Please Rewind Talent Wall

Laura Dern

Laura Dern has built a career around characters who are alert, complicated and rarely content to stand at the edge of the story. Born in Los Angeles on February 10, 1967, she is the daughter of actors Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern. Her first film appearances came as a child, including an uncredited part in White Lightning and a role opposite her mother in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. By the mid-1980s, Dern was taking on roles that quickly established her range. In Mask, she played Diana Adams, the blind teenager who becomes a love interest for Rocky Dennis. A year later, she appeared as Sandy Williams in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, bringing an open, searching quality to a film filled with menace. That performance became a breakthrough and began a long-running collaboration with Lynch that later included Wild at Heart, Inland Empire and Twin Peaks. Dern reached a much wider audience as paleobotanist Ellie Sattler in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Ellie is practical, self-possessed and fully engaged with the science as well as the danger, and Dern gives the spectacle a grounded human presence. She later returned to the role in Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World Dominion. Her career has repeatedly moved between major studio films, independent work and television. She played the provocative title character in Citizen Ruth, co-created and starred in Enlightened, and won an Emmy and Golden Globe for playing technology executive Renata Klein in Big Little Lies. Other later roles include Bobbi in Wild, Marmee March in Little Women and divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw in Marriage Story. Her performance in Marriage Story brought her an Academy Award, BAFTA, SAG Award and Golden Globe. Dern has also worked as a producer, executive producer, voice actor, screenwriter and director. Across those different roles, her acting remains distinguished by its willingness to let confidence, unease, humour and anger occupy the same frame—a quality already visible in Mask and Blue Velvet, and one that helped make Ellie Sattler far more than a passenger in Jurassic Park.