"And then the neighbors' baby woke me up, six feet from my head, and I'm like, Hello! Good morning! It's still dark out!" says Diane Lane, skipping blithely up the brick steps to her new house, trailing monologue behind her like smoke. She is wearing jeans and joggers and a clingy, spaghetti-strap top, a frumpy pink cardigan. Her shoulder-length hair, approximating natural warm browns with streaks of honey, is pinned carelessly atop her head. Wraparound sunglasses, no makeup. Purse and phone and keys crowding the basket of her hands. Her voice is deep and earthy, her patter manic, the switch thrown about twenty minutes earlier when she picked me up at my hotel in her little turquoise BMW convertible--a courtesy, she explained, designed to lend a sense of control, a fleeting commodity in her hectic life. "You're my prisoner," she said, flinging open the passenger door, a shot of cleavage, and patted the leather seat. "Hop in! You can help us move the bed!"

The house is set upon a little hill in a quiet Los Angeles neighborhood, a gray stucco split-level. Reaching the top of the steps, she turns to survey her yard, the avalanche of boxes spilling out of the garage onto the driveway. "I couldn't go back to sleep," she continues. "I was like, Okay, all right, all right. Fine. I'm gonna do the office. I'm gonna go right down there and unpack, because there's really some embarrassing stuff lying around. I went in there the other day and there was an ancient diary sitting right out. And this letter to Christopher that was four typed pages long, trying to explain why our marriage wasn't working. And I was like, Oh, my God! That's been sitting on my desk for how long? Oops! A little chunk of entrail! Excuse me! You know, private is private. There's such a little precious bit of it in my life. But then I got down there and I looked at all the boxes and I just thought, I can't. I can't. I can't. I'd had enough. I'd just had enough, you know? When you go and see the old place, you'll understand; it's nothing but storage. Oh, my God! Floor-to-ceiling storage with pull-out drawers. And I had to leave it all. My lovely tower--boo hoo. I loved that place. I just wanted to get my daughter a yard. That was my excuse: A six-year-old needs a yard. When I really think about it, I had outgrown that apartment. It had just become--ahhhhh! It didn't feed me at all anymore. And the metaphor of being in the tower--people started giving me shit about it. And I'm like, What? What! If this was New York you wouldn't think twice about it. I'm from New York! Sue me! But after they said it enough times I started to wonder. My tower. My ivory tower. Rapunzel's tower. And I started to think, Maybe they're right. Ah, ha ha, ah, haaaaaa! Question yourself, right? That's great. That's just great! What I love to say about Eve in the Garden of Eden was that God said to her--I always get that wrong, I love that--I mean, what Satan said to her was, Are you sure that's what God said? And that's all it took. A little self-doubt, and that was it. You question yourself once and you're lost. But you've got to lose it and find it again. You have to. You do."

She pauses a moment, rummaging in her purse for a cigarette. She is a sprite of a woman, all nerves and birdlike energy, barely five feet six. Boyish hips, valentine lips, fine-boned cheeks and jaw, easy smile--a pleasant beauty, more pretty-mom-next-door than jaw-drop virtuoso, a porcelain doll awaiting paint, an idle daydream. "It was late when everybody finally left," she continues, lighting up an American Spirit. "The movers left at midnight. John and Whitney left at one. They've started calling themselves Team Diane, if you can believe it. And then I did my hand. I was an idiot. Blood all over the place! Took the skin right off. Great timing, you know? Typical. I was just settling in for one of those moments. Everybody was finally gone. I'm in my new house. I got myself a beer. I went out to the deck. My deck. Under my trees, my stars. Overlooking my little patch of lawn. And I sat down in the lounge chair, and I put my hand right onto the ratchet--the meaty part of the thumb, the thumb part of your palm? And it went ka-chunk and I was like, Ahhhhhhhh! And I sucked it, and I bit the piece of skin off that would have protected it. The germs! Can you imagine? All this moving and packing, cleaning and touching and garbage and thanking everybody profusely and shaking hands. God! Eek! I have to find the peroxide. I keep thinking, This is a phase. This is this time, it's this week--you're going through a lot. It's my daughter. It's the movies coming out, one after the other. It's my emotional life. It's this and it's that. There won't be . . . any . . . break. That's why they say 'Rest in peace' when you die. And it's like this a lot. Because in homeownership, you have people with leaf blowers--God forbid they should get together and agree to do it all at the same time."

Cig dangling from her lips, Diane keys the lock in the front door. When she first bought the place, she felt a bit vulnerable about the prospect of having an entrance on the street. She is particularly conscious of security, though she says she's never had a bad experience. In public she's rarely recognized. If she is spotted, she's sometimes mistaken for someone else. She refuses to give out her phone number; she was particularly nonplussed on one occasion when I returned her call, cell phone to cell phone--her number isn't supposed to come up on the digital display. Hoping for anonymity, she registered the new house under a different name. Come moving day, however, her plans were foiled. The neighbor across the back fence is a casting director. Next door, with the new baby, is a studio exec. Across the street is someone else in the industry. The previous owners of her house had a microphone installed in the ceiling so the alarm company could listen in. The repairmen are supposed to come to remove it. So far they've canceled twice. You can imagine the monologue on that.

"It's always been kinda nuts," she continues. "It always is. Thirty-eight films. My dad says, 'What are you worried about? What can they do to you now? You've been here so long they have to accept you.' But you've got to realize, I'm not thirty-five. I'm really fifty. I've already lived several lifetimes. Like the used-car salesmen say, 'It's not the model, it's the mileage.' Wouldn't you hate to be traded off for two twenties when you hit forty? I mean, come on, you know? I'm running around like a lunatic. It's not one movie after another, but it seems like one movie after another. You have to understand, what I do is this. And the effect it has on my whole life is thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis. I love working. It's just all the other goddamn dress-up shit! And then moving on top of that! I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm just venting."

She pushes on the door, steps inside. "Welcome to my world: an exquisite state of disarray." She smiles, proud of herself. "Exquisite disarray! I like that, don't you? Take it down. You can use it for your story: the metaphor of me." She makes a graceful, sweeping gesture with one hand, a game-show mannequin, a mistress of ceremonies, indicating the dusty clutter of a move in progress, a woman in progress--the particular, rarefied, outsized drama of a life lived in the Hollywood hothouse. First job at six, Medea in Greek. Virginity lost on a movie set in Durango, Mexico, at fifteen. Honeymoon on a 150-foot yacht with the hunk from Greystoke and Highlander at twenty-three. Principal photography on a movie just twenty-eight days after the birth of her daughter. Divorce a few months later. Critical acclaim in the film industry just coming now, at thirty-five--child star to ingenue to serious actress, several lifetimes indeed. She drops her stuff on the table, sucks the wound on her palm. "Make yourself comfortable, if you can. I've got to find the peroxide before I die of gangrene."

hhhhh, ohhhhh, yessssss?. . ." She issitting at the kitchen table, sounding very much like the object of true love and forbidden lust that she has played in movies since her first, at thirteen, when she starred with Sir Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance. She has located the small brown plastic bottle she was seeking, though she couldn't find any cotton balls or any other suitable sterile medium, so she has removed the top of the peroxide, placed her wound directly over the opening, and upended the bottle.

"You need Gus from Lonesome Dove to cut it with a knife and suck out the venom," I suggest.

"Cool! Dress my wound. It sounds so Vagina Monologues. I just did that, you know, here in L. A. I love Bobby Duvall. Bobby! I never call him that. Every time he sees me he comes up and says, 'How about a poke, little darlin'?' Before I did Lonesome Dove, I never knew how much of a compliment it was to be called a slowpoke. Hey! It's working!" She offers her palm across the table for inspection. Her hand is soft and small, delicate blue veins running up the wrist. The peroxide is bubbling on the injury, a raw-looking little divot about the diameter of a pencil eraser.

"Are you usually accident-prone?" I ask, indicating an elaborate-looking orthopedic device on the floor next to a vacuum cleaner, a silver bud vase, and a single ski boot.

"That's from the karate moves in Judge Dredd. I did something to the joint in my knee. I limped around the entire movie."

"You looked great in the cat suit."

"Judge Bone--that's what I called myself. Ladies and gentlemen, the Kate Moss of law enforcement! I kept telling them, Do not put me next to Stallone, who had cinder blocks for glutes. Cinder blocks! I mean, you could serve food on them. And I'm like trying to grow an ass. When I was in school, I always hung out with the black girls. I always wanted that great bubble ass. It was just never gonna happen. I'm an ectomorph. And I have issues, okay? But you can't blame me. You can't, can you? I always like to say that my life has been like learning to play the violin on the street corner; everybody knows what stage of development you're at, you know? God. It's like everybody has on X-ray glasses but me."

She has been developing in front of us, in fact, for twenty-nine years, beginning at age six, when she landed her first role with La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York. At fourteen, after A Little Romance, she was featured on the cover of Time, which extolledher "dizzying breadth of untroubled brow, a braces-just-came-off prettiness, and a shy grin." Drawing comparisons to Natalie Wood and Grace Kelly, she went on to star in nearly forty movies and has been a favorite of such directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Walter Hill, and Sir Richard Attenborough. Her latest film, The Perfect Storm, based on the best-selling book by Sebastian Junger, with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, opens on June 30.

Diane's grandmother was a thrice-married Pentecostal preacher. Diane's mother was a Playboy centerfold, Miss October 1957. A singer and an aspiring actress, Colleen Farrington worked for a time as a game-show mannequin on TV's The Big Payoff. Diane's dad, Burt Lane, ran an acting workshop with John Cassavetes in New York, later drove a cab, and later taught humanities at City College. When Diane was thirteen days old, her mom went to Juárez, Mexico, and got a divorce.

A precocious New York street urchin who loved to skateboard beneath the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, a child actor juggling rehearsals and nightly shows with math homework and boyfriends, a frequent runaway, Diane lived most of her early life with her dad in a residence hotel on Broadway. She spent five years as a full member of La MaMa, which toured the world every summer. Diane went along, a ward of the company's twenty-something players, who traded off baby-sitting duties.

"I remember one time, we were in Iran. I was nine. We were under very strict orders not to give dirty looks to the photographs of the shah that were everywhere. Photographs, portraits, velvet paintings--everywhere. 'Cause they would come and chop your head off, you know? And one day, they kind of attacked me in the bazaar. For being white. And blond. And for wearing these overalls that I'd outgrown. In my hippie way, I'd cut them apart and sewed a triangle of material there to make them into a skirt. I was very frugal and able, even at nine. And patchwork was in, don't forget. This was the seventies. Anyway, I had embroidery around my chest area, which in hindsight was probably very illicit. 'Cause the women there were all veiled. And here I am with, like, flowers where my nipples were. We were in the bazaar in Tehran, and I'm haggling for a rug, or I wasn't haggling, one of the actors was haggling for me--he was this great guy. I had a real big crush on him. I always rode everywhere on his shoulders. So I was with him, and I was with two of the women in the company. Jane was an Alaskan Indian. Valois was black. She had the most beautiful breasts, and she was topless every night in the play. She played Cassandra, and she'd come out and freak out and start screaming in Greek and they'd carry her away on a rope. Oh, my God! It was so tribal. It was tribal opera, with fire torches as our only light source. It was avant-garde theater, the rape of Helen with the bear--the guy with the bear head and a loincloth--and they'd spit and throw mud on her and she was naked and they shaved her head and then the bear raped her right there, and everybody's spitting and doing this chant, and I was like nine years old, and this was my nightly show. That was The Trojan Women. We also did Electra,As You Like It, all of the classics. I always played the child. And they always killed me, the innocent one. I was the death of innocence.

"So anyway, we were in the bazaar, right? And I got groped. This was not a goose. This was a violation. You know, in the crowd. And it happened and I turned around and everybody's scurrying away from me like they didn't know what was going on. Everybody's in that garb. Everyone was innocent. And I suddenly got ill. Just ill. You know, like you've been finger-raped or something. That was when I was nine. Talk about your death of innocence."

At twelve, Diane graduated to Joseph Papp's productions of The Cherry Orchard (with Meryl Streep) and Runaways. Papp considered Diane his protégé and gave her a platinum-and-gold bracelet with the inscription someday juliet. Later, when she chose Olivier and Paris over taking Runaways to Broadway, Papp broke all ties. Complicating her life further was her selection for an accelerated program at prestigious Hunter College High School.

"Our morning routine was we'd get in Dad's cab, we'd go to the Greek greasy-spoon restaurant where all the cops and cabs and regular folk would get their muffin and tea, and then he'd drop me off outside the school. And I'd go in the building and the bell would ring, and I wouldn't even go to class. I'd go to the bathroom, into the handicapped stall, and go to sleep on the floor. I'd sleep there sometimes for hours, until somebody came in and busted me. And then I'd take the train home and sleep some more. The play every night, school every day--it just became more than my little body could do. I'd finally had enough. I was transparent. The school put me on notice that they were going to kick me out if I didn't get my grades up. I told my dad I didn't want to be an actress anymore. I really wanted to go to school and be normal. I really wanted to contribute something to the world. I was into ecology. You know, the Marvin Gaye song? Remember the Indian crying on the rock? I was very concerned about taking care of the earth. And I wanted to create some legislation that was going to help make jail time truly rehabilitative. I hung around all these twenty-year-olds in the early seventies, so I was kind of like a hippie. I really wanted to do something, you know? But then A Little Romance came up and that whole dream immolated when I said yes. How could you turn down Olivier? That's what my dad said. That's been my life ever since."

By 1982, Diane was seventeen and had already made ten movies. In 1983, she starred in two Coppola films: The Outsiders, with Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, and Patrick Swayze, and Rumble Fish, with Dillon and Mickey Rourke. Both films were roundly panned. As was Streets of Fire, an expected sure thing, and Coppola's The Cotton Club, in which Diane played a sexy moll opposite Richard Gere. Though producer Robert Evans described her as "magical . . . she's an original--like Picasso," the film was the biggest financial flop of the year.

The lack of box-office success had little effect on Diane's status in Hollywood. She was the girl of the moment, dating the hottest boys. A romance with Timothy Hutton gave way to an affair with Christopher Atkins (of The Blue Lagoon) and then to one with rocker Jon Bon Jovi. Some say Bon Jovi's hit "You Give Love a Bad Name" was written with her in mind. She says it wasn't. "I never wear red nail polish," she explains, picking apart the lyrics. Then Diane met French actor Christopher Lambert, the buff but sensitive Tarzan of Greystoke. Diane had been asked by a French television program to re-create a Cotton Club dance scene with Lambert. Sparks flew. "It wasn't love and it wasn't lust, but it was sure something," Diane says. "I used to joke with Christopher, 'I'm marrying you for all the things that I'm avoiding, not for what I'm getting.' I was mostly celibate when I was married because he was gone all the time. I felt like the nun in heat waiting for the guy on the stallion to take me off and make a woman of me. I just wanted to belong to somebody and have somebody belong to me in the old-fashioned way. In hindsight, I call myself a rock bleeder; I found the absolutely least likely person on the planet Earth to give me what I needed." Their six-year marriage dissolved soon after the birth of their daughter.

Since 1995, she has made fifteen more movies, starring opposite Wesley Snipes, Robin Williams, Sylvester Stallone, Liev Schreiber, and Bill Pullman. Last year, after her performance in A Walk on the Moon, in which she played a conflicted Jewish housewife on vacation in the Catskills during the Summer of Love, critics started buzzing again, comparing her to Bacall, calling her performance a long-overdue breakthrough. Now The Perfect Storm.

"I love working, I really do. And I think I've gotten better at it; I've learned to find the wind. But I've also learned some perspective. I remember a time during the first seventy-two hours of my daughter's life, I was kneeling by the crib to make sure she was breathing, and I'm like, My body grew this and pushed it out, and now it has its own heartbeat and it's drawing its own breath! I realized that everything could go, but if I had her, that was all that was important.

"Some people fascinate me. They really worship at the altar of their careers, you know? And it's terrifying. It's sort of like setting a table and waiting for someone to come along and whoosh--push all the plates onto the floor. I never wished that I was a superstar. Hell, I never even wished that I was an actress. You look up and you're thirty-five and you've been doing what you do for twenty-some years. It's all I know."

he sun has dipped below the neighbors' roofline, leaving Diane's little patch of lawn in deep shadow. As is her way, she has returned to her deck, to the suspect lounge chair with the palm-eating ratchet, this time to better effect. I sit on a plastic lawn chair by her head, a notepad in my hand. From across the back fence, from the casting director's house, it might appear as if a therapist is paying a house call. For the first time all afternoon, Diane has flagged; the switch has turned off. She lies virtually motionless, speaking haltingly, one arm draped over her forehead, a dressing covering her wound.

"I've reached the point where I'm finally achieving sort of a cumulative acceptance rather than a connect-the-dots, where-are-you-now, Etch A Sketch sort of plotting," she says. "No individual film is lifetime-achievement worthy, but it's the collection. People are beginning to see the body of work as a whole. That's what's important in the long run.

"You have to realize, making movies is the weirdest thing you could ever do. It's a contrivance, but you're attempting to reach people's hearts in the dark, and there are so many factors that are out of your control. Sometimes there's a $10 million moment hanging on a bobby pin, and everybody's looking for a bobby pin, and you've got a tear dangling in the corner of your eye, and then there's a helicopter passing overhead and they can't get the shot. You try not to laugh at the absurdity of the moment. You have to take it seriously. And you have to not. This is what I do, you know? I can't take it too seriously. That's why I love to be in nature. That's why I wanted to get this house--a little patch of grass that I own. All the lessons are in nature. You look at the way rocks are formed--the wind and the water hitting them, shaping them, making them what they are. Things take time, you know?"

We sit in silence for a while, watching a squirrel play in the branches of a towering avocado tree. "My squirrel," she says languidly. "My tree. Isn't it wonderful?"

"Listen," I say. "I think we should call me a cab."

"Really?" she asks, perking up a bit.

"I think we're both tired."

"If you say so," she says, feigning disappointment. "I can take a hint."

"No. No! It's like a good date: You have to know when to leave."

"No problem! Really! I take direction well. Cut! Wrap!"

"You've been really nice to make time for me. I know things are pretty hectic around here."

"Actually, by keeping you here, I'm avoiding brilliantly what I have to do--unpacking!"

"You know a good cab company?"

"You're still going to help with the bed, aren't you?"

Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter who's been a contributor to Esquire for thirty years.

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