Diane Lane, left, plays Penny Chenery, the Virginia horsewoman who guided her horse to the first Triple Crown win in 25 years, in Secretariat.

Secretariat is a movie with two stars, one of them a beautiful and spirited thoroughbred whom everyone underestimates. The other is a horse.

Diane Lane leads the field in Secretariat as Penny Chenery, the Virginia horsewoman who gambled everything to guide her horse to the first Triple Crown win in 25 years. It all took place in 1973, so the role of Chenery comes with specific social weight -- it was the era of Watergate, nuclear testing and feminism, among other upheavals.

The movie is about the horse's triumphant run, but it's also a film about the unusual relationship between Chenery and Secretariat, and about Chenery's role in changing public perception about women and work. She was formidable.

"Formidable? Well, I've done my homework on that word, and it can cut both ways," says Lane, 45, during an interview to promote Secretariat (in theatres Friday). "I don't think she frightened anyone. She just wasn't motivated by anyone else's expectations or out of anything vainglorious."

The actress focused on Chenery's accomplishments. "She was helping her family, wearing the mantle of the family business, taking it from her father, learning on the job how to get things done. She knew about horse breeding, but as to what goes into the nurturing of a racehorse's will to win, that I think was her maternal insight and gift."

Lane met Penny Chenery, who is now in her late 80s, to talk about the real events behind the movie. "So I had a stronger sense of what I had to live up to on the screen."

Lane herself was only eight years old when Secretariat won the Triple Crown, but she clearly remembers how the racehorse grabbed world attention. Unlike most eight-year-olds, however, Lane wasn't at home watching events on TV.

She was in Europe, working with a theatre troupe. The New York-born daughter of an acting coach (and sometime cab driver) and a singer/actor/Playboy centrefold, Lane was acting from age six, starting at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. She made her film debut at age 13 in the film A Little Romance, co-starring with Sir Laurence Olivier and making the sort of impact that put her on the cover of Time magazine.

She left home at 15 to start the film career that has continued, with various ups and downs, for the last 30 years.

Lane was big news in the early '80s with such Francis Ford Coppola movies as The Outsiders and Rumblefish, but critics decided that she'd be stopped in her tracks at age 19 by the box-office failure of The Cotton Club.

By 1989, the same critics had her enjoying a "comeback" with the success of TV's Lonesome Dove; other so-called comebacks were declared on her behalf for such films as Chaplin or A Walk On The Moon, but by the year 2000 Lane made it clear that she'd never gone away.

My Dog Skip and The Perfect Storm that year led to Hardball, The Glass House and then Unfaithful, the 2002 movie that saw Lane earn an Academy Award nomination, among many other honours. Included in her 40-plus feature films and umpteen TV movies and series are Hollywoodland, Nights in Rodanthe and Kill Shot.

For her next role, in the movie Cinema Verite (2012), Lane will play Pat Loud, a woman whose family was the subject of the very first reality TV show on PBS in 1973.

"She was thrust into the media and rather unwittingly personified what it is to be a woman in a changing world," says Lane, whose co-stars in the film are Tim Robbins and James Gandolfini.

The actress thinks every woman should read Pat Loud's book. "It offers such personal insight into that transitional moment for women," says Lane of the era, "when we had to reinvent ourselves because the old roles had been uprooted."

Still learning to nurture

Lane has been married since 2004 to Josh Brolin -- a union that also gave her two stepchildren of 16 and 22 -- and she has a teenage daughter from her first marriage to actor Christopher Lambert.

Having not had much of a childhood herself, Lane says, "It has been the most gratifying experience to create a childhood for my daughter and enjoy the little things.

"I try not to make too big a deal out of them, but invariably, I can't help myself, 'cause for me it's way too precious. It's a little embarrassing, and I probably end up embarrassing her in the process."

By way of an example, Lane recalls gathering fireflies in a glass bottle to show her daughter some years ago.

"I showed them to her, and she was like, 'Ew! get those away from me!' Not the reaction I was anticipating," says Lane, laughing.

"So you see, all our expectations really are premeditated resentments! I just need to let go and let the kids raise me, because I learn how to parent by seeing what they need. There's no way to rehearse this stuff."

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