Jan 1999

In 1979, 13-year-old Diane Lane starred opposite Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance, landed on the cover of Time magazine, and prompted the critics to call her " a budding Grace Kelly." Although Lane made indelible marks on insecure teenagers everywhere as the unattainable teen vixen in Francis Ford Coppola's '80s street-gang movies, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, she didn't achieve the predicted A-list status. After that, she found steady work in unsteady movies such as Knight Moves, Judge Dredd, and Murder at 1600.

With A Walk on the Moon, due out this spring, Lane may finally be having her moment. In actor Tony Goldwyn's directional debut, Lane plays a devoted Jewish wife and mother who, in the summer of 1969, make the customary family pilgrimage to the Catskills. There she re-evaluates her life of mah-jongg, Bar Mitzvahs, and marriage to a menschy TV repairman when a free spirit in baggy cords (Viggo Mortensen) passes through town hawking blouses and a little free love. As Pearl Kartowitz, Lane is just as believable doing the free-to-be-you-and-me dance with Mortensen at Woodstock as she is chopping celery. No wonder: at age six, Lane was a full member of the traveling avant-garde theater company La Mama. When not hanging out in New York City with family friends John Cassaveses and Gena Rawlands, she was performing Euripides for the wife of the Shah of Iran and "running around Middle Eastern bazaars wearing hippie patches and peace signs." Things are considerably calmer these days for Lane, the single mother of a five-year-old girl whom she had with her ex-husband, actor Christopher Lambert. Having learned the dangers of excessive media hype, Lane rejects the talk of her "comeback." The illusion of having control is as scary as not having control at all," she says. "The problem with film is that you can rent it on video 15 years later."

- EVGENIA PERETZ

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