It’s the interplay of dark and light that gets you: At 41, Diane Lane remains a classic film beauty, one of the most exquisite to appear on the screen, yet there’s something more in her face that aesthetically pleasing features—flawless and flawed, timeless but not ageless, it conveys a sense of a life lived, with the spoils and tolls of all of her daily triumphs and tragedies there for the world to see.
It was an astute choice indeed to cast her as the real-life Hollywood socialite Toni Mannix, herself a knockout who must slowly coming to terms with the decline of her youth, mostly sharply felt with the loss of her younger lover George Reeves, the actor who portrayed TV’s Superman in the 1950s. And eschewing the look-young-and-beautiful-at-all-costs ethos that pervades most star actresses’ mentalities, Lane was willing to have herself aged on screen to effectively play the part in the noir-ish exploration of the mysteries surrounding Reeves’ death in 1959.
“With her you don’t have try and make her beautiful. She is already that in every sense of that word, personally and physically,” says the film’s director Allen Coulter. “She is so professional and she was so determined to be true to Toni that she encouraged and was willing to allow herself to be made up to be older than she is. That transition, which is very subtle, goes on throughout the film until the final moment where you see that she’s been affected by all that’s happened to her and that she’s indeed aged. That’s Diane’s courage as an actress.”
Hollywood.com: Can you talk about what you saw in George Reeves’ story and why you wanted to be a part of making that come alive?
Diane Lane: Well, I always had a thing for George. He was the definition of Superman for me and I bought it hook, line and sinker in the sense that that’s all he was. I never looked beyond the curtain or considered anything about actors versus the characters that I knew them to be as a child. So there was no black cloud over him in terms of the lore that the generation before me knew about. It was still on morning television when I was growing up and it’s interesting because there are so many layers to the story of George and I was very happy to portray some version of love in his life because I was a fan.
HW: What kind of woman is Toni Mannix?
DL: Well, it’s interesting because I was sitting next to Dominick Dunne very recently at dinner and he knew Toni, and I so wished that I had spoken with him prior to filming. Everyone has so much to tell me now. But I do feel that burden of responsibility to honor her as closely as I was told and could glean from things that I had read. I appreciated her vulnerability and how it came out all wrong, and I just thought that everyone in the movie was a truly interesting character in their own merit. So it’s nice to be a thread in an interesting tapestry.
HW: Some people have compared your interpretation of Toni as akin to Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
DL: I have no comment on that. I didn’t write it. These things have a life of their own without me helping them [laughs].
HW: This movie is about an actor’s life in Hollywood and not having that life really go as it was planned. Can you talk about the frustrations and disappointment from your own life in Hollywood?
DL: I would say that the whole myth of the word “plan” in your question belies the little man behind the curtain in Oz, because there is no plan unless you’re someone, people who I can’t name, who maybe actually do have a plan—which is kind of startling to imagine–to take over the world. It’s such a crap shoot. If they knew what made hits they would make more of them. That’s my bumper sticker on the whole industry, and so I don’t think that you can live for that, and I think that the more you get caught up in that, whether you’re a film star from the ’50’s who regrets that he was ever on television or the pop psychology of what it is to be a victim of the media and all of this, that the film deals with is relevant today as it was then. It is a case study of what makes people happy and the myth of happiness itself.
HW: This is a period piece. Can you talk about the challenges and joys of doing this type of film?
DL: It’s always refreshing to step into another time. I’ve often loved Westerns because it was so interesting to experience the oppression of being in the saddle and being in a corset–just to appreciate being able to complain about being in high heels and tight jeans when you’re done with your day’s work. There is always something to complain about, but it’s just a difference reference once you see the limitations are in the time that you’re portraying and the freedoms of that time because it cuts both ways.
HW: You aged yourself in this movie. What was that experience like?
DL: I think that it was a wonderful exhale to just embrace the fact that the alternative to aging is much worse, and frankly having had a mother and watching her gracefully have a currency of life that was more meaningful than her youth–the vulnerability of a woman of years is a very interesting commodity to work with on film, versus an almost callowness of youth that is assigned to men, but I think that women possess it as well. It’s just something that’s easy to come by and hard to lose. Certainly Toni Mannix, that’s a very important element of the relationship that she had with George which was her vulnerability of being the older woman, that whole element which today you can be eighteen months older and it means a great deal evidently. So I’m just saying that, again, it’s about the ’50’s versus 2006 or wherever we are. I think that it meant even more then.
