Laura Dern comes of age: roles in Marriage Story and Little Women show she is at the top of her game
- Dern had two wildly different film roles this year – a cutthroat divorce lawyer in Marriage Story and a patient matriarch in Little Women
- Despite ups and downs since her debut in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, at 52 she finally has the career she always wanted
Laura Dern sashays in, dressed for success in form-fitting blue jeans, red heels and a cascade of perfectly situated blond hair. “Sorry I look so schleppy,” she says. “I had an event at my kid’s school.”
Dern is Nora, the cutthroat divorce lawyer in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story , out on Netflix.
Beautiful but spiky, heartless but hilarious, the role is the culmination of a career full of fierce feminists and rebels. Midway through the film, she stops texting for a moment to rail against the misguided, Judaeo-Christian double standards that Western society holds against mothers.
But in the (metaphorical) cinema next door this month, Dern is Marmee, the ever-patient, ever-loving matriarch in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. Buttoned up in the finery of a proud poor woman in 1860s New England, Marmee is the radiant, nurturing nucleus of a house spinning with four rambunctious girls, led by Saoirse Ronan’s Jo.
“It’s interesting to have these two women, two characters, who have, honestly, the greatest feminist writing ever – in two completely different worlds,” Dern says. “Between some of the lines I say to Saoirse – that are directly from the book, these lines that Louisa [May Alcott] wrote in the 1860s – about ‘I’m angry nearly every day of my life,’ and to talk about what it is to be an artist, and what it is to be a woman, and not to need to marry, and to love who you choose to love. I mean, it’s some really radical thinking.”
