Laura Dern Net Worth

Laura Dern's Quotes

• It's really fun to act like a bimbo. But it's fun to act like a bimbo only when people know that you really aren't one.
• I get so protective of David [Lynch], like an older sister or something, which is so absurd. He's not waiting for us to get the movie because he doesn't think the cinema is about 'getting it'. I think he believes - which I've found very rare in filmmakers - in the intelligence of the audience, that they're intelligent enough to discover the film and what it means within themselves.
• (2011, on Enlightened (2011)) I worked with HBO on Recount, and we had a wonderful experience together. I'm such a fan of HBO and how much flexibility they give in character as well as schedule. Mike [White] and I had done his first directorial feature together, which was Year of the Dog, and really wanted to do more together. HBO had asked me if there were characters or things I really wanted to do, and I talked along the lines of things that inspired me. I talked about how aware all of us had become of our cultural apathy in this country, and I thought it would be really interesting to play a character who was a rager that somehow turned that into becoming a whistleblower, with Network-my favorite film-being an influence on that. People may think he's crazy, but he's the one person opening windows and saying, "I can't take it anymore!" From that place, with HBO's support and hope, and them wanting Mike to do something as well, they threw us in the ring together to see if he could create a vision around that idea. And from that came this story. It was a really cool, wonderful collaboration. Not only did Mike write the show, but he was able to go away as a screenwriter first to really write all the episodes. That's unheard of in television. We had the episodes first, and then we filmed them as a block, as we would a feature. That was an amazing way to do it, the way you'd pray you could do it, and it was great for us because we were working on films as well. Doing this, by the way, was like doing one movie for four months.
• (2011) Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) was watching Martin Scorsese work. And that was a big influence on me, and that was the summer I really became in love with the idea of acting. He asked me to be in this scene where I ate an ice cream cone, they asked what flavor I liked, I said, "Banana, one scoop on a cone." And the scene is very long, because it's this climactic scene between Kris Kristofferson and Ellen Burstyn, and I'm sitting right behind them, which means even in their close-ups I had to be in the shot, which means 19 fully eaten ice cream cones. So the story that is told, and that Marty and I have talked about since, is that he said, "If you can eat 19 ice cream cones and not throw up, you should be an actress." And so years later when my mother was, like "Don't be an actress," I was, like "Martin Scorsese told me I should be an actress." She was, like "Because you didn't throw up. Sort it out." But that was a very memorable moment.
• (2011, on Mask (1985)) Talk about feeling like the luckiest girl in the world. Every 15- and 16-year-old actress should be blessed enough to have Peter Bogdanovich there to guide them toward subtlety and kindness and... I mean, I use the word "compassion", but he really taught me a lot about expressing and connecting to compassion through a character and to a film. He loved Rocky, the character that Eric Stoltz played, so deeply. And Rusty [Dennis], his real mom, who Cher played, was on the set with us. To be able to play a character who gave him love and saw his beauty was just incredible. He's one of our great directors. Truly. I'm very lucky to have made a movie with him.

Interesting Facts about Laura Dern

1. Born at 7:48am-PST
2. Daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd.
3. Once engaged to Billy Bob Thornton.
4. Once engaged to Jeff Goldblum for two years (1995-1997).
5. Had an elder sister, born in 1961, who drowned at the age of 18 months, years before Laura was born.
6. Granddaughter of Mary Lanier
7. When she was cast in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982) at age 13, her mother Diane Ladd refused to let her go, feeling she was too young to leave home for a movie shoot. Laura sued for emancipation and won, but the movie was not a hit.
8. She said that her idols are Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck and Lucille Ball.
9. Hers and her mother's (Diane Ladd) Oscar nominations for Rambling Rose (1991) mark the first time a mother and daughter ever received Oscar nominations for the same movie.
10. Has played daughter to real-life mother Diane Ladd in four movies: White Lightning (1973), Wild at Heart (1990), Citizen Ruth (1996) and Daddy and Them (2001).
11. Both she and her mother, Diane Ladd, starred in two dinosaur-themed movies in 1993. Dern starred as Ellie Sattler in the box office smash Jurassic Park (1993), while Ladd starred in the failed indie film Carnosaur (1993).
12. Has starred in two films titled "Happy Endings", one a television film, Happy Endings (1983), and the other an independent film, Happy Endings (2005).
13. Goddaughter of the late Shelley Winters.
14. Her paternal great-grandfather, George Henry Dern, was Governor of Utah and Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Secretary of War. Her maternal cousin was playwright Tennessee Williams.
15. She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6270 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on November 1, 2010.
16. Gave birth to her first child at age 34, a son Ellery Walker Harper on August 21, 2001. Child's father is her boyfriend (now ex-husband), Ben Harper.
17. Gave birth to her second child at age 37, a daughter Jaya Harper on November 28, 2004. Child's father is her fiancé (now ex-husband), Ben Harper.
18. Seventeen years after she starred in Alexander Payne's first major film Citizen Ruth (1996), her father Bruce Dern starred in Payne's Nebraska (2013) -- probably one of the few, if only, times in movie history that a father-daughter duo similarly starred in the same director's films, especially with the actress/daughter's performance preceding her actor/father's.
19. Her Daddy and Them (2001) co-star Jim Varney passed away on her 33rd birthday February 10, 2000, from lung cancer at age 50.
20. She beat out Helen Hunt and Gwyneth Paltrow, among others, for the role of Dr. Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park (1993). This was revealed to Dern herself when she visited Today (1952) to promote the 3D re-release of the film in 2013. The audition tapes of the other actresses were shown to Dern, to which she responded "Well, I'm a lucky girl".