A YOUNG CAREER INTO HIGH GEAR

“I feel so lucky to be in a film about a young person who is real. It’s encouraging that someone wanted to show what teen-agers are really like.”

That’s 18-year-old Laura Dern talking, the actress who’s been earning plaudits for her work opposite Treat Williams in the new movie “Smooth Talk,” which opened Friday.

Some people, of course, had already remarked on her talent after seeing her as a blind girl in Peter Bogdanovich’s “Mask.” “How did you find a blind girl who could act?” Barbra Streisand asked him after seeing the movie. “She’s not blind,” Bogdanovich said. “She’s Bruce Dern’s daughter.”

Now all systems seem to be go for this tall (5-foot-10) blond offspring of Dern and actress Diane Ladd. She has just completed work on “Blue Velvet” for director David Lynch, and offers are piling up.

“A lot of people think I’ve only just started my career,” said Dern this week, her hair tumbling like spaniel’s ears, “but really I’ve done quite a lot. I’ve been acting since I was 7.”

That was when she visited her mother on the set of “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More” and director Martin Scorsese used her as an extra--”I’m the one eating ice cream behind Kris Kristofferson and Ellen Burstyn when they kiss in the soda fountain,” she said, laughing.

She was an extra again in several more movies, “and I loved it. My dad kept taking me on his sets and saying, ‘There’s a lot of heartache in this business, you know; it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ and I’d be saying, ‘Oh, isn’t this great!’ By the time I was 9 they knew I was determined to be an actress and let me attend the Lee Strasberg Institute.”

Dern had her first feature role in Adrian Lyne’s “Foxes” when she was 11. But it was “Teachers,” in which she played a 16-year-old high school girl forced to have an abortion, which earned her her first mentions.

Then came “Mask.” She worked hard on that role, attending classes for the blind and spending two weeks going around blindfolded.

And that indirectly led to “Smooth Talk.” The movie, written by Tom Cole from the Joyce Carol Oates short story about a young girl’s transition from adolescence to womanhood, was almost ready to go into rehearsals, but Joyce Chopra, making her debut as a feature director, had still not found the right actress to play 15-year-old Connie.

It was special still photographer Nancy Ellison, wife of producer Jerome Hellman, who said, “I know just the actress: Laura Dern.”

“Nancy knew me because her husband had produced ‘Coming Home’ in which my dad starred,” said Dern, “and she’d heard how hard I’d worked on ‘Mask’ and how serious I am about my work.”

Now Dern is crossing her fingers that the movie enjoys the success it deserves. “It was made on a small budget, with no car crashes or major sex scenes,” she said. “So we’ve that going against us. On the other hand, it’s real. I can’t tell you what a joy it was to work with a writer who actually writes the way teen-agers speak.”