Laura Dern Celebrates ‘Badass’ Dad Bruce Dern’s 88th Birthday: ‘I Love You So’
Laura Dern and her father Bruce Dern acted for the screen together for the first time in the recent Apple TV+ series ‘Palm Royale’
Laura Dern is wishing her father a happy birthday.
As Laura’s father, actor Bruce Dern, celebrated his 88th birthday on Tuesday, June 4, Laura, 57, shared a throwback black-and-white image of her father running track as a young man to Instagram.
“Pop… Happy birthday you baddass marathoner, actor, historian, irreverent hilarious genius storyteller buddy of mine,” Laura wrote in a caption to her post. “I love you so.”
Bruce, a two-time Academy Award nominee who has racked up hundreds of onscreen roles since he began acting professionally in the 1960s, was a high school track star growing up in Winnetka, Illinois, north of Chicago. As The Chicago Tribune reported in 2013, Bruce even tried out for the U.S. Olympic track team in 1956 prior to setting out on his acting career.
The Nebraska star shares Laura, an Oscar winner herself, with his ex-wife Diane Ladd, whom he was married to from 1960 to 1969. The former couple met while performing together off-Broadway and welcomed one daughter, Diane Elizabeth, in 1961, prior to Laura’s birth. Diane Elizabeth died at just 18 months old in a drowning accident; they later welcomed Laura to their family in 1967.
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Though Laura and her mother Diane, also 88, have worked together on a number of film projects, she never acted alongside Bruce until they wound up playing a father-daughter duo in Apple TV+’s recent series Palm Royale.
“I’ve had the great good fortune of working with my mom several times, but I’d actually never worked with my dad,” she told Entertainment Weekly of working with Bruce back in March. “So that was such a dream come true. [The production team and I] talked a lot about how I’d never worked with my dad and wouldn’t that be incredible, but it was sort of filed away. And then, it occurred to everyone at the same time.”
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Laura additionally joked that she “became like a kid not wanting to bother my dad” when it came time for producers to invite Bruce to act on the show.
“He was busy. And so it was also like, ‘Would you want to come play for these amount of days?’ And juggling his schedule,” she said. “But he did, and he and I together had one of the great experiences of our life.”
Back in April, Laura shared a photo of her and Bruce sitting in a golf cart on Palm Royale‘s set together on Instagram. “No one makes me laugh harder with his badass hilariousness. I love running lines in a golf cart with you, Pop,” she wrote at the time.
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