Age: 61
female
Diane Colleen Lane (born January 22, 1965) is an American actress and producer. Born and raised in New York City, Lane made her screen debut at age 14 in George Roy Hill's 1979 film A Little Romance. Laurence Olivier, who played a major supporting role in the film, called her "the new Grace Kelly". The two films that could have catapulted her to star status, Streets of Fire and The Cotton Club, were both commercial and critical failures, and her career languished as a result. After taking a break, Lane returned to acting to appear in The Big Town and Lady Beware, but did not make another big impression on a sizable audience until 1989's popular and critically acclaimed TV miniseries Lonesome Dove, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award. It was not until 1999 that Lane earned further recognition for her role in A Walk on the Moon, and that was followed by her performance alongside George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in the 2000 blockbuster The Perfect Storm. She was especially lauded and honored for the 2002 film Unfaithful, which earned her Satellite, New York Film Critics Circle, and National Society of Film Critics awards for Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Drama). Her performance in Unfaithful also garnered her Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for Best Actress. She was also highly lauded by critics for her performance in the immediately subsequent film Under the Tuscan Sun. For much of the rest of the decade, she alternately appeared as a lead actress in romantic films such as Must Love Dogs (2005) and Nights in Rodanthe (2008), and thrillers such as Fierce People (2005), Hollywoodland (2006), and Untraceable (2008). She has appeared in four films directed by Francis Ford Coppola: The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, and Jack. She has been in one film directed by his wife Eleanor Coppola: Paris Can Wait. She also played the recurring role of Martha Kent, the adoptive mother of Superman, in Man of Steel (2013) and appeared in subsequent films of the DC Extended Universe. Her most recent film is the 2020 neo-western Let Him Go.
In Valley of the Dolls, Anne Welles arrives in postwar New York seeking independence and quickly becomes entangled in the intoxicating world of fame, ambition, and illusion. Working for powerful attorney Henry Bellamy, she befriends rising performer Neely O’Hara and the luminous but vulnerable Jennifer North, forming a trio bound by dreams of success. As Anne falls into a complicated romance with Lyon Burke, she also finds herself navigating the manipulations of industry titan Helen Lawson and the seductive pull of wealth and status. Neely’s meteoric rise to stardom and Jennifer’s troubled relationships mirror Anne’s own emotional entanglements, revealing the hidden costs of glamour as love, betrayal, and ambition collide. As the years pass, success gives way to dependency, heartbreak, and disillusionment. Neely’s career spirals under the weight of addiction and pressure, while Jennifer, searching desperately for love beyond her beauty, meets a tragic fate. Anne, now deeply embedded in the very world she once observed from the outside, struggles to reconcile her ideals with a life shaped by compromise, toxic relationships, and emotional endurance. Reunited with Lyon in a marriage shadowed by infidelity and power imbalance, Anne ultimately confronts the quiet devastation beneath her carefully constructed life. Surrounded by the echoes of lost innocence and broken dreams, she turns to the same “dolls” that claimed her friends, embracing a numbing acceptance of a world where success and suffering are inextricably linked.
