Actor nominated for Oscar married in Carson City

Actor Bruce Dern and I worked together in a PBS documentary on Lake Tahoe environmental issues, The Fate of the Jewel (2001). That’s when I learned he married his current wife, Andrea Beckett, in Carson City.

On March 2, Dern, 77, hopes to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his outstanding performance in the feature film Nebraska (2013).

You may remember Dern as the bad guy, Long Hair, who brutally killed John Wayne in The Cowboys (1972). Perhaps you recall his Oscar-nominated performance with Academy Award winners Jane Fonda and Jon Voight in Coming Home (1978). His acting career dates back to the late 1950s and includes hundreds of plays, movies and TV productions. His memoir, Things I’ve Said, But Probably Shouldn’t Have, was published in 2007.

Prior to videotaping the Lake Tahoe production at Stateline’s Edgewood Country Club, Dern shared that his grandfather, George H. Dern, had been a Utah governor and President Franklin Roosevelt’s first Secretary of War. His godmother was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and godfather was Illinois governor and 1952 and 1956 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. His uncle was the Pulitzer-prize winning poet/playwright and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish.

Dern, learning I lived in Carson City, told me that his buddy Elliott Gould and Barbra Streisand married in the state capital, and, so did he.

Dern married Andrea Beckett in 1969. He had recently divorced second wife actress Diane Ladd, the mother of Laura Dern (Laura is a successful actress in her own right and the apple of her father’s eye). Late Justice of the Peace Pete Supera, who had presided over the Gould-Streisand wedding in 1963, conducted the ceremony for Dern and Beckett on Oct. 20.

Dern, born and raised in the Chicago area, ran track for the University of Pennsylvania before quitting school to join the prestigious Actor’s Studio in New York City in 1958. He received training from Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan who remained his friends throughout their lives.

Dern also enjoyed a good working relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock appearing in two of Alfred Hitchcock Hour TV episodes, the motion picture Marnie (1964), and starring in Family Plot (1976).

His lead role in Silent Running (1972) was a major boost to his career. He also appeared in such noteworthy movies as They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1969);The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) with long-time friend Jack Nicholson; The Great Gatsby (1974) with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow; and Black Sunday (1977). More recently, he appeared in Monster (2003), with Oscar-winner Charlize Theron, and Director Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012).

Andrea Beckett’s acting career was short lived. She had moved from North Dakota to New York City to become a model and an actress. After losing her husband and high-school sweetheart in an auto accident, Beckett, 24, relocated to Los Angeles. Dern was Beckett’s teacher at the Strasberg Theatre Institute in the summer of 1969.

Beckett has gone on to make a name for herself as an artist and painter. According to Dern, Barbra Streisand bought one of his wife’s first paintings and he mentions Heather Locklear and Pierce Brosnan as purchasing her artwork. Beckett has also decorated her own houses and a number of the homes of Hollywood’s rich and famous.

“I respect Andrea enormously,” Dern writes. “She’s as close to the perfect lady as anyone I’ve ever known . . . Andrea and I have a magical existence.”

And to think it all started with a quickie wedding in Carson City.