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A luminous, willowy blonde, Laura Dern is a rare hybrid of character actress and movie star. With role models like father Bruce Dern, mother Diane Ladd and godmother Shelly Winters, it's little wonder that she grew up unafraid to tackle unglamorous roles, acquiring a reputation as a risk-taker who lives and dies by the "authenticity" of her work. Conceived during the filming of Roger Corman's "The Wild Angels" (1966, in which both parents acted), she remembers seeing at an early age her father's severed head bounce down the stairs when "Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte" (1965) played on TV. Dern became further enthralled by her own ice cream-eating episode in Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (1974) not to mention watching Alfred Hitchcock put her father through his paces on the set of "Family Plot" (1976). She began studying at the Lee Strasberg Institute at the age of nine and was ecstatic to land a bit part as an irksome party crasher in Adrian Lyne's "Foxes" (1980).

Dern first registered as a troubled pregnant teen in "Teachers" (1984) and was then so convincing as a blind girl in love with the disfigured protagonist of "Mask" (1985) that many audience members believed she really was sight-impaired. Before Hollywood could lock her in as a "symbol of purity", filmmakers Joyce Chopra and David Lynch came along and rescued her from such typecasting, exploring her aura of latent dangerous sexuality in films that exposed the darker side of American small-town life. Chopra's "Smooth Talk" (1995), adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates short story, cast her opposite a sinisterly seductive Treat Williams, playing the brooding, alluring, teenage tease who's just beginning to discover the power of lust. Lynch's "Blue Velvet" (1986) poised her provocatively between innocence and the outlandishly weird: her smart, sweet Nancy Drew, the good twin to Isabella Rossellini's lewdly masochistic chanteuse, one half of the Madonna-whore complex. Despite the character's blue-eyed wholesomeness, she is the catalyst that propels the film into its most disturbing disclosures.

After the disappointments of "Haunted Summer" (1988) and "Fat Man and Little Boy" (1989, in which she played a nurse who must watch lover John Cusack die of radiation poisoning), she scored a resounding success as the gum-cracking, chain-smoking, hell-raising Lula Pace Fortune, Nicolas Cage's uninhibited traveling companion, in Lynch's "Wild at Heart" (1990), a part diametrically opposed to her Sandy in "Blue Velvet". On the run from her crazed mother (played with manic glee by real-life mom Ladd), Lula summed up the spirit of the enterprise (and perhaps the Lynchian oeuvre in general): "The whole world's wild at heart and weird on top." The next year, once again acting with Ladd, she won widespread critical acclaim as Rose, a sweetly wanton orphan whose presence disrupts a 1930s Southern family in Martha Coolidge's "Rambling Rose" (1991). Dern received a Best Actress Oscar nomination while Ladd snagged a Best Supporting Actress nod, making them the first mother-daughter team cited in the same year for the same film.

Dern stepped into the world of big-time blockbusters as potential dinosaur chow for Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" (1993), playing a role that was less demanding but far more high-profile than her preceding parts--she would also return for a strategic cameo in the 2001 sequel "Jurassic Park III". She also mixed it up that year with co-stars Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner as a criminologist in Eastwood's under-appreciated dark chase film "A Perfect World", its disappointing box-office proclaiming audiences' unwillingness to accept Costner outside the heroic mode. Dern returned to feature leads with a well-received performance as a pregnant glue-sniffer who becomes caught in a tug-of-war between pro-choice and pro-life forces in the satiric "Citizen Ruth" (1996), a film which also featured her mother in a raunchy unbilled cameo. Three years passed before Joe Johnston's "October Sky" presented her as a morally upright teacher (a marked contrast to some of her unhinged wackos) inspiring some West Virginia schoolboys to look beyond their coal-mining community, and the white trash romantic comedy "Daddy and Them" (also 1999) which starred her opposite the pic's writer-director, former off-screen fiancé Billy Bob Thornton, and once again provided employment for Ladd.

The actress provided support as the caring girlfriend of dentist Steve Martin before his life is thrown of track by a seductive patient (Helena Bonham Carter) in "Novacaine" (2001). She then teamed with actor William H. Macy to play a Brooklyn couple who, in the waning months of World War II, are mistaken for Jews by their anti-Semitic neighbors in "Focus" (2001), based on Arthur Miller novel After a brief appearance in the drama "I Am Sam" (2001) opposite Sean Penn as a mentally disabled man seeking custody of his daughter, Dern took a few years off from the big screen (to couple with singer Ben Harper and raise their first child), returning in a strong performance in the otherwise unremarkable indie drama "We Don't Live Here Anymore," with Dern as a part of a pair of married academic couples who self-destructively drift into infidelity with the other's spouses.

Dern has saved some of her finest portrayals for the small screen, often for Showtime, with whom she has a long-standing relationship. She appeared opposite Anthony Andrews in that network's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1989), and won Emmy nominations for her performance as a military widow in the HBO docudrama "Afterburn" (1992) and the 1993 "Murder, Obliquely" episode of Showtime's "Fallen Angels" film-noir series. After making her directing debut with the romantic short "The Gift" (Showtime, 1994), for which she also starred and provided the story, she executive produced and acted alongside Raul Julia and Vanessa Redgrave in the dark political drama "Down Came a Blackbird" (Showtime, 1995), In addition to playing ill-fated militia fugitive Vicki Weaver in "Ruby Ridge: An American Tragedy" (CBS, 1996), Dern provided narration for that year's "Bastard Out of Carolina" (Showtime), a gritty drama about child abuse in the 1950s that marked Anjelica Huston's directorial debut. After securing her place in history (and a third Emmy nomination) as the lesbian lover in the "coming out" episode of "Ellen" (ABC), she turned in a critically-acclaimed performance as the low-rent mother of four who contracts to sell her next baby to a yuppie couple in "The Baby Dance" (Showtime, 1998). Less successful, critically and creatively, was her subsequent telepic "Within These Walls" (2001), but she snared another plumb role when she appeared in the well-praised cautionary HMO tale "Damaged Care" (HBO, 2002) as a doctor who blows the whistle on unsavory insurance practices.