Diane Lane

Diane Lane (born January 22, 1965) is an American film actress born and raised in New York City. Lane made her screen debut in George Roy Hill's 1979 film A Little Romance, starring opposite Laurence Olivier. Soon after, she was featured on the cover of Time. Lane has had a movie career spanning across three decades and has appeared in several notable films, including Unfaithful in 2002, which earned her Academy Award, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. Lane is also well known for her 2003 film Under the Tuscan Sun.

Diana Lane was born in New York City. Her mother, Colleen Farrington, was a night club singer and Playboy centerfold (Miss October 1957), who was also known as "Colleen Price." Her father, Burton Eugene Lane, was a Manhattan drama coach who ran an acting workshop with John Cassavetes, worked as a cab driver, and later taught humanities at City College. When Lane was 13 years old, her parents split up. Her mother went to Mexico and obtained a divorce while retaining custody of her daughter until age 6. Her father gained custody of his daughter after Farrington moved to Georgia.

One of few child actors to make a successful transition into adult roles, Lane made a hit with audiences in the back-to-back cult films The Outsiders, starring with future movie stars Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, and Patrick Swayze, and Rumble Fish, starring Dillon, Mickey Rourke, and Nicolas Cage. Subsequently, Andy Warhol proclaimed Lane, "the undisputed female lead of Hollywood's new rat pack." However, the two films that could have catapulted her to star status, Streets of Fire (she turned down Splash and Risky Business for this film) and The Cotton Club, were both commercial and critical failures, and her career languished as a result. After The Cotton Club, Lane dropped out of the movie business and lived with her mother in Georgia.

Lane returned to the business to make The Big Town and Lady Beware, but it was not until 1989's popular and critically acclaimed TV mini-series Lonesome Dove that Lane made another big impression on a sizable audience. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for the role. She also enjoyed positive reviews for her performance in the independent film My New Gun, which was well received at the Cannes Film Festival. She went on to appear as actress Paulette Goddard in Sir Richard Attenborough's big-budget biopic of Charles Chaplin.

In 2002, Diane Lane starred in Unfaithful, a drama film directed by Adrian Lyne adapted from the French film The Unfaithful Wife. Lane played a housewife who indulges in an adulterous fling with a mysterious book dealer. The film featured several sex scenes. Lyne's repeated takes for these scenes were very demanding for the actors involved, especially for Lane, who had to be emotionally and physically fit for the duration. Unfaithful received mostly mixed to negative reviews, though Lane earned widespread praise for her performance. Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman said, "Lane, in the most urgent performance of her career, is a revelation. The play of lust, romance, degradation, and guilt on her face is the movie's real story". She followed that film up with Under the Tuscan Sun, based on the best-selling book by Frances Mayes.

In 2009, it was announced that Lane will star in Secretariat, a Disney film about the relationship between the 1973 Triple Crown-winning racehorse and his owner, Penny Chenery, whom the actress will be portraying.