By BRUCE KIRKLAND --
HOLLYWOOD -- Diane Lane is back in the fame game. But this time she is playing by her own rules.
"I couldn't be happier," she says of her status in Hollywood, where she is considered a solid veteran actress, still young at 30, still beautiful, still desirable, but not the superstar she was once touted to become.
She is about to make her debut as an action heroine armed with a gun and a bad-ass attitude. She plays Judge Hershey opposite Sylvester Stallone in the futuristic law-and-order thriller Judge Dredd, opening Friday. It's an openly fascistic scenario. The law exerts control by on-street executions. Judge Dredd is the ultimate hardliner. Judge Hershey is his partner.
It is a movie project that has given Lane's personal life a lane change too. Separated from her husband of seven years - actor Christopher Lambert, with whom she had a baby girl two years ago - Lane is involved with Judge Dredd director Danny Cannon.
Later this year, Lane will appear with Jeff Bridges in Wild Bill, the epic about Old West legend Wild Bill Hickok. She will also co-star as Stella in the new CBS-TV version of A Streetcar Named Desire.
This is the same Lane who made her stage debut at six, spouting Greek verse by rote in a New York production of Medea. She made her movie debut at 13 co-starring opposite the legendary Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance. At 14, she was a Time covergirl, labelled as one of "Hollywood's Whiz Kids."
By 19, she was a bonafide movie star, having appeared in a string of Francis Ford Coppola films: The Outsiders, Rumble Fish and The Cotton Club, as well as the rock 'n' rolling Streets Of Fire. Her male co-stars of the day included Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Patrick Swayze. Lane was more famous than any of them - at the time.
So she bailed out. "I ran away," Lane reflects now about her brush with the lure of superstardom. "I took two years off after The Cotton Club." It wasn't because Coppola's film failed. Lane was scared.
"I said: If this is going to happen like everybody says it's going to happen, I'm not ready! So, if it happens now, fine, because I am ready. But that still doesn't mean I'm really (after it)."
Her fear was internal at 19. She had already been leading a tumultuous life. Her parents split up when she was 13 days old, launching a tug-of-war that allowed Lane to gain an unnatural freedom for a child as she played one parent off the other.
"I was still growing into becoming an adult," she says of herself at 19, after The Cotton Club experience, which included what she later called "farcical" rumors of a romance with Coppola.
"I didn't want to have people think they know who I am because I didn't know who I was," Lane muses now. Her attitude about everything, including success, is simple: "Go all the way or don't go!" She made her choice then: "I was afraid so I ran away and chilled off and worked for my own reasons and that was it. I think I lost a good five years of momentum. But I'd rather be doing it on purpose."
With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Lane makes it clear she does not like any suggestions that she disappeared, however. "I worked steadily." When it is mentioned that many people didn't notice, she snaps with a sarcastic snort: "I was blissfully ignorant of that! Now I'll go hang myself, thanks!"
She need not worry. Whatever critics say about Judge Dredd, it is considered a surefire box-office smash and her mug and lithe body will be up front alongside Stallone's. "It's better than I expected," Lane offers about the movie, which has been at the centre of a firestorm over control of the artistic vision. Cannon was sucked into a titantic struggle with Stallone.
"I'm so happy," Lane says, underplaying the struggle, which she saw firsthand as Cannon's companion. "I'm so relieved. I'm so thrilled. I felt removed from the final end result, yet to see it was so rewarding. I think it's such a classy five-star production."
Likewise she is delighted with her own character. "It's a comic strip and I was relieved to see that Hershey works. Because she was a risk - a big risk. You have the freedom to be very large and tough and say things. So playing Hershey was a challenge for me. To pull that off I had to psyche myself up every day."
She also had to hold her own physically, although she is quite frail, at least compared to the martial arts proficient Joan Chen, who plays a villain who gets into a vicious catfight with Judge Hershey. Chen admits she had to hold back to keep from hurting Lane.
Meanwhile, Lane used her vulnerability to advantage with Stallone, who arrived with entourage and ego. "He's sort of romantic and he's very gentlemanly and very sensitive and he's very misunderstood. And he has his own way of communicating and his own reasons for being the way he is. That's everybody's story. His is just more in your face because we all watched him for the past 20 years and he's an icon."
How did she survive the situation? "By empowering him." She showed off her "femininity and needing qualities," she says. "I have needs! Any man responds to that. It's true. I mean that in a very respectful way." She appealed to the `protector' in Stallone - and he responded. "I needed him! Are you kidding? Especially on that man's movie set. I needed an ally and what better person than Judge Dredd?"
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