(Credits: Far Out / The Weinstein Company / YouTube Still)
Mon 9 June 2025 18:45, UK
Bruce Dern isn’t a name that everybody will immediately recognise, but to his fans, he’s a god amongst men. In her early years, he was a bit-part player in a number of major movies, such as Elia Kazan’s Wild River and The St Valentine’s Day Massacre. Over his lengthy career, he’s cropped up in everything, from The Hateful Eight to Bonanza, Coming Home to King of the Hill. In 2013, at the age of 76, he was nominated for a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for his role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska.
Since he first started acting way back in the early 1960s, Dern has worked with some of the best actors and directors to ever grace the industry. Not only is he a phenomenal talent, but he’s also a fascinating resource. He’s been there for some of the biggest shifts in Hollywood history, particularly the move away from the studio system and the beginning of the ‘New Hollywood’ era.
Widely believed to have started in the mid-1960s, the New Hollywood movement was one of increased creative control for the people actually making movies. Through films like Easy Rider, The Graduate, and Bonnie and Clyde, New Hollywood directors and actors opened audiences’ eyes to a new world of sex, obscenity, and violence that had previously been kept from them by the powers that be. The old ‘Hays Code’ of content regulation simply couldn’t compete, and a brave new age of filmmaking was thoroughly underway.
Dern was right in the thick of this astonishing period. He rose to prominence through some of the gritty, unrelenting pictures that dominated the early years of the movement, sharing the screen with other icons such as Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. Unfortunately for Laura’s father, he didn’t always see eye-to-eye with his fellow revolutionaries.
As per the book Jack Nicholson: The Early Years by Robert David Crane, Dern really wasn’t a fan of working with one of the biggest names of the era. “Any time you’re in a movie with Peter Fonda, it’s very hard to do quality work as an actor, because he’s just not an actor,” he said. “He just doesn’t have a clue. I don’t know why they stand for it; I don’t think they will much longer. I think his career has definitely waned as an actor. He might be a pretty good filmmaker someday.” The book was released in 1975, but it’s unclear when Dern made these comments.
Unfortunately for Dern, he ended up working with Fonda a lot. They both appeared in The Wild Angels, a motorcycle movie that put Fonda on a Harley-Davidson three years before Easy Rider. Then there was 1967’s The Trip, an LSD flick directed by Roger Corman and written by Nicholson himself. When he wasn’t working with Peter, Dern could also be found collaborating with his sister Jane. In Coming Home, the pair play a married couple whose union is tested when Fonda’s character falls in love with a disabled Vietnam War veteran (Jon Voight). Turns out the Fondas are like Japanese knotweed – once you let them in, they’re very hard to get rid of.
Peter Fonda’s career did indeed wane somewhat until the release of 1997’s Ulee’s Gold, which marked his major comeback. It’s unclear what Dern thought of his old rival’s return to the spotlight, but you’d like to think he was magnanimous about it.
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