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Diane Lane interview, 'More' details of PBS documentary Half the Sky (VIDEO)
By April MacIntyre Aug 28, 2012, 17:23 GMT
Oscar nominated actress Diane Lane is speaking out about her new PBS documentary Half the Sky (Released October 1st & October 2nd) that draws attention to the mistreatment of women around the world.
Diane Lane is the September cover story in More magazine, and it features her interview that covers her mother-in-law, Barbara Streisand, life as a child actor, and her new global fight for women’s rights in Africa.
Oscar nominated actress Diane Lane is speaking out about her new PBS documentary Half the Sky (Released October 1st & October 2nd) that draws attention to the mistreatment of women around the world.
Lane dishes about her new film and more:
On grandma “Barbara Streisand”
When Lane married Brolin in 2004, they united their children—her daughter and his son and daughter—in a blended family. Barbra Streisand, who is married to Josh’s father, actor James Brolin, is an active grandmother, notes Lane. “What I enjoy most about Barbra is how participatory she is in the family”….“She’s a mensch. She comes to the kids’ plays and graduations. It was never an issue or question. She wants that involvement.”
On being a “tough cookie”
“I have learned a lot from my characters,” says Lane. “They’ve made me more accepting of my own…the dreaded word: vulnerabilities. You must be vulnerable emotionally for the audience to care and feel for you. I’m much more the tough cookie. When I was younger, I didn’t want to explore that. I was more interested in protecting myself. I’m grateful that with time I’m accepting my own true heart and the tenderness more. Things don’t last forever, so you take care of them. I learn from working.”
On embracing an empty nest with husband, Josh Brolin
“I can still hear the sound of Velcro ripping, the tearing-away feeling,” Lane says. “Wait! Where are you going? Was it something I said?” Being without them “is kind of chilling,” she adds, “but I like straightforward showdowns with fate. I’m feeling good about it.”
On not (Initially) wanting children
“I thought, if I have a child, I’ll be focused on the one and won’t be able to do great things,” she says. “In fact, it’s the opposite: because of having had a child, I have gone past my comfort zone and been willing to put myself out there.”
Her TIME magazine cover at 14 with Tatum O’Neal and Brooke Shields
At 14, Lane landed on the cover of TIME for a story about child stars that included Tatum O’Neal and Brooke Shields. “I was so happy to see other specimens,” Lane says. “It was such a rarity; I don’t think young people today remember a time when 14-year-olds didn’t control the entertainment industry.”
On the being tormented as a child actor and being “precocious”
“I’d performed at the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord. I knew La Rochelle and areas of France. People thought that was precocious. I realized I shouldn’t talk about it.”…At school in the U.S., her acting was “very much of a stigma,” she says. “Isn’t it weird? But kids can be mean with whatever you offer them.”
A possible stint on Broadway?
She’s also contemplating a theater project in New York. “Hey! Some people I love are in New York!” she says brightly, imagining a reunion with the departed children 9two of her three children now live in New York). “I can be, like, nearby ... I’d be out of their hair, but available!”
Robert Duvall on his “affair” with Lane
Duvall who considers Lonesome Dove, the acclaimed 1989 Western miniseries he made with Lane one of his favorite projects. Duvall played Gus McCrae, a cattleman who takes Lane’s prostitute character under his wing. “I’ll always think of her as ‘Lorie darling,’” he admits. Although Gus repeatedly asked Lorie for “a poke,” Duvall didn’t do the same. “Diane was with her French Tarzan husband [Christopher Lambert] at the time,” he says laughing. “So it was platonic, with good, warm feelings.”
On longing for a NORMAL childhood
Because of rehearsals and performances, “I was missing out on a lot, sports and friend stuff,” she says. ‘Normal childhood looked like a candy store and Christmas to me.”
Her difficult relationship with her acting couch, her father
Her father, Burt Lane, was an acting coach and sometime cabdriver for whom the craft of acting was, she says, “a religion”…Lane’s ambivalence about her career fueled a rocky relationship with her dad. “You’d have made me an actress if I had two heads!” she recalls shouting when she was 12, before throwing a chair to drive the point home…”By 19, when Lane was starring in The Cotton Club, her first of three movies with Gere and the third of four she made with Coppola, she had a moment of realization. “I said, ‘OK, I am now wiser than my father in every aspect of filmmaking.’ I outgrew his ability to give me advice. He agreed.”
Her father’s concerns about the potential traps of being a women
“’I did not raise you for bondage,’” she remembers. “He would elucidate this whole scenario: A guy is going to chain you to a chair, have his way with you until you’re pregnant with his child and you have to have it and that will be your life. It was a really toxic cartoon.” In hindsight, though, she says she understands her father’s concern about the potential traps of being female. “That is women’s plight historically and today in many parts of the world, because women don’t have any say over their bodies. [My dad] couldn’t believe that would be the fate of his only flesh and blood daughter, his only child.”
Exposing mistreatment of women in girls in her new PBS documentary Half the Sky
In the documentary, Lane, 47, and five other actresses—Eva Mendes, America Ferrera, Meg Ryan, Olivia Wilde and Gabrielle Union—each travel to a different country in Asia or Africa to draw attention to cultures in which egregious mistreatment of women and girls is endemic. The film, which airs in two parts, on October 1 and 2, is based on the best seller by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife.
On her inspiration to join the Half the Sky project (drawing attention to Somalia’s issue of female mutilation and reproductive issues).
“My role at the minimum was to be a witness and an ambassador,” says Lane. “I’m guilty of the sheltered, privileged life of an American woman. I was grateful to have the scales cleaned from my eyes about the plight of women in the majority of the world.”…“I’m out of my twenties, I’ve been around a little, I thought, ‘What am I going to care about when I’m 80?’ If I can contribute to something that stirs my heart, then it’s all for something.”
On watching a video of female genital mutilation
“I can still hear [that girl] screaming. The video was taken around the time I was 9 years old, the age of the child on the table. I thought, ‘Wow, that could be me.’ The chance of where you’re born, who you’re born to, your gender and color – it’s so bizarre to think your fate is determined by such things.”
Edna Adan Ismail, former First Lady of Somalia on Lane
“When we knew that a Hollywood star would be coming for the documentary, many of us, including me, were expecting the stereotype: an artificial, self-centered and fragile person,” Ismail says. “Instead, I found a warm, intelligent and naturally beautiful woman who was genuinely concerned about the poverty and ill health of the people she met.”
