Happy Birthday: Laura Dern

Laura Dern

Born: February 10, 1967 in Saint John’s Health Center, Santa Monica, Los Angeles County, California, USA

(2011, on Mask (1985)) Talk about feeling like the luckiest girl in the world. Every 15- and 16-year-old actress should be blessed enough to have Peter Bogdanovich there to guide them toward subtlety and kindness and… I mean, I use the word “compassion”, but he really taught me a lot about expressing and connecting to compassion through a character and to a film. He loved Rocky, the character that Eric Stoltz played, so deeply. And Rusty [Dennis], his real mom, who Cher played, was on the set with us. To be able to play a character who gave him love and saw his beauty was just incredible. He’s one of our great directors. Truly. I’m very lucky to have made a movie with him.

(2011, on The West Wing (1999)) Aaron Sorkin is a genius, with this crazy brilliant brain that works a million miles a minute. And I had never worked around someone who, as you’re filming, can give you three more pages. ‘Cause I’d never really worked in television, and it moves so quickly. It was just an amazing experience to watch someone continue to stop at nothing to come up more or new or different, and keep trying and working and creating as you’re shooting. So all I can say is just that Aaron Sorkin is brilliant, and it’s wonderful to be around his brilliant brain.