Dern’s life in the slow lane

For a long time, Bruce Dern felt like he’d been left behind, said Marlow Stern in TheDailyBeast.com. In the 1970s, the actor watched as contemporaries like Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, and Jack Nicholson became bona fide movie stars. “As my age group ascended, Brucie was still on the bottom rung, saying five lines on an episode of Gunsmoke,” says Dern, 77. His consolation has been an opportunity to work with Hollywood’s biggest names, including directors Elia Kazan and Alfred Hitchcock. He remembers working on Hitchcock’s 1976 dark comedy Family Plot when a young Steven Spielberg—fresh off his success with Jaws—visited the set, hoping to meet his idol. “Hitch would say, ‘I-I-Is that the boy that made the fishhh movie?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s him.’ And he said, ‘Ah, I could never speak to him. He makes me feel like such a whore.’” Two years earlier, Hitchcock had made $2 million for doing a voice-over for Universal Studios theme park in Orlando. That’s why, he told Dern, he didn’t want to meet Spielberg. “I can’t look at him, or shake his hand, because I’m the voice of the Jawsss ride.” Dern explains, “He took the money and felt it wasn’t right. And they never talked.”

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