ONLY once in her career has Diane Lane ever been asked to meet an actor to ascertain if the pair would have enough onscreen "chemistry" to make the screen sizzle. That was for the 1984 movie "The Cotton Club," and director Francis Ford Coppola wanted Lane to come meet Richard Gere.
"I was filming 'Streets of Fire' and graduating high school," she recalls with a throaty chuckle. "On a Sunday, I had to fly to New York and then fly back the same day. I was 18 and very upended by that feeling of auditioning -- when I had already made two films for the director. I kind of felt rebellious against that whole sweet-and-sunshine kind of popularity contest that one assumes an audition might be. Richard just cut through my whole awkwardness and laughed at me, and we've been laughing every since."
Indeed, the duo reunited to play a married couple torn asunder by Lane's character's infidelity in 2002's "Unfaithful" and now reteam, yet again, for "Nights in Rodanthe," playing two broken souls who inadvertently meet and fall in love during a hurricane weekend in North Carolina.
"Nights in Rodanthe," which opens in theaters on Friday, has a lot of old-fashioned pleasures that, after this boom-boom summer, I've practically forgotten exist in movies. It doesn't have explosions or superheroes. It has real characters with real, recognizable life problems. (She's a housewife escaping from her unfaithful husband; he's a doctor whose life implodes after one of his patients dies.)
Mostly, though, it has movie stars who look a lot better than real people when they suffer, and connect, and canoodle. And movie stars who don't look to have had plastic surgery, which seems to be practically an epidemic in the over-40 Hollywood set. Let's face it, in the so-called sexy older woman category, Diane Lane could give Gov. Sarah Palin a serious run for her money.
Indeed, I don't know what has happened to Hollywood recently, but established cinematic couples -- of the male-female kind -- are practically a rarity these days. Yes, Hollywood is loaded with bromance: Brad Pitt and George Clooney, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, and the entire Judd Apatow oeuvre. Yet heterosexual romance seems to be a dying breed.
