Part of Jurassic Park featuring Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, and Samuel L. Jackson.
Rise to Fame
She showed up onscreen before she could read. Dern's first uncredited appearance came at age six in White Lightning (1973). The real career launched when David Lynch cast her in Blue Velvet (1986), a role she got because Molly Ringwald's mother refused to show her daughter the script. Jurassic Park (1993) made her a household name, but she'd already spent nearly a decade building a real film career, not coasting on her parents' names. She sued for legal emancipation at 15 specifically to run her own work.
In the Spotlight
She waited three Oscar nominations across 28 years before winning. The first came for Rambling Rose in 1992. She finally won Best Supporting Actress for Marriage Story in 2020, on her birthday, for a part Noah Baumbach wrote specifically for her. The win was the first Oscar for a Netflix production in an acting category. Now she's deep into prestige TV: Big Little Lies Season 3 is confirmed for Max, and she starred in and produced Palm Royale for Apple TV+. She's said publicly she's never had Botox or surgery, which in Hollywood is either a statement or a flex.
Side Notes
She played Ellen DeGeneres' love interest in the landmark 1997 coming-out episode and has said it cost her roughly a year of work. The industry punished her for it. Her lineage is almost absurdly stacked: both parents are Oscar-nominated actors, her great-grandfather was the Governor of Utah and FDR's Secretary of War, and she's a distant cousin of Tennessee Williams. David Lynch named Inland Empire (2006) after a passing remark she made about her then-husband's hometown, because he became so fixated on the phrase he couldn't continue the conversation.