Laura Dern’s mellifluous voice gently emanates over the phone from Italy where she’s currently filming with Noah Baumbach. Marriage Story, her last project with the Brooklyn director with a knack for turning a hyper-real yet artful lens on to everyday life, won her an Oscar, Golden Globe and Bafta in 2020 for her 18-minute turn as Nora Fanshaw, the no-bullshit lawyer who power-charges Scarlett Johansson’s divorce from Adam Driver. Her punchy monologue — ‘People don’t accept mothers who drink too much wine and yell at their children and call him an a**hole’ — has become synonymous with a kind of unflinching honesty in film; see also America Ferrera’s feminist speech in Barbie for Baumbach’s wife, Greta Gerwig.
At 57, Dern has steered a career full of complicated roles with depth and nuance. In celebrity terms she flies fairly under the radar, but her back catalogue features decades’ of high-profile, agenda-setting performances. From starring in David Lynch’s Eighties classic Blue Velvet, fending off CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, to the cut-throat corporate mother Renata in Big Little Lies and softness of Marmee in 2019’s Little Women, she’s run the character spectrum, sailing somewhat against the tide that these rich roles don’t exist for women in Hollywood.
