At 61, Diane Lane Finally Addresses Her Scandalous Affairs
Diane Lane spent her entire childhood being fought over. Not metaphorically — literally. Her parents split just thirteen days after she was born in New York City in January 1965, and what followed was a legal war that would define her earliest years.
Her mother, Colleen Farrington, was a Playboy centerfold and nightclub singer; her father, Burton Lane, was an acting coach who drove a taxi to make ends meet.
When Lane was six, her mother fled with her to Mexico, triggering a custody battle her father ultimately won.
He raised her in New York residential hotels, and she rode along in his cab between fares.
Burt Lane didn’t just parent his daughter — he strategized her. He later admitted, without much shame, that putting her in acting jobs was simply cheaper than paying for a babysitter.
By six, Lane was performing professionally with an experimental theater company, touring internationally in avant-garde productions.
She would later say, half-joking, that the experience alone “definitely got her a seat in therapy.”
By twelve she was on Broadway, sharing a stage with Meryl Streep. By fourteen, she had a starring role opposite Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance — and Olivier, notoriously stingy with praise, called her the next Grace Kelly.
Weeks later, her face was on the cover of Time magazine. She was declared Hollywood’s “whiz kid.”
She was fourteen years old. Lane, even then, understood the machine she was caught in.
She’d later note dryly that Henry Kissinger shared that same magazine cover — a small detail that put the whole spectacle of celebrity in perspective for her.
By her mid-teens, the pressure cracked her. At fifteen, she ran away to Los Angeles for a week with a nineteen-year-old actor she’d met on a film set — a reckless bid for freedom from a father who controlled nearly everything.
She’d later call the decision dangerous, the direct result of being given far too much independence far too young.
Not long after, her mother forcibly took her to Georgia; Lane recalled getting into the car and realizing the doors had no handles.
She was, in her words, being driven somewhere against her will while her mother just wanted to talk.
The standoff triggered another legal battle, and Lane eventually declared her own independence, moving out and paying her own rent as a teenager using money from her film work.
Decades later, discussing her role in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, Lane finally spoke publicly about how deeply that custody war had scarred her — the agony of being forced to choose between two parents who refused to be united about anything, the strange guilt of feeling like she’d done something wrong simply by existing between them.
Her career hit real turbulence in her twenties. After starring in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, she anchored his 1984 film The Cotton Club — a critical and commercial disaster that badly damaged her standing in Hollywood.
Exhausted by the backlash and the media’s obsession with her love life, she walked away from the industry entirely and moved to Georgia to reconnect with the mother she’d barely spoken to in years.
The tabloids, meanwhile, never let up. They invented romances, chased rumors, and linked her to nearly every co-star she had.
She did briefly date Jon Bon Jovi in 1984 — she’d later call it a wonderful experience every young woman should have — but always denied being the inspiration behind “You Give Love a Bad Name,” pointing out, with some amusement, that she’d never worn red nail polish.
Her first real marriage came in 1988, to French actor Christopher Lambert, fresh off his fame from Highlander.
Their romance began years earlier in Paris but collapsed under the weight of distance — until they reunited on a film set in Rome and fell hard, fast, and permanently.
They married in Santa Fe and had a daughter, Eleanor, in 1993. From the outside, it looked like a glamorous transatlantic power marriage.
Inside, it was mostly silence. Lambert was constantly working abroad, leaving Lane alone for months at a stretch.
In a striking 2007 interview, she admitted she’d spent most of the marriage essentially celibate, waiting for a husband who was rarely home to make her feel wanted.
She later reflected that she’d been searching for a sense of belonging she’d never had as a child — and had found, in her words, “the absolutely least likely person on the planet” to give it to her.
She filed for divorce in 1994. Her second marriage, to actor Josh Brolan, began in 2002 and seemed to promise the stability she’d been chasing.
They wed in 2004 on his ranch, blending her daughter with his two teenage kids from a previous marriage.
But just four months into the marriage, police were called to their home after a domestic altercation, and Brolan was arrested on a misdemeanor battery charge.
He later admitted he was drinking heavily during that period of his life, and that alcohol had a way of erasing his judgment entirely.
The marriage limped on for nearly a decade, strained by his ongoing struggle with alcoholism, before Lane filed for divorce in 2013.
Brolan has since credited that divorce — and a sobering visit to his dying grandmother — with finally pushing him into recovery.
It was in the middle of all this chaos that Lane delivered the performance that would define her career: Unfaithful in 2002.
The role, famously turned down by Jennifer Lopez, earned Lane Oscar, Golden Globe, and SAG nominations, and transformed her overnight from respected actress into a defining face of American cinema.
Ironically, the performance was so convincing that audiences began confusing her character with her real life, fueling the very tabloid speculation she’d spent years trying to escape.
In the years since, Lane has deliberately steered away from tabloid-bait romantic roles, instead building a second act in franchise films — playing Martha Kent in the DC Extended Universe — and in prestige television, earning acclaim for Feud and A Man in Full.
Now in her sixties, she remains unmarried, fiercely private, and entirely on her own terMs.
