Lane’s pushy father

Diane Lane had no choice but to become an actress, said Margot Dougherty in More. Her acting-coach father, Burt, forced her into the profession as a child, and by age 13 she was starring opposite Laurence Olivier in 1979’s A Little Romance. At school, her career was “very much a stigma,” she says. “Kids can be mean with whatever you offer them.” Lane blamed her father for her loneliness. She recalls hurling a chair at him when she was 12 and shouting, “You’d have made me an actress if I had two heads!” Burt thought he was giving his daughter the skills she’d need to be a successful, independent woman. “He’d say, ‘I did not raise you for bondage.’ He’d elucidate this whole scenario: ‘A guy is going to chain you to a chair, have his way with you until you’re pregnant, and that will be your life.’ It was a really toxic cartoon.” At age 19, while filming The Cotton Club—her third film with director Francis Ford Coppola—Lane finally took control of her life. “I said, ‘Okay, I am now wiser than my father in every aspect of filmmaking.’ I outgrew his ability to give me advice. He agreed.”

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