Not only can Bruce Dern tell you about the last time he was in Boulder, he can tell you the exact dates, as well as his favorite bar and his favorite player on the University of Colorado’s football team at the time.
“I spent far too many hours in Tulagi,” the 79-year-old actor said of the now-defunct bar and venue. “I remember (CU) had a great running back named John ‘The Beast’ Bayuk, and he was almost as big as Ralphie.”
Dern spent 45 days in Boulder, from mid-May to July 4, 1956, training at altitude to compete for the U.S. Olympic team as an 800-meter runner, on loan from the University of Pennsylvania.
It would be another 60 years before Dern had good reason to head back (he didn’t make the Olympic team).
On Friday Dern will accept the 2016 Career Achievement Award, which in recent years has gone to , , and . Ron Bostwick, the festival’s special event producer, will hold an on-stage Q&A with Dern at the that looks at the actor’s long, eclectic career.
It started in earnest after Dern dropped out of college and moved to New York to study at The Actor’s Studio, where he worked with legendary film and stage director Elia Kazan (“A Streetcar Named Desire,” “On the Waterfront”), who gave the intense, long-faced young Dern a bit of portentous advice.
“You are not a conventional leading man,” Dern remembered Kazan telling him. “You have a tendency to become the roles you play. Therefore, when you get to Hollywood, you’re going to play the fifth cowboy from the right for about a decade. You’ll be in your late 60s before anybody realizes how unique, individualistic and wonderful you are. So do me a favor: make sure you’re the best fifth cowboy from the right anyone ever saw. “
Dern made his film debut in Kazan’s 1960 movie “Wild River” but spent most of the ’60s as a prolific character actor on TV shows such as “The Fugitive,” “Stoney Burke” and “Gunsmoke.” He perfected his evil-cowboy persona and nabbed film roles in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie” and Roger Corman’s “The Wild Angels,” the latter of which endeared him to long-hairs and Hollywood’s scrappy New Wave.
In the 1970s, he focused almost exclusively on film, his acclaim and profile rising thanks to titles such as “Silent Running,” “The King of Marvin Gardens,” “The Great Gatsby” and “Coming Home.” His acting in those last two garnered him Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.
To date, he has appeared in nearly 150 films and TV shows.
“The only movie I’m not nuts about was (1976’s) ‘Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood,’ ” Dern said. “The movie starred a German Shepherd, Art Carney, Madeline Kahn and myself. It was a comedy, and it was directed by Michael Winner, who directed the Death Wish movies. Not the best of choices.”
Despite working consistently in the 1980s and ’90s, Dern — who was formerly married to Dianne Ladd, with whom he had a daughter, Oscar-nominated actress Laura Dern — didn’t get another big bump until HBO’s “Big Love” hired him up as Frank Harlow, the cranky, glowering father of Bill Paxton’s polygamist businessman.
Despite playing another dyed-in-the-wool bad guy on the acclaimed drama, which ran from 2006 to 2011, Dern reminded audiences (and the industry) of his reliable on-screen presence, the years of experience etched into his face providing shorthand for any number of grizzled emotions. Directors, in particular, recognized a prickly humanity in Dern’s portrayal, which hinted at his underutilized range.
“After that, suddenly people started asking me to star in independent films again,” Dern said.
Those films led to Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated “Django Unchained” (2012) and Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” (2013), the latter of which earned Dern dozens of nominations — including an Oscar for best actor.
Dern was then slated to star in Denver director but had to drop out for an even better Colorado-related film opportunity. Following “Django,” Tarantino wrote him a part in the gritty Western which was filmed outside of Telluride in late 2014 and early 2015.
“While I haven’t been to Boulder, I’ve been all over Colorado recently,” Dern said. “There were so many times we had to go down to Montrose, take a flight back east over the Rockies to Denver and then fly home to L.A. — or drive to Grand Junction just to get a flight out.”
Tarantino tailored the “Hateful Eight” role of Confederate Gen. Sanford Smithers for Dern, which Dern considers one of the highest honors of his career. He counts Tarantino among the half-dozen “genius” directors he has worked with, including Kazan, Hitchcock, Douglas Trumbull, Francis Ford Coppola and Payne.
Tarantino and Payne “gave me something I’d never had before on a film, which was a chance to get better,” Dern said. “They have the same idea, which is that, for the director, 85 to 90 percent of making a film is casting. And once they’ve written your role and cast you, you don’t have to try and act or do something that isn’t within you. They let you do your job but also dare to take risks.”
Dern’s late-career renaissance lends a warm glow to a life that already reads like an improbable survey of American culture. Who else can claim Eleanor Roosevelt as a babysitter (Dern’s family has a deep political history in the Midwest and West) and roles in films with both Bette Davis and Kristin Stewart, John Wayne and Leonardo DiCaprio?
Dern continues to work with his production company — including on a new film he declined to name, saying only it’s “the best script I’ve ever read outside of ‘Nebraska’ ” — and leveraging his career momentum for better roles.
But with a seemingly limitless supply of colorful stories culled from his decades in Hollywood, he’s also OK with looking back from time to time.
“In 2011 my daughter (Laura), ex-wife Dianne and I all got stars on The Walk of Fame,” Dern said. “It was the first and only family to have mother-father-child stars on Hollywood Boulevard at the same time. That’s pretty neat.”
BRUCE DERN TRIBUTE AND CONVERSATION
The actor will receive Boulder International Film Festival’s 2016 Career Achievement Award on stage with host Ron Bostwick. 7:15 p.m. March 4 at the Boulder Theater, 2023 14th St. Tickets: $25 via 303-449-2289 or .
