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Laura Elizabeth Dern (born February 10, 1967 in
Los Angeles, California) is an United
States|American film and television actor. She is
the daughter of actor Bruce Dern and actress Diane
Ladd.

Her best known film is Jurassic Park. She was
nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress
for her performance as the title character in
Rambling Rose.

Dern was previously in relationships with fellow
actors Treat Williams, Jeff Goldblum, Kyle
MacLachlan and Billy Bob Thornton, and now is in a
long-term relationship with blues music|blues
musician Ben Harper with whom she has two
children.

Laura Dern was born into a moviemaking family.
Dern was exposed to movie sets and the movie
industry from infancy, and obtained several bit
parts as a child. Her parents divorced when she
was two and she lost contact with her father for
several years as a result.

Her parents' background and her own early tastes
of the moviemaking would soon convince the young
Dern to pursue acting herself. Like so many young
child actors, her decision may have been
influenced by social awkwardness—the child
of 1960s counterculture parents, she was steeped
in Eastern mysticism and political radicalism, and
was seem an oddball by her more conservative
classmates. Her gawky physical appearance didn't
seem to help - even before her teens she had
achieved her 5'10 height, was rail skinny (other
than precociously wide hips), had huge feet and a
slouching posture, and for all this was often
teased by her classmates. Perhaps the
nine-year-old Dern found refuge by studying at the
Lee Strasberg Theater Institute.

The first success for the young Dern was in 1980,
with a role in Adrian Lyne's Foxes (1980
film)|Foxes (1980), a teen movie starring Jodie
Foster. She followed this with several small
parts, or parts in small movies, such as Ladies
and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains and Teachers,
as a student who has an affair with a teacher.
(Her mother objected to her active presence on
movie sets at age thirteen, which required Dern to
sue for emancipation so she could play her role in
The Fabulous Stains.) Her next roles, as the blind
girl who befriends the deformed boy in Mask
(movie)|Mask (1985), as the teenaged girl whose
sexual awakening colides with an older man in
Smooth Talk (1985), gave her career an important
boost. She appeared to have made it with a leading
role in David Lynch's acclamed Blue Velvet (1986),
but it was four years before her next notable
film, and this was the bizarre Wild at Heart
(1990), also directed by Lynch.

The following year, Dern starred in Rambling Rose
(1991), which wound become her signature
performance, as a sexually precocious,
free-spirited young housemaid in the South in the
1930s. Dern earned an Oscar-nomination for her
performance, and so did her mother and co-star
Diane Ladd.

Dern continues to win prominent roles on the big
screen, often in smaller, highly regarded human
dramas such as October Sky (1999), I Am Sam (2001)
and We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004), although
she is perhaps widely known for her role as Ellie
Sattler in the movies Jurassic Park (1993) and
Jurassic Park III (2001), or for her guest
performance on Ellen (television series)|Ellen
(1994), as the woman to whom Ellen finally comes
out as a lesbian.

Dern's pre-teen gawkiness mature into lithe
beauty, but this doesn't prevent her from
fearlessly throwing herself into a wide variety of
roles which are sometimes unflattering, an
excellent example being her unflinchingly comic
portrayal of an intensely annoying loser whose
pregnancy becomes a social and political football
in Citizen Ruth (1996). This results in Dern being
one of the most interesting actors working in
Hollywood today.

==External links==
* imdb name | id=0000368 | name=Laura Dern