Lula and Bobby Peru, played by Willem Dafoe, where he touches her despite her protestations and she orgasms.

In the 1990 interview with Gary Indiana she said, “I think he actually did just take her for a drive. I also think both Lula and Connie are in control in those scenes.”

Dern played Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State of Florida during the 2000 presidential election who played a significant role in declaring the election for George W. Bush in the 2008 HBO film Recount.

Tidbit is a nickname that Lynch uses for Dern. He also calls Naomi Watts Buttercup and Patricia Arquette Solid Gold.

Dern is referring to the 2003 documentary A Decade Under the Influence about the rise of New Hollywood when American filmmaking shifted from the studio system to the director as auteur.

Both The Irishman and Marriage Story received a limited theatrical release preceding their online debuts on Netflix.

Director who simply does not exist – Vlast – Kommersant

Lynch was awarded the Golden Lion for a successful cinematic career, never receiving it for any of the films

Photos: AFP

“INTERNAL EMPIRE” by David Lynch appears on the Russian screen. The director insists that the title be written in capital letters. Andrey Plakhov wondered if the creator of the picture, who received the honorary “Golden Lion” for his career at the last festival in Venice, has enough reason for that.

The Polish-Gypsy Novel

The plot of “THE INTERNAL EMPIRE” baffled even the devoted fans of Lynch. They did not manage to catch and make the property of an intelligible retelling. Actress Niki (Laura Dern) moves into a luxurious house where the servants speak Polish and everything is imbued with an “alien” atmosphere. A neighbor comes to meet, speaks with a cruel Eastern European accent, and there is something specifically unpleasant in her appearance – if not a nervous tic, then some kind of deformation in her face, immediately reminiscent of the episodic characters of “Rosemary’s Child” by Roman Polansky, who are, as you know, agents of the devil.The guest reports that the film, in which Nicky was invited (for the sake of filming, she filmed this Polish house “with the past”) and which is based on the “old gypsy legend”, had already started filming earlier, but the leading actors were killed.

Nicky listens to the story of a neighbor with growing tension, her face (you need to know the plastic of Laura Dern) is ugly distorted. Probably, she, who married for convenience and lost her little son, had been at odds with herself before, and the visit of a neighbor awakened dormant fears and feelings of guilt.She is haunted by obsessive visions: a woman crying in front of the TV, a devil child. However, perhaps all this is happening not with Nicky herself, but with the heroine she plays. Or these images came from the experience of people involved in the previous, and not filmed film, go figure it out.

“INTERNAL EMPIRE” filmed with a digital camera offers many more mysteries. There are many characters of different nationalities, from Poles to Japanese, who do not play a special role in the plot. At the same time, the director filmed and then cut out the scene with the star Nastassja Kinski.Several years ago, David Lynch, invited by Polish film fans, came to a film studio in Lodz and fell in love with this country with its dreamy, irrational mood, mysteriously flowing gray light, unique architecture and stunning young actresses without Californian brilliance, but with Slavic beauty and ” snake charm “.

Lynch was repeatedly asked to decipher the associative array of “INTERNAL EMPIRE”, for example, an episode with three

rabbit-men and a sharp laugh that is periodically heard in the room.The director answers all such questions: “A film is a film, it has many abstractions and its own inner meaning, which cannot be put into words. Cinema itself is a wonderful, perfect language, quite suitable for communication. Let everyone find their answer. Therefore, I prefer to refrain from commenting. Imagine that you are dealing with a book whose author has died, and there is no one to ask. Consider that I simply do not. ”

Surgeon and abortion victim

“Inner Empire” will bring many pleasant minutes to the viewer who loves to find secret meanings and decipher vague symbols

Photos: AFP

Lynch’s childhood was spent in the forests of Montana, his father was a naturalist-researcher.It was he who intrigued his son with painful secrets of living nature. Art for the future filmmaker was associated with painting, which he studied in Boston and Austria, where he traveled to watch live at his beloved Oskar Kokoschka. In the 60s and 70s, Lynch experimented with moving images and sound, and then for seven years filmed “Eraserhead” – “the last masterpiece of the avant-garde”, a film about disgusting embryos, premature freaks, excrement and waste of post-industrial civilization. Lynch at that time experienced a genuine delight in the female body, and when one of his producers had a gynecological operation, he begged her to send him her uterus.

In 1980, when Lynch’s first studio film “The Elephant Man” appeared, he strongly opposed any rational interpretation of this work. “I don’t know why it is believed that art should have meaning. After all, everyone has somehow come to terms with the fact that life has no meaning,” he said, not without coquetry. But this could not prevent numerous interpretations. In “The Elephant Man” – the story of a gentle human soul suffering from the fact that its corporeal shell seems ugly to people – they saw an apology for a new fashion for screen mutants and a treatise on the then emerging political correctness.

In 1986, “Blue Velvet” appeared, playing the role of the central aesthetic and ethical provocation of the decade. Young Jeffrey (Kyle McLachlan – future agent Cooper) found a severed human ear in the grass and tried to solve the riddle behind it. Singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) sang a viscous erotic song “Blue Velvet” and got a thrill from the humiliation that psychopath and sadist Frank (Dennis Hopper) subjected her to. Another drug-ritual song was sung by Dick Stockwell with the powdered face of a homosexual clown.Jeffrey got into this warm company, who at first acted as an “agent of the forces of good”, then as an unwitting observer, and finally let evil draw him into its vicious circle.

Blue Velvet (later recognized as a reference film by Lynch) was rejected by the Cannes Film Festival for puritanical reasons. But in 1990, an American director brought the film Wild Heart to the French Riviera and plucked the Palme d’Or. The whistle of the opponents was drowned in the delight of the fans, who welcomed Lynch and his “luminous girlfriend” Isabella Rossellini to the stage (this was one of their last joint appearances before the breakup).The heroes of the movie Sailor and Lula (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) are the true children of American pop mythology. Behind Sailor is the myth of Elvis Presley, behind Lula is the figure of Marilyn Monroe. Both represent the “purity of vice”, not tainted by psychoanalysis, America, where the West was ideology and California was heaven. Heroes of “Wild Heart” and go to California, but never get to the goal, but on the way they give free rein to their wild hearts, turn into passionate lovers, then into cruel barbarians, but at the same time surprisingly retain their innocence.

1990 was almost officially declared the “year of Lynch” (it was not for nothing that the superstitious director did not tie his shoelaces before the results of the festival were announced). “Wild Heart” brings together Lynch contrasts – quivering mysticism and pop frenzy, childish belief in miracles and intolerable sophistication of vice, sophistication of stylization and attraction to kitsch. Like none of the previous ones, this Lynch film evokes an instant vibration in the audience.

This is where the classic Lynch ends. The series effect “Twin Peaks” (about the glorious American town where Agent Cooper investigates the murder of high school student Laura Palmer and along the way discovers a lot of very interesting things) belongs to a different territory and a different era.It is no coincidence that Lynch spewed out the main fruits of his fantasies precisely in the 80s, when the old model of culture (the classic plus or minus avant-garde) was replaced in record time by another, based on the expansion of mass culture. The avant-garde (and its heir to modernism) was aborted from the long-suffering bosom of culture.

Lynch is one of those who brilliantly performed this operation, but he also became an unwitting victim of an abortion when the monstrous fetuses took on their own life and overpopulated the planet. Lynch brilliantly expressed the postmodern mutation of flowers: too green grass, too scarlet blood, too blue velvet and a defiantly blue rose.However, over time, mutations began to be taken for granted. Having played the role of the dictator of style for an entire decade, Lynch has once again turned into a lone wolf, devouring hamburgers in the American way and processing them into fantastically beautiful chimeras.

Vanguard Conservative

“Wild at Heart” sung by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern won the Cannes Jury for an exquisite combination of viciousness and innocence

Photo: ZUMA PRESS

At one time, Lynch was called a critic of the secret vices of American society, they even talked about the “lynching trial”.A beautiful image, however, is meaningless. Lynch paints a one-story America with caustic irony, but this does not diminish his admiration for its natural power and pioneering barbarism. Who could expect from the avant-garde of the Lynch spill such a film as “A Simple Story” (1999) – about an old veteran who plowed half of America on his antediluvian tractor to meet with a seriously ill brother, forget the old feud and sit together under the starry sky. According to the director’s daughter, “he loves Reagan, he loves America, he is very intolerant of her enemies.”David Lynch, like Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks, embodies the quite barbaric gastronomic tastes of his country: coffee with donuts, steamed broccoli, cheese and burnt bread.

And at the same time, it is Lynch, oddly enough, remains the last avant-garde emperor in the sense that the twentieth century left behind. Although the late Leonid Trauberg said he had never seen anything more disgusting in life than Blue Velvet, Lynch’s Gothic rides can be somewhat likened to the experiments of FEKS (the avant-garde film factory where Trauberg worked in his youth with Grigory Kozintsev).And the further in recent years Lynch moves away from the mainstream, the more obviously he returns to himself of the era of avant-garde youth. This was already noticeable in the director’s previous film “Mulholland Drive”, which is also related to the morals of Hollywood, but moved far from the topic into the space of total mysticism. This also determines the character of “INTERNAL EMPIRE”: the picture brings the main themes of the visionary director to the utmost concentration. This is a catastrophic movie: the devil’s winds are blowing, the city streets are filled with homeless people and drunks, and a person’s attempt to hide in his “inner empire” fails, disintegration and split consciousness await him.

True, this new phase of Lynch’s creativity no longer determines the basic trends in art, and the territory that he conquered and is settling in remains his personal fiefdom. In a sense, Lynch today is an emperor without an empire, in honorary exile, from where he is periodically summoned to reward for his previous services. In this territory, pride of place has been given to new filming technologies and related media – television and the Internet.

Lynch claims that many of his previous films have had similar sources of inspiration.Blue Velvet was born from the color sensation: red mouth, green eyes, piercing light, atmosphere and color scheme of Edward Hopper’s work. Mulholland Drive began with a miniseries and INNER EMPIRE started off as a development for the director’s website at http://www.davidlynch.com. Lynch calls digital DV filming a “fairy tale” and promises never to return to traditional cinematography.

Although the world of Lynch’s films seems gloomy and dark, his image as a person is completely different. He dresses in light-colored shirts and suits and always looks flawlessly correct.With age, with the transformation of “monster” and “barbarian” into “classic”, this became the main component of his image. To those who doubt the naturalness of this pose, Lynch says: “Don’t forget, I’m making a fantastic movie. their speech is normal and even primitive. I love daydreaming, sitting in a comfortable chair during the day. I smoke, I love French red wine, and instead of drugs I resort to meditation. “

Oscar 2020: who will win?

Almost everything is known, but there may be surprises.

Tonight, from the ninth to
the tenth of February, the 92nd Academy Awards will take place. She will end the season
film awards and, apparently, will be quite predictable – at least
in most major categories. We give the layouts along with the coefficients
bookmaker Bwin and
we tell you where the voting members of the film academy can surprise.

Best Actor

• Joaquin Phoenix (Joker) 1.02
• Adam Driver (The Marriage Story) 17.00
• Leonardo DiCaprio (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) 34.00
• Jonathan Price (The Two Popes) 67.00
• Antonio Banderas (Pain and Glory) 67.00

In October 2019, after
release of “Joker”, we wrote that the new image of the criminal prince of Gotham will become
cult, regardless of the success at the box office and the number of collected
awards. The forecasts were confirmed, but from a commercial point of view, the project
turned out to be incredibly successful.Todd Phillips’ film became the first in the R category to gross over a billion dollars. Have
“Joker” 11 Oscar nominations, for this role Joaquin Phoenix will receive his first
statuette (on the fourth attempt).

Phoenix took all awards for
preceding the Oscar ceremonies, he utters from the stage memorable and
provocative speeches, he is at the peak of popularity. It was originally assumed that
“Joker” may turn out to be too gloomy for academics, they talked about a possible
victory for Adam Driver or even Antonio Banderas, but now there is no doubt.

This “Joker” will also become a cult. In any case,

About the movie comics, which changes the rules.

tk.media

Best Actress

• Renee Zellweger (Judy) 1.05
• Scarlett Johansson (Marriage Story) 10.00
• Cynthia Erivo (Harriet) 26.00
• Saoirse Ronan (Little Women) ) 34.00
• Charlize Theron (“Sensation”) 51.00

Forgotten about Renee Zellweger, Rene
Zelleweger was written off, but 16 years after winning Best Actress
supporting “for” Cold Mountain “the actress returns for the first time to receive
award for the main role.Rene already has a Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG awards, so
that even the absence of “Judy” in the nomination for the best film will not be a problem
(this gives Scarlett Johansson minimal chances, but there will be no sensation).

Academics love to reward for
the roles of real people: Julia Roberts was noted for how she
played by Erin Brockovich, Gary Oldman – for Winston Churchill, Meryl Streep – for
the embodiment on the screen of the image of Margaret Thatcher.
Judy Garland is a Hollywood icon, and this film was originally imprisoned for
Oscar.Zellwerger did not disappoint. Charlize Theron should be especially offensive – she is not
find out under make-up in “Sensation”, but even the topical topic #MeToo this time did not help.

Renee Zellweger in Judy. Photo: LD ENTERTAINMENT AND ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

Best Supporting Actor

• Brad Pitt (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) 1.03
• Joe Pesci (The Irishman) 17.00
• Al Pacino (The Irishman) 21.00
• Volume Hanks (“A Beautiful Day Next Door”) 34.00
• Anthony Hopkins (“Two Dads”) 51.00

“It was really
difficult role. The guy who smokes weed, takes off his shirt and conflicts with
wife, ”jokes Brad Pitt. It seemed that the actor could receive a nomination for “K
stars ”, but with her he would have no chance of winning. And here
for his supporting role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pitt will receive
the first Oscar in his career as an actor.

All of its competitors have already
there are figurines, they, like Brad, represent the “old school”, so it’s time and
Pitt to join the club.The actor is being prepared for triumph by giving him awards to everyone
ceremonies before the Oscar, so he already
ready to make a speech of thanks from the stage. Surprises like victory
Mark Rylance in 2016, when everyone was confident in the success of Sylvester Stallone,
it shouldn’t be here – Joe Pesci had chances at the start, but the promotion campaign
Pitta says that they are now equal to zero.

To the Stars: Will Pitt Make it to Oscar?

Yuri Shevchenko – about Brad’s space travel.

tk.media

Best Supporting Actress

• Laura Dern (Marriage Story) 1.05
• Margot Robbie (Sensation) 17.00
• Florence Pugh (Little Women) 17.00
• Scarlett Johansson (Jojo Rabbit) ) 26.00
• Katy Bates (“Richard Jewell”) 67.00

The experts are angry –
unpredictable duel between Jennifer Lopez and Laura Dern, whom they are so
anticipated after the release of “Wall Street Fraudsters” did not take place.J.Lo even
not nominated: while she lights up on stage during the Super Bowl half-time, and Dern prepares to realize that
trailers of her next films, she will turn from an Oscar nominee to
“Owner”.

Katie Bates already has
figurine, Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh and Margot Robbie will still have them
(probably). Dern has earned at least a Lifetime Achievement Award, or more precisely –
for a heated monologue about motherhood in “Marriage Story”. Participation in another
successful project – “Little Women” – adds weight.

Laura Dern in Marriage Story

Best Film

• 1917 1.60
• Parasites 4.00
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 9.00
• Joker 12.00
• Jodo Rabbit 67.00
• “Irishman” 67.00
• “Marriage Story” 101.00
• “Outsiders” 101.00
• “Little Women” 101.00

interesting. At the start of the season, the highest chances were given to “Irishman” and “Once in
Hollywood “, but the masters Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino this season moved to
side.Sam Mendes’ military epic “1917” is a bookmaker’s favorite. It has already been recognized
Best at the Golden Globe, PGA, DGA, BAFTA and Critics ”Choice awards. But there is a very powerful competitor – “Parasites” Bong Joon
Ho.

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”: a completely different Tarantino

About the most anticipated film of the summer.

tk.media

South Korean film took
SAG award
for the best cast. Social
the drama is admired in the US – it has even been re-released. Experts
they say that this can be a purely political decision – America needs
show how she appreciates the culture of other countries, how loyal she is.

All fans of the new wave
are in favor of “Parasites”, but among the academics, they are not the majority. “1917”
called too old school, not too inventive in terms of plot, however
many will choose Mendes’ film over Parasite, simply because 1917 is
American product.

But it is in this nomination
something unexpected can happen. “Parasites” are reminiscent of “Moonlight” and
“In the spotlight” – underdog films with an important message, which are also not
were considered the main contenders for victory.

Best Director

• Sam Mendes (1917) 1.22
• Bong Joon Ho (Parasites) 4.00
• Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) 17.00
• Martin Scorsese (The Irishman) 41.00
• Todd Phillips (“Joker”) 101.00

Same situation as in
Best Picture nominations: Sam Mendes vs. Bong Joon Ho.

Mendes triumphed at the DGA Awards, and only in 7 out of 71 cases, the winner of this award did not
took Oscar.Also the director of “1917” was honored at the Golden Globe and Critics ”
Choice. It is believed that the choice in favor of Mendes is purely technical. “1917”
– visually impressive, the film has incredibly complex choreography, 24 hours to
the battlefield is compressed to a dense 159 minutes, and the effect of “one shot” creates
an incredible sense of presence for the audience. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarito, Eng
Lee, Alfonso Cuarón – they all won an Oscar for their performing arts, and Mendes
since “1917” is perfect for this company.

“Parasites” – work at all
of a different kind.Oscars secured – competitors among foreign language films
not. But most experts are sure that the Academy will not be limited to one
statuette. There are three options: Best Film, Best Director, Best
original script. Obviously, double Oscars for film and direction in
this year will not be. Considering that Mendes has a chance in the individual nomination
more, will “Parasites” become the main triumph of the evening?

Best Original Screenplay

• “Parasites” 1.48
• “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” 2.80
• “Marriage Story” 13.00
• “1917” 26.00
• “The Knives’ Head” 34.00

Another nomination, where
the winner cannot be 100% guessed. For
months before the Oscar, the favorites changed: they talked about the statuette for the “Marriage
stories “, then the audience was delighted with the ideas of Ryan Johnson in” Knives
bald “, there are even those who support” 1917 “, although the plot is not the most
memorable project.But it seems that now there are two main contenders.

Quentin Tarantino took
Golden Globe Award for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, rewriting in his film
the history of the Dream Factory. Pona Joon Ho honored with WGA and BAFTA – his script
really looks the most original among the nominees. At the bookmakers
“Parasites” have become favorites quite recently, but here everything again depends on the choice
in other nominations. The South Korean film has other options for
Tarantino statuette for the script seems to be the only chance.

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Jojo Rabbit 1.50
• Little Women 2.80
• Irishman 9.00
• Joker 34.00
• Two Dads 51.00

At the USC Scripter ceremony whose winners matched the Oscar winners in eight
cases over the past ten years, the award was given to Greta Gerwig for a new look at
classic American novel “Little Women”.But there seems to be a catch.
This is the seventh adaptation of the book, but the Oscars still prefer something more
fresh. So Taiki Waititi and Jojo Bunny have a good chance.

Sparkling satire on
Nazi Germany has already been noted at the BAFTA and Writers Guild Awards, beating the same “Little
women ”and“ Irish ”. This time, respect for the 150-year-old classics must give way
before the well-deserved recognition of the talent of the author of one of the most memorable
films of the year.

Best Animated Film

• Toy Story 4 1.90
• Klaus 2.00
• The Lost Link 9.00
• I Lost My Body 34.00
• How to Train Your Dragon 3 67.00

Disney Big Project – Frozen 2 – even was not nominated, and
this is already unexpected. Toy Story 4 won the Critics “Choice and PGA Awards,
academics love the franchise, but the Pixar cartoon has serious competitors.

“The Lost Link” from Studio Laika won the Golden Globes. Netflix’s “Klaus” won seven prizes at the most revealing Annie ceremony the day before
Oscar.So Spanish animation can gain a foothold in the status of a new
Christmas classics, bypassing those loved by the audience, but too familiar,
Woody and Baza.

Other categories

Best foreign film
language

• “Parasites” 1.01
• “Land of Honey” 15.00
• “Pain and Glory” 21.00
• “Outcast” 34.00
• “The Body of Christ” 51.00

Best Operator

• Roger Deakins (“1917”) 1.02
• Lawrence Sher (The Joker) 26.00
• Jarin Blaschke (The Lighthouse) 26.00
• Robert Richardson (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) 34.00
• Rodrigo Prieto (The Irishman) 34.00

Best Work
production designer

• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 1.65
• 1917 3.25
• Parasites 4.75
• Irishman 34.00
• Jojo Rabbit 67.00

Best Music 903

• Joker 1.25
• “1917” 4.00
• “Little Women” 17.00
• “Marriage Story” 26.00
• “Star Wars. Skywalker. Sunrise “34.00

Best visual effects

• ” 1917 “1.90
• ” Avengers: Endgame “3.75
• ” Irishman “5.50
• ” The Lion King “7.00
• ” Star Wars. Skywalker. Sunrise “34.00

Best makeup and hairstyles

• ” Sensation “1.12
• Joker 6.00
• Judy 17.00
• 1917 26.00
• Maleficent: Lady of Darkness 34.00

Best Song

• Love Me Again ”) 1.18
• “ Stand Up ”7.00
• “ Into the Unknown ”10.00
• “ I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away ”(Toy Story 4 “) 13.00
• ” I’m Standing With You “51.00

Best Costume Design

• Little Women 1.33
• Jojo Rabbit 4.25
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 7.00
• Joker 34.00
• Irish 51.00

Best Editing

• Outsiders 2.00
• Parasites 2.15
• Irish 9.00
• Joker 13.00
• Jojo Rabbit 34.00

Best Sound Editing

0 1

” one.35

Outsiders 3.00

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 26.00

Joker 26.00

Star Wars. Skywalker. Sunrise 34.00

Best Sound

• 1917 1.40
• Outsiders 2.80
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 26.00
• Joker 26.00
• To the Stars 34.00

Best Documentary
feature film

• American Factory 1.70
• “For Samy” 2.55
• “Land of Honey” 6.00
• “Cave” 51.00
• “On the Edge of Democracy” 51.00

Best Documentary
Short Film

• “Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl)” 1.12
• Away 9.00
• St. Louis Superman 10.00
• “Life Grips Me” 15.00
• “Walk, run, cha-cha” 34.00

Best Short Film

• Brotherhood 1.75
• Neighbors Window 2.25
• Nefta Football Club 10.00
• Saria 11.00
• Sister 13.00

Best Animated
short film

• Hairy Love 1.55
• Cotbul 2.75
• Unforgettable 9.00
• Sister 11.00
• Daughter 51.00

Yuri Shevchenko , TK.Media

“Wild at Heart”: the sky in emeralds 30 years ago

On May 19, 1990, David Lynch presented his new film “Wild at Heart”. Starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe. At the Cannes Film Festival in the same year, the film received the Palme d’Or, but in the director’s filmography it is still considered a secondary work. Andrei Kartashov dissects the picture, studies the nature of sin and fairy-tale motives in the story of growing up, and also recalls the jacket of the hero Nicolas Cage.

The plot of “Wild at Heart” is as simple as a nickel dime, but as soon as you start retelling, you immediately get lost. A boy meets a girl, he is an orphan, her mother is a despot; the world is against their love, they run. This seems to be all, but apparently not. For those who have never seen the fifth film by David Lynch, a list of the alchemical ingredients of the picture will help to present it rather. What are girls and boys made of? Rock and roll and sex, hot asphalt and gasoline, lace and snakeskin; from the old quarters of New Orleans, from the prairies of Texas, from Baum’s tales and pulp fiction.

“Wild at Heart” – a story of growing up. In culture, this function is assigned to fairy tales: a folklore hero passes tests, that is, an initiation rite, and gets a wife, that is, becomes an adult. And the film opens up into fairytale territory, juxtaposing the adventures of Lula and Sailor with Dorothy’s journey along the yellow brick road. The Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Sorceress of the South are participating. There is no such thing in the novel, this is an innovation of Lynch, who has accordingly completed the ending. The director discovers and manifests a fantastic dimension in the text of Barry Gifford, who wrote after all a gothic noir, not a psychedelic in Oz.A typical example: in the novel Sailor and Lula exchange a few phrases about brands of cigarettes, this optional dialogue becomes just a lead-in to a meaningful conversation about the parents of the heroes and the mysterious death of Lula’s father. In the film, the scene begins with a super-close-up of matches, whose flames effectively fill the screen, and in the dialogue itself, Sailor reveals that he started smoking at the age of four. Lynch introduces grotesque into a normal noir scene and makes its main content not plot details, but an abstract image of fire as a destructive element; he has already appeared in the opening credits and will appear in the film more than once.

I beg your pardon for being tedious, but this is important: the Russian name that I have to use is incorrect. “Strange outside and wild at heart” – this is how Lula speaks not to herself with Sailor, but about the world in which they have to live. They themselves are pure souls, almost children who are seduced by this world. The heroes defend themselves from the dark chaos and survive, but lose their innocence – this is the plot of the film in a nutshell. In the first scene, Sailor kills a person – in defense, he acts instinctively and cruelly, like an animal that does not reason about the limits of self-defense.The crime was provoked by Lula’s mother – one of several representatives of pure evil acting here. In the second half of the film, Sailor will have to once again sacrifice morality and agree to an armed robbery; and this, too, is urged on by the obvious messenger of the unclean. Bobby Peru performed by Willem Dafoe, just for the sake of pleasure, does evil and forces him to: about this – a terrible scene of humiliation of Lula, where Bobby does not get from her sex, but a few spoken words – a symbolic fall.The nature of evil and sin is a theme not only of a fairy tale, but also of noir, and it is important that Wild at Heart belongs to this genre as well. Motels, Cadillacs, stingy men with weapons, fatal women for whom these men die – for Lynch these are the facets of national mythology, which he has been exploring all his life. The South of the United States is the dark heart of this myth, the focus of American Gothic. The yellow brick road leads from North Carolina through New Orleans to Texas: inside the scenery from a Faulkner novel or a play by Tennessee Williams, Gifford and Lynch put characters with names from a comic book or cartoon.Lula is an excellent student from a wealthy family, the girl from the picture; current Oscar winner Laura Dern Lynch has already cast in a similar role in Blue Velvet. Sailor is a gentle-hearted bully who values ​​freedom the most, as a true American should. Young Nicolas Cage in this role gives Sailor a bright, “testosterone” sensuality and romantic charm. This is one of Cage’s best roles, pursuing this Elvis image in every work he does; the symbol of his independence – an unimaginable snakeskin jacket – borrowed from the artist’s wardrobe.In Lynch’s filmography, Wild at Heart is considered a secondary work – because there is a lot of kitsch and because Cage (which itself is kitsch). There are even more inexplicable scenes without any plot sense here than in other paintings by the author, except, perhaps, “Twin Peaks” (work on the first season went parallel to “Wild Heart”). But in Lynch’s personal cosmogony, this film has its place – this is his most voluminous and complete depiction of hell; together with the heroes, we are in it from the very first scene and the whole film is trying to escape from there.And we will definitely break free, even if this requires the intervention of magical forces. The heroes of “Wild at Heart” are not rebels without an ideal, they believe in independence and individual freedom, but also in rock and roll and happiness and in the Emerald City, which awaits them at the end of their journey.

90,000 Episode Seven – Vertigo.com.ua

The seventh episode of “Twin Peaks” is the beginning of the second act, in which we finally get answers to the questions that tormented us, and the secrets begin to slowly unfold.

Twin Peaks Secrets

The puzzle pieces scattered by Lynch in previous episodes are gradually being added. As we expected, the papers Hawke found in Episode 6 turned out to be pages from Laura Palmer’s diary. Laura’s Notes provide two references to the prequel movie Fire Follow Me. It turns out that Laura recorded one of her dreams, in which a girl she did not know, Annie, said that a certain Cooper remained in the Black Lodge. A hint of the non-linearity of the Black Lodge’s time was already in the first episode of the third season, when Michael in the Red Room asks “Is it future, or is it past?”

The second reference is Laura’s words that her tormentor and killer is not the demon Bob.Lynch again insists on the idea that the root of evil is not otherworldly forces, but people themselves. This “Fire, follow me” was significantly different from the series (and, perhaps, this is one of the reasons for its unpopularity).

Seriously concerned about the new evidence, Sheriff Frank Truman asks Dr. Hayward (played by the recently deserted Warren Frost, father of screenwriter Mark Frost). Doc Hayward was one of the last to see Agent Cooper after leaving the Black Lodge, and noticed his strange behavior.

Cooper-Bob’s insanity will hardly surprise anyone, but the information that the agent most likely visited Audrey Horne at the hospital is something new. As you know from The Secret History of Twin Peaks (a book written by Mark Frost), Audrey is the only person to survive the explosion at the bank. The girl ended up in a coma and we can only imagine with horror why the false Cooper came to her. Many fans of the show believe that Cooper raped Audrey, and psychopath Richard Horne is their son. However, the fact that Cooper visited Audrey was Dr. Hayward’s assumption.Perhaps the evil Cooper went to the hospital to return the ring that was left on Annie’s hand. In any case, let’s not rush to guess.

The mysterious events in Twin Peaks do not stop there. Something sinister still lives in the forest. We bet that Jerry Horne (Davil Patrick Kelly) didn’t just panic while high, but saw some kind of frightening creature.

Meanwhile, Officer Andy Brennen (Harry Goaz) makes an appointment with a frightened, unnamed farmer, whose car Richard Horne used to hit a child in the last episode.The farmer reluctantly agrees to talk to Andy in a secluded place, but disappears before the police arrive. There are several potentially important details associated with this episode: First, the meeting was to take place at 4:30. Numbers have always played a special role in Twin Peaks, and 4:30 is one of the clues the Giant gave Cooper back in the first episode. In addition, Andy’s watch, on which the camera lingers, is an expensive Rolex, which is not quite affordable for an ordinary policeman. Hopefully, Lynch hasn’t decided to ruin our old beloved heroes by turning shy eccentric Andy into a dirty cop.

A strange whistle is heard in one of the rooms of the Great Norton Hotel, which Ben Horn and his secretary are trying to track down – we assume that this is a reminder of Josie Packard’s soul enclosed in the table handle. Although actress Joan Chen has not been announced as part of the new caste, it would be nice to know at least something about Josie’s fate. Another important find at the hotel is the key to the room where Agent Cooper lived.

90,000 Oscar -2020: who will win ideally and who will win in real life | Reviews

The 92nd Academy Awards will take place on 9 February.A few days before this event, we announce our forecast in two categories: realistic and desirable.

Best Film

Actually : “1917” by Sam Mendes.

In 2000, Mendes already took the main Oscar with his American Beauty. After 20 years, he will almost certainly be awarded a second statuette, or even two: as a producer and as a director.

Among other contenders for the main “Oscar” there are films great (“Once upon a time … in Hollywood”, “Irishman”), good (“Jojo Rabbit”, “Marriage Story”, “Ford vs. Ferrari”), average (“Little Women” , “Parasites”) and one terrible (“Joker”).

But it is “1917” that seems to be the most likely winner due to its combination of a serious war theme, a basis on real events, technical excellence (brilliant camera work) and experiment (the illusion that the picture was shot in one shot).

Ideally : “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” by Quentin Tarantino.

The ninth production by Quentin Tarantino is no less brilliant than the previous eight. It is truly the best film in the world since The House That Jack Built by Lars von Trier, the second absolute genius filmmaker alive today.

The trailer may display tobacco products. Smoking is bad for your health!

Best Director

Actually : Sam Mendes.

The two main American directors of today (Tarantino and Scorsese) will most likely be unfairly given a ride by the film academics; They will absolutely deservedly ignore the cheeky Phillips (“Joker”) and, of course, will leave the visiting Asian Pong Jung Ho (“Parasites”) without a figurine.

Ideally : Quentin Tarantino.

Best Actor

Actually : Adam Driver (“The Marriage Story”).

The driver has long been “asking for” an Oscar (nominated last year), but now the film is suitable, and competitors, except for Leonardo DiCaprio, are not so strong. Hoaquin Phoenix (“The Joker”) will not be rewarded for this worst of his roles, hopefully.

Ideally : Leonardo DiCaprio (“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”).

The fact that the best modern actor in the world under fifty has received only one Oscar (for a wonderful, but far from the brightest image in his filmography in The Survivor), once again speaks of the arbitrariness and shortsightedness of film academics. In the Tarantino film, Leo played one of his two most magnificent roles (the other in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street). But they didn’t get an award for the “Wolf” – apparently, they won’t be awarded for “Hollywood” either.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Best Actress

Actually: Renee Zellweger (“Judy”).

Oscar winner plays Hollywood legend and two-time Oscar nominee Judy Garland. If you didn’t bother to reward Judy herself, you should at least give this honor to her newly minted “understudy”.

Ideally : Scarlett Johansson (“The Marriage Story”).

Scarlett does not have an Oscar yet, but the actress is gorgeous.

Best Supporting Actor

Actually: Al Pacino (“The Irishman”).

Triumphantly back in the real world and starring for the first time with Scorsese, Al is practically obliged to take this Oscar.Moreover, the “Irishman” should be noted somehow, and this is the most suitable case.

Ideally : Al Pacino. Or Brad Pitt (“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”).

Best Supporting Actress

Actually: Laura Dern (“The Marriage Story”).

Dern alone won the Golden Globe Award for Marriage Story. Probably, the Oscar will go to her.

Ideally : And Laura Dern is a good candidate, but Scarlett Johansson would be a happy one.This nomination features her role in Jojo Bunny.

Best Original Screenplay

Really (and ideally) : “Once upon a time … in Hollywood.”

Probably, even film academics are able to understand that Tarantino does not and cannot have serious competitors in this nomination.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Really (and ideally) : “Irishman”.

Second most likely Irishman award.Clever Steven Zaillian (screenwriter for Schindler’s List and the first Mission Impossible) has perfectly adapted for the big screen Charles Brandt’s documentary I Heard You Paint At Home.

The trailer may display tobacco products. Smoking is bad for your health!

Best Animated Feature

Actually: Toy Story 4.

Although the Pixar studio deteriorates every year, the film academics do not seem to notice it.”Oscar” is almost consistently taken by the Pixar team once every two years. If last year the award was taken by “Spider-Man: Through the Universes”, now without the statuette they are unlikely to leave other favorites of the children’s audience.

Ideally : “Klaus”.

Already due to the fact that in this Spanish cartoon you can see good old hand-drawn animation, and not soulless computer 3D, I want to believe in the victory of this particular picture.

Best Foreign Language Film

Really (and ideally) : “Parasites” (South Korea).

The main competitor of “Parasites” in this nomination is the autobiographical film by Pedro Almodovar “Pain and Glory” about a homosexual director performed by Antonio Banderas . It is also tempting for film academics, but perhaps they still prefer to greet the more populist “Parasites”. Moreover, the latter have already received the Palme d’Or – really the main film award in the world, in contrast to the local Oscar.

The trailer may display tobacco products.Smoking is bad for your health!

Evgeny Novitsky, IRK.ru

Photo from kinopoisk.ru.

The opinion of the editorial board may not coincide with the opinion of the author.

90,000 from Jesus to Pasolini – Archive

Streets of Fire (1984)

At the beginning of his career, Willem Dafoe played the leader of a biker gang twice in a row. This role became the actor’s debut in 1981 in Katherine Bigelow’s film “Without Love” (the real debut actually happened a year earlier in the film by Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”, but all the scenes with Dafoe’s participation were cut from there).And three years later, the aspiring actor repeated his appearance in the film by the producer of “Alien” Walter Hill. “Streets on Fire” is an unpretentious, but cozy stylization of the 50s, which is remembered today primarily thanks to the excellent soundtrack and pavilion shooting – the eatery in them looks like an homage to the film “Night owls” by Edward Hopper. Skinned Dafoe appears even before the opening credits in the midst of a concert in which the heroine of Diana Lane sings a song from the repertoire of Meat Loaf, and kidnaps the singer right from the stage.His hero is the villain Raven Shaddock, seeking the love of the queen of the rock scene. “Don’t fight, let’s love each other for a week, and I’ll let you go,” he says to Lane, tied to the bed. Fortunately, she has a savior – ex-fiancé played by Michael Paré.

To Live and Die in L.A (1985)

However, it is believed that he discovered Dafoe as an actor, William Friedkin. In his film Live and Die in Los Angeles, Willem plays his first real villain, forger and artist Eric Masters.This is a shameless movie that has everything a good cop thriller needs – a couple of partners, one of whom avenges the death of the other, a blonde informant, explicit sex, a long car chase in the oncoming lane (quite in the spirit of Fridkin) and even a gallery owner- dwarf in a wheelchair. Young Defoe demonstrates hand-to-hand combat skills, an insolent grin and a smooth face that has not yet been pitted with his trademark wrinkles. Fridkin himself is now busy filming a series based on this film. It is not yet known whether Defoe will play in it.

Platoon (1986)

The next film was Oliver Stone’s Platoon and the first Oscar nomination (for Best Supporting Actor). In Stone, Defoe plays the fearless sergeant Alice Grodin fighting in Vietnam. Although the main character is formally Private Taylor played by Charlie Sheen, Dafoe removes him in the first scene together, placing Taylor’s soldier belongings on his shoulders. In Platoon, a film in which there are practically no women, Defoe has a halo of sexuality that is rare for this ascetic actor, perhaps due to the homoeroticism of some scenes – like that ambiguous episode when soldiers smoke marijuana and Sergeant Grodin forces Taylor into his mouth the muzzle of a rifle through which a jet of smoke is blown.According to legend, before filming the scene, Stone actually gave all the actors a smoke. But, according to Defoe, by the beginning of the robots, the effect of the drug had evaporated – and the actors felt terrible.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1986)

Although the role of Jesus in the film by Martin Scorsese did not bring Defoe an Oscar nomination, it became one of the milestones in his filmography. Now this film is considered a masterpiece, but at one time it was received ambiguously.In many ways, the reason for this was the figure of Jesus, written in the script by Paul Schroeder (based on the scandalous novel by Nikos Kazantzakis) as a man seeking, restless and resisting. Defoe speaks not so much fiery monologues as contradictory monologues, says that he is possessed by the demon of pride, that he is not “just a son of God, but God himself.” Many viewers were frankly jarred by the scene in which Jesus watches the prostitute Mary Magdalene receive a series of clients (not to mention the subsequent shocking closeness of Jesus and Mary).Willem Dafoe, for whom the image of a screen villain was already firmly entrenched, was also considered not the best candidate for the role of Christ. However, this role expanded the boundaries of Defoe’s role, proving his undoubted talent.

The Simpsons (1989)

Defoe’s stellar TV outing: In the 26th season of The Simpsons, he played Bart’s teacher, the brutal Jack Lassen. Lassen, speaking in Defoe’s voice, tries to re-educate Bart in the most ridiculous ways. Characteristically, the series is called “Blazed and Confused” (by analogy with the school Linklater film “Dazed and Confused”, which we translated as “High and Confused”).

Wild at Heart (1990)

The role of an actor with such an expressive face in the film by David Lynch was a matter of time. In Wild at Heart, Lynch’s tribute to The Wizard of Oz, Dafoe is cast as the memorable gangster Bobby Peru. “My name is Bobby Peru. Peru. Like a country, ”he introduces himself with a distinct southern accent and smiles with a wide smile, which this time is slightly spoiled by rotten teeth. One of the most memorable scenes with his participation is the episode of Bobby Peru’s violence against Lulu, the heroine of Laura Dern.

Body of Evidence (1993)

There were crushing failures in Defoe’s career. In 1994, for example, he was nominated for a Golden Raspberry for Worst Actor in Body as Evidence. In this erotic thriller by Uli Edel, the actor plays gullible lawyer Frank DeLane, who fell in love with his client, played by Madonna. Thin-rimmed glasses and a long-length coat complement the image of the right human rights defender. However, in the famous sex scene, where Madonna binds Defoe’s hero with a belt and pours it abundantly with molten wax, neither glasses nor a coat played any role.The episode is really quite ridiculous, in all respects deserved a “raspberry” (then Defoe was nominated for the “Golden Raspberry” again – in 1997 for “Speed-2”).

“The English Patient” (1996)

In the Oscar-winning drama by Anthony Minghella, Defoe plays a soldier with mutilated hands and the name of Caravaggio. He wears black woolen gloves and tries to open the eyes of the heroine Juliette Binoche to the true face of the strange patient she cares for.From a few dialogues, we learn that David Caravaggio is from Canada, in the past a thief, exiled to the war. However, for the time being, his personality is rather mysterious, Caravaggio himself calls himself a ghost from the past life of an English patient.

New Rose Hotel (1998)

The only time Defoe co-produced was in collaboration with Abel Ferrara, who played (and still plays) one of the key roles in his career as an actor.“The New Rose Hotel is a strange mixture of thriller, fantasy and love drama. Defoe plays a man named X, a desperate schemer and kidnapper. X must “teach to fall in love” Sandy (Asia Argento), so that she helped steal the Japanese scientist-millionaire. But everything goes wrong, X himself falls in love with Sandy, and the girl twists him around her finger. In this semi-cyberpunk experiment by Ferrara, there are many memorable things: Christopher Walken limping on one leg, Defoe himself playing an abandoned lover as if in a fog, close-ups of Asia’s Argento tattoos, as well as book-sized mobile phones used by the heroes to text each other.Almost twenty years later, much in the New Rose Hotel seems naive, but Defoe will play at Ferrara more than once. And at least once again – a similar underground romantic.

Existence (“eXistenZ”, 1999)

Another cyberpunk role – this time with another great director, David Cronenberg. Defoe, who plays villains with enviable regularity in Existence, is again a bad guy. The owner of the gas station named Gus, who admires the creator of virtual games Allegra, seeing her alive, falls on his face.Ten minutes later, he is already aiming his rifle at her head. From the lips of Gus, we learn that the game turned his life upside down, and virtual reality made him believe in himself. For the late 90s, this, of course, sounds like a revelation.

The Boondock Saints (1999)

The Boondock Saints is a critically scolded film that has succeeded in video distribution thanks in large part to Dafoe’s character. Troy Duffy’s picture never came out, but it earned $ 50 million in video collection and the status of a cult crime comedy to boot.Defoe plays the harsh and eccentric gay detective Paul Smecker, who constantly mocks colleagues and easily solves one case after another. He only needs a few minutes at the crime scene to understand what happened. An important detail: Smeker is dressed in a carefully ironed suit and listens to classics in headphones. The bandits are also colorful: one of the gangsters is called Ivan Chekhov, and the main characters, the Irish Catholic brothers, almost never remove the crucifix from the neck.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

In the filmography of the not very famous director Edmund Elias Meridge, the film “Shadow of the Vampire” remained a major achievement.The ambitious plan – to make a film about the creation of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu – paid off in principle. The role of Murnau was played by Malkovich. Defoe had to play Max Shrek, the famous actor who embodied in “Nosferatu” the image of the vampire Count Orlok. At Meridge, Shrek pretends to be a fan of the Stanislavsky system and, according to legend, does not take off his makeup even in between filming. In fact, Shrek is so ugly (which is not far from the historical truth), because he is a vampire in fact.Viewers have to wait a long time for the release of Defoe. But the wait is worth it: the appearance of the actor made up like Shrek is truly triumphant. For this role, Defoe was nominated for an Oscar for the second time, but, unfortunately, he never received the prize.

“Spider-Man” (2002, 2004, 2007)

“Shadow of the Vampire” became that fateful film, after which the producers invited Dafoe to take the place of the main villain in “Spider-Man”. Now even kids know the actor who played the Green Goblin in three films in the franchise.The green mask and the ability to run on the ceiling were added to Defoe’s arsenal. Recall that according to the plot, the scientist Norman Osborne is experimenting on himself with a new development – a chemical gas that increases speed, strength, intelligence, intelligence and endurance, but the gas makes him mad, splitting his personality. When the film “The Amazing Spider-Man” was released in 2013 (already without Dafoe), the actor accused the creators of the picture of impudent cynicism: “This is crazy! This is not an exact copy, but the same story. A very cynical approach to making money.It was different for Sam Raimi. ”

“Fairy tales of the strip club” (“Go Go Tales”, 2007)

Abel Ferrara has repeatedly called Willem Dafoe his alter ego. You can also say that Defoe is Ferrara’s lucky star. For example, now the actor is helping the director raise money for the film “Siberia” about dreams and about Jung. Dafoe even recorded a video that Ferrara uses for the Kickstarter campaign. In the film “Tales of the Strip Club”, Defoe not only plays the main role of the bankrupt owner of a strip club, but also sings.The recipe is the same as that of the New Rose Hotel: mysterious Defoe, naked Asia Argento, a nightclub, a hidden video camera, many beautiful female bodies and dances. This time without mysticism, but with a fair amount of humor.

Fireflies in the Garden (2008)

In Dennis Lee’s nagging drama Fireflies in the Garden, Willem played a rather atypical role – an unpleasant husband, a biscuit and a bore, guilty of the death of his wife. Charles Taylor is a writer and annoys the whole family with his pedantry: he terrorizes his son, nagging his wife (played by Julia Roberts), makes caustic remarks to his wife’s sister.And when he, having exceeded the speed, gets into an accident in which his wife dies, all that he is capable of is a hysterical comment: “The funeral should be of the highest order.” Not Dafoe’s greatest role, which, however, brings significant variety to his stellar filmography.

Antichrist (2009)

One of these starring roles in the 2000s was the psychoanalyst husband in Lars von Trier’s drama The Antichrist. Everyone, of course, remembers the scandal that erupted after the show in Cannes.The reason for this is the abundance of pornographic scenes, and tough psychologism, and female castration, and the outrage of Tarkovsky’s memory, to which von Trier appealed. In general, we must pay tribute to Dafoe, who plucked up the courage and trusted the most scandalous director of our time. And yes, not for the first time – Defoe had already played with von Trier in Manderlay.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)

This film by Werner Herzog was produced by David Lynch and bears a noticeable stamp of his style.For example, the beginning is similar to Twin Peaks: Detective Havenhurst (Defoe) drives to the scene of the crime and talks to his partner the way Agent Dale Cooper spoke to his mysterious secretary: “11.44 means someone was killed. They completely, completely killed. ” Above the corpse, he also behaves in an appropriate manner: he measures the distance between cups of coffee, professionally dictating information. Contrary to the prevailing rule, Defoe tries on the role of not a villain, not a madman, not a romantic, but a pragmatic professional-humanist faced with domestic murder.

“4:44 Last Day on Earth” (2011)

Ferrara again. And again Defoe is in his usual role: a renegade drug addict embarks on his last night walk before the end of the world. In the fantastic plot of this picture, one can clearly hear the echoes of the New Rose Hotel. The film is mainly devoted to how Cisco (Defoe) says goodbye to everyone he loves – with his ex-wife and daughter, with neighbors and friends, with his current lover. These are Skype conversations and gatherings in night kitchens, drinks on the roof, the last dose in the toilet, the last sex at dawn.It seems that all the masks are about to be torn off, but humanity continues to play its traditional performance even in the face of imminent death. One of the best films with Willem Dafoe, immersed in an atmosphere of decline, chaos and video art.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

In the last film by Wes Anderson, Dafoe got the role of the vile villain Jopling. The gallery of his on-screen images was complemented by a motorcycle, a long leather coat, severed fingers, as well as an episode in which Jopling throws a fluffy Persian cat out of the window.Well, for a picture that tells about the first days of fascism in Europe, Defoe managed to create a hero that is quite appropriate for the time.

Pasolini (2014)

The adaptation of the last day of the life of the great director Pier Paolo Pasolini is a project not quite typical for Abel Ferrara. Taking your favorite actor for the role of Pasolini was not just a friendly gesture, but also a successful casting decision. After all, there was no need to apply makeup to achieve a visual resemblance: it was enough to put on large square glasses on Defoe’s thin profile.And let’s hope this isn’t the last great biopic in the 60-year-old actor’s filmography.

See also: Defoe’s recent interview with Afishe.

The Watchmen series became the record holder for the Emmy nominations – Rossiyskaya Gazeta

The nominees for the annual Emmy Award of the American Television Academy have been announced. The ceremony will take place on September 21, but for now you can already make a list of TV shows that are recognized by television academics.

Immediately record the Watchmen, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Heirs and the Ozarks.HBO’s Miniseries Watchmen is this year’s record holder for Emmy nominations – 26 places on the list. The Amazing Mrs. Maisel – Comedy Queen – 20 Nominations. 18 nominations for the series “Ozark” and “Heirs”. Continue the list with serials such as White Crow, The Mandalorian, Better Call Saul, Unorthodox, Killing Eve, The Incredible, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flawless, Black Comedy. “Euphoria”, “Rami”, “Black Monday”, “I know this is true”, “Big Little Lies”, “Westworld”, “How to Avoid Punishment for Murder”, “Stranger”, “Black Mirror” …… But let’s see how the series were distributed according to the nominations.

One of eight projects may become the best drama series. Eight (!) – here one cannot but whistle with admiration – well, the serial genre has strengthened its position. The Crown, The Handmaid’s Tale, Killing Eve, The Mandalorian, The Ozark, Stranger Things, Better Call Saul, and The Heirs. You don’t need to be seven inches in the forehead to not understand – these are streaming services – the giants are forcing the TV channels to make room. It’s only the beginning…

Best Comedy Series. Also eight projects: “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, “White Crow”, “The Kominsky Method”, “Dead to Me”, “Nice Place”, “The Amazing Mrs. Maisel”, “Sheets Creek”, “What Are We Doing in the Shadows”.

And here are the top five contenders for Best Miniseries: And Fire Smolders Everywhere, Mrs. America, The Incredible, Unorthodox and The Keepers.

In terms of actors, Jason Bateman (Ozark), Sterling K.Brown (This Is Us), Steve Carrell (The Morning Show), Billy Porter (Pose), Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong – both for their work on the Heirs.

Best Actress in a Drama Series – May fall into the hands of Jennifer Anniston (The Morning Show), Olivia Colman (The Crown), Laura Linney (The Ozark), Zendaya for her role in Euphoria and Jody Comer or Sandre Oh, both for Killing Eve. In order not to tire readers with the list of nominations – the list can be viewed on the award website, let’s just say that the list of applicants includes such actors as Michael Douglas, Rami Yousef, Rachel Brosnahan, Issa Rae, Jeremy Irons, Hugh Jackman, Mark Ruffalo, Laura Linney, Kate Blanchett, Regina King, Octavia Spencer, Jeffrey Wright, Helena Bonham Carter, Laura Dern, Julia Garner and even Meryl Streep.