Between now and the 63rd Annual Emmy Awards on Aug. 29, WVFC is launching a series of profiles of our Power Women Honor Roll — actors, writers and producers who are also, like us, women discovering this new phase of life. Stay tuned for publisher Patricia Yarberry Allen on The Big C, aspiring comedian Rachel Rawlings on the powerhouse that is Tina Fey and others, including our movie/TV maven Alexandra MacAaron. Today, some thoughts on Diane Lane, 46, nominated this year for HBO’s Cinema Verite (see clip above).

Full disclosure: Diane Lane went to my high school (and Justice Elena Kagan’s), though I didn’t know her then. She was already a professional actor in those days, including her movie debut in A Little Romance, (left, 1979), and a pioneering role in Elizabeth Swados’ Runaways before she was 16 years old. At right, Lane as one of the earliest girl punk rockers in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. (1981).
 
Lane continued her young-rebellion persona into the late 1980s with Rumble Fish and The Outsiders (left), before broadening her range via the 1989 TV miniseries Lonesome Dove and a featured role in 1992’s Chaplin (right).
 
But as the 21st century began, Lane emerged in her full power, as the central character in the love triangle in 2002’s Unfaithful. In 2006’s Nights in Rodanthe, she went on to demonstrate that love in midlife doesn’t have to be played for laughs (and can even include Richard Gere, as her real-life does Josh Brolin). And in last year’s Secretariat, she showed that she didn’t need a leading man at all to carry a movie: just a woman with a dream.
 


 

What about the 2010 film for which Lane’s been nominated — an HBO look at the 1970s television series An American Family? In a performance hailed as “icily spot-on” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Lane plays the mother in the Loud family, the first to allow TV cameras to follow them 24/7. The family crumbled under the pressure long before the term “reality TV” existed.
 
We’ll be watching Lane on awards night with a lot of interest. And we hope she keeps checking back with us, too; her mix of grit and grace is part of what Women’s Voices for Change is all about.

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