Taking a chance on comedy

In the romantic comedy “Must Love Dogs,” newly divorced preschool teacher Sarah Nolan suffers through several disastrous first dates: a man who weeps uncontrollably over failed relationships, a handcuffs aficionado and a man whose eyes search the room before he admits, “I just thought you’d be younger.”

Photos of single men are passed to her like business cards, and Nolan’s sisters set up a profile of her on an Internet dating site, posting her high school graduation photo in cap and gown and pronouncing her “voluptuous, sensuous, alluring and fun.”

Farfetched? Perhaps. But even the beautiful actress Diane Lane, who plays Nolan, couldn’t escape the uncomfortable first dates and awkward setups by friends after her own divorce in 1994.

“At parties, I would walk into the room and knew something was up; I felt like I was being given away,” she said with a laugh. “I hid from dating brilliantly because I was a working single mom.

“I had friends who would encouragingly whisper to me, ‘You should call so-and-so,’ and I just looked at them like they were crazy. I’m so old-fashioned, I would never reach out and call someone.”

Today, Lane, 40, is happy to have left the dating scene behind.

She married actor Josh Brolin in 2004 and is busy raising her 11-year-old daughter from her marriage to ex-husband Christopher Lambert and Brolin’s two children from a previous marriage. She said her movie sends the message to be proactive and seek new opportunities after a divorce -- good advice, she adds, even if she didn’t always wholeheartedly embrace it herself.

“The truth is, when you have the pain of divorce as your last experience, it’s good to wash that out with some different experiences,” she said. “They don’t have to be the greatest experiences ever -- just new ones.”

The 2002 critically acclaimed film “Unfaithful” was a breakout role for Lane, whose portrayal of a suburban mother caught up in an adulterous affair was marked by intense love-making scenes and compelling moments in which guilt and excitement clashed. She was given Oscar and Golden Globe nods. She followed that up with a starring role in the 2003 romantic comedy “Under the Tuscan Sun,” playing a divorced writer who buys a villa in Tuscany on a whim.

“Must Love Dogs” required Lane to flex more of her comedic muscles than ever before, and for that, Lane said she relied on the advice and experience of costar John Cusack and writer and director Gary David Goldberg, who wrote for the TV comedies “Spin City” and “Family Ties.” Goldberg adapted the screenplay from the bestselling novel of the same title, written by Massachusetts-based author Claire Cook.

“He’s much more of a veteran than I am in the genre,” Lane said of Cusack. “He encouraged me to trust my instincts and tried to pull me into more improvisation. I’ll get there, but this is not that film for me. It was more of what Gary had in mind; he heard the way the characters speak in his ear when he wrote the words.”

Cusack said he was drawn to the film because of his desire to work with Lane and was surprised by how easily she adapted to the role of a comedic actress.

“It’s really Diane’s movie,” said Cusack, who plays Lane’s love interest with a “Doctor Zhivago” obsession. “She’s such an unbelievably accomplished dramatic actress, and to see her find a way to be very whimsical and light on her feet and play through these jokes for the first time was fun. She has a real gift that way; she can be loose and screwbally.”

In one scene, Nolan goes on a blind date with a man who advertises his age as a “young 50.” She arrives at the outdoor cafe to run into her widowed father, played by Christopher Plummer, holding a long-stemmed yellow rose, just as the man she was meeting had promised.

“Dad, a young 50? You’re 71,” she moans, her face in her hands. “I answered my own father’s personal ad.”

Nolan’s father also becomes active on the online dating scene and brings several of his Internet lovers, including the free-spirited and wacky Dolly, played by Stockard Channing, to a family dinner.

For Lane, it was a case of art imitating life. Lane remembers awkward moments from her mid-20s after her divorced father would invite both of his girlfriends, one barely out of her 20s, to family occasions.

“I’m definitely very much my father’s daughter and I was close to him,” she said. “It took me a long time to get comfortable with that concept. I just didn’t approve and I was very worried about him getting his heart broken.”

Lane will break new ground again in her newest film, “Fierce People,” due for release in April 2006, which chronicles a young mother with a cocaine addiction who moves out of Manhattan with her teenage son to try to clean up her life.

She will star with Ben Affleck and Adrien Brody in “Truth, Justice and the American Way,” a detective story on the mysterious death of George Reeves, TV’s Superman, which is to be released in 2006. Lane said playing the wealthy fiftysomething Toni Mannix, rumored to be romantically linked to Reeves, was “an exercise in freedom,” allowing her to experience the opulence of that lifestyle in the 1950s without the expectations of looking youthful and flawless.

“I’m starting to become more and more of an actress as the youth and glamour aspects become less important to me,” she said. “I can finally branch out. You’re supposed to disappear into a character; that’s the emotional goal.”