The role Diane Lane snatched away from Jennifer Lopez: “It was my turn”
Sometimes things go just the way you want them to, you might get the last purple one in a box of Quality Street, you might roll into a petrol station just as the red fuel light starts to blink, or if you’re a movie star, you land the role that brings you an Academy Award nomination when someone else wanted it, a bit like Diane Lane did.
Back at the start of the century, Lane was seen as a pretty decent character actor who, all the same, was yet to have what would really be considered a major hit, although she had appeared alongside George Clooney in the dramatic ‘lots of Atlantic Ocean fishermen die’ Wolfgang Petersen drama The Perfect Storm in 2000.
But then in 2002, she landed the lead in a movie that captured the imagination of pretty much every bored housewife in America, and there are plenty of those. Unfaithful was an erotic drama about a married woman living in the New York suburbs who meets a hunky French guy played by Olivier Martinez and embarks on a torrid affair, before her husband Richard Gere catches wind of it and it all gets rather murder-y.
It seemed to perfectly capture the mood in the United States post 9/11, and Martinez, for a while, became the most sought-after male celebrity around, dating the likes of Kylie Minogue and then Halle Berry. Lane, meanwhile, was admittedly superb in the thriller, which critics weren’t too fussed about, but most women wanted to watch with a glass of wine and the hubby out busy playing, let’s say squash.
She picked up a raft of nominations for her performance, including the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards, although she lost out in each case. But it certainly didn’t do her career any harm, as she earned more award shouts over the next decade and ended up being cast in three DC Comics movies starting with 2013’s Man of Steel.
One person who didn’t share much happiness about Lane’s success, however, was Jennifer Lopez, looking jealously on like a wicked witch of the west from behind a curtain. OK, not really, but she wasn’t over the moon about it, because she had apparently had the opportunity to take the lead role in Unfaithful but turned it down, recently telling Howard Stern that the decision “haunts me”.
When this was relayed to Lane, she said she had no idea Lopez had been offered the part that she made famous, but didn’t seem too fussed about it, telling Entertainment Tonight: “Oh, I see. I didn’t hear that interview.”
She also said that she and Lopez have never discussed the affair, although they did work together a few years before Unfaithful on a 1996 movie called Jack, which nobody remembers but was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, adding, “But I’m glad to hear it. I mean, how great. It was somebody’s moment and it was my turn.”
More recently, Lane has been concentrating on TV shows rather than movies, although she continues to star alongside some of the biggest names in the business. She made the Netflix series A Man in Full with Jeff Daniels, Extrapolations with Meryl Streep and is about to be seen in a dystopian thriller called Anniversary, a film about an over-reaching government tearing a family apart with its authoritarian rules.
