Now starring in a dual role

Laura Dern is missing. It’s a Tuesday afternoon and the blond, willowy actress is supposed to be in the sunlit garden at the Chateau Marmont having her picture taken to plug her new film, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore.”

Despite vanishing from Hollywood’s radar three years ago, Dern, who plays a disaffected wife in the film, has throughout her career managed to find substantial, memorable roles to tackle, and this one is no exception. “It’s a great comeback film for her,” says her costar, Mark Ruffalo, who plays her husband. “I think it will be one of the great performances this year.”

But at the moment not a soul at the famously laid-back hotel seems to know where she is. Finally a page comes in with a message from Dern’s publicist. The actress emerges sometime later and immediately apologizes. “I am so sorry,” she says without the slightest hint of the prima donna about her. In a brown, nubby skirt topped with a teal sweater and looking out from dark glasses, she has just come from a cable TV show that producer Peter Guber is hosting (“Sunday Morning Shootout”) -- a sort of “Hollywood Crossfire,” she quips -- and the interview went way over.

The 37-year-old actress is four months pregnant with her second child, and though the news is all over the tabloids, she never mentions it. (Dad is musician Ben Harper, also father to their 3-year-old son, Ellery.) Now that she’s here, Dern plops down at a table while her makeup person touches up her face for a photo. She is gracious and warm but manages somehow to stop short of gushy. When a photographer shyly offers that he shot her father, actor Bruce Dern, at his home in Malibu Colony 25 years ago, she smiles enthusiastically. “That is so cool,” she says. “It is so nice to meet you!” Later, at lunch, when the waiter brings the bread she requested Dern responds -- “Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!” -- as if he just handed her a bouquet of flowers.

Her colleagues from “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” are effusive. “She’s just jaw-droppingly good,” says the film’s director, John Curran.

“She is not only one of the most remarkable actresses working today,” agrees Ruffalo, “but also one of the most lovely human beings in this business.”

Which raises the inevitable question: Where has Dern, known for her gutsy performances in independent films such as “Citizen Ruth,” been lately?

“We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” which opened Friday, is Dern’s first feature film since the 2001 drama “I Am Sam.” It’s an interesting choice for the actress, who earned an Academy Award nomination for “Rambling Rose” when she was just 25.

Art imitates her life

The film about marriage and motherhood has some striking personal parallels for Dern, who hasn’t been highly visible because she’s been tending her personal affairs. A year after her public breakup with actor Billy Bob Thornton, who abruptly dumped the actress and married (and since divorced) Angelina Jolie, Dern found love with Harper, whom she met through a concert for Amnesty International. In July 2001, Dern became pregnant. She and the 34-year-old rocker are engaged and, like any couple, trying to find “balance.” The extraordinary actress has become that ordinary thing: a working mom. Nursing her son on the set. Scouting out preschools. Handling tantrums.

“Ellery, Mommy’s got to do a work call for a few minutes,” Dern says patiently one afternoon to her son, who’s screaming bloody murder as she’s trying to talk on the phone.

Seated now in a banquette in the Chateau’s dining room, Dern picks lightly at her beet-and-mozzarella salad as she talks about the hiatus she took. “I called my agent and said, ‘I’m about to have a baby. I’m not going to read anything for the next year. I don’t want to talk about movies. I just want to be with my child.’ ”

Still, after three years of full-time motherhood, Dern was a bit restless. So she told her agent, “I’m really ready to go back to work. I need to act now, and I just want something I can sink my teeth into as an actor, a really well-written character.” A few weeks later “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” came her way.

Based on short stories by Andre Dubus, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” is a brutal look at the consequences of infidelity. Shot in somber tones, the film plunges into the uneasy intimacy of two couples whose marriages are unraveling. Dern plays Terry, a disheveled housewife whose husband, Jack, played by a bearded Ruffalo, is fooling around with her best friend, Edith. Naomi Watts plays Edith while the boyish Peter Krause plays her aloof husband, Hank.

Like many of Dern’s previous roles -- a glue-sniffing derelict who’s swept into the abortion issue, a sex-crazed young woman, a loveless orphan hooked on sex -- Terry is unhinged. She screams, she drinks, she throws things. Her house is a shambles.

Watts, who had the choice of either female role because of a long friendship with Curran, had already declined the part of Terry, having just finished the emotionally draining “21 Grams.” Asked how he came to cast Dern, Curran admits that she wasn’t his first thought.

“I love Laura Dern,” he says. “But I didn’t originally imagine her for the role, and I was eager to meet someone. Terry was always the most difficult.”

Although she loved the script’s adult take on marriage, Dern wasn’t sure about Terry, either. “I was halfway through the script, I thought, ‘OK, I’ve read this before. This is a great part, but the guy has this ogre wife and he’s about to get into this affair. They’re obviously going to run off together and I’ll be this boorish character who ends up alone.’ ”

Dern suddenly realizes that she and Curran were having lunch in this very spot when they met. Curran reassured her that he envisioned Jack and Terry’s flawed marriage as a love story. “And that was so exciting to me,” Dern says.

“I like it that he has a very sober point of view of the work in a relationship being erotic almost, that it’s part of a relationship if you want it to be long-term. That made me feel so safe, and also made me feel safe in knowing I could go into the extremes with the character.”

Because of Watts’ and Ruffalo’s schedules, Curran had only 30 days to shoot the $2-million film. There was no time to rehearse. Faced with a sequence of ugly fight scenes, Dern and Ruffalo had to find their way.

“We had a sort of kindred spirit,” Ruffalo says of their rapport. “Just a shorthand about acting with each other. It was just very easy and familiar with her.

“You kind of feel like you can fly without a net with her. She’s just so generous and enthusiastic about the whole process of acting.”

Dern may be a sweetie, but she’s no soft touch. She had firm ideas about how to approach Terry and Jack’s relationship -- ideas that sometimes clashed with Curran’s.

Ruffalo recalls one pivotal scene in which the couple are at an emotional crossroads. “She was fighting with John to touch my hand. He said, ‘No, it’s too much,’ and she fought and fought and fought for it.

“Laura goes to the mat for what she believes in, and thank God,” Ruffalo says with a laugh, “because she can back it up so easily.” And Curran respects her for it. “I think it’s a better character for it,” he concedes.

Although Dern has played some dreadful characters, she has usually been able to keep them at a distance.

Not so this time. In one scene, Terry storms into the house after a tryst with Hank and in a vengeful tirade spews the details to Jack.

When Dern watched that scene with an audience at the Sundance Film Festival, she was mortified. Describing it as she eats her salad, she starts coughing on a bit of pepper. “I have done so many things in movies that are seemingly inappropriate, horrible, disgusting things,” she says. “But this was the first time I felt really embarrassed.” She takes a sip of mineral water. “And I felt like it was really appalling behavior too,” she continues. “I felt, ‘How do you get through this scene and not be the most hated person?’ ”

Why does she choose such heavy material? For the actress, who has been influenced by her father and by her mother, Diane Ladd, it’s about building a body of work. As such, she’s drawn to a filmmaker she’s wanted to work with or a script that’s socially provocative or a character she’s never explored. “I have fun with labels because I’ve had a few and they keep changing, and that’s what you want as an actor.”

Keeping it interesting

When Dern isn’t sure about a part, she consults a trusted group of actors and friends, including Steven Spielberg, who directed her in the blockbuster “Jurassic Park.”

Dern recalls one mainstream role she was fretting over when she called him for an opinion. After reading the script, he told her: “It’s just not you, what you love.” The film went on to be successful, but Dern is philosophical. “To do films you love, sometimes you’re turning down things that could make you a lot of money. For whatever reason, these wonderful parts have come at the same time as a movie that’s a nice job monetarily.”

Dern doesn’t particularly care about being a movie star. “The interesting challenge about becoming a movie star based on a specific kind of movie is you can get pegged into that persona,” she says. “I look at those actors who have incredible power to get films made, they’re not getting to be actors. They couldn’t go off and do ‘Citizen Ruth.’ It might be too dangerous a film for them, and that’s a bummer.” Dern has a project lined up for winter, but it’s not far enough along to talk about it.

For now she hopes her new movie attracts a broad audience. “I would hate to see this considered a woman’s film more than a man’s film,” she says, “or that it should be some age group that has to do with intellectuals who know Andre Dubus.”