(20 October 1969 - present)
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).
The marriage license application noted that Bruce M. Dern, 33, of Santa Monica, California, was divorced on September 18, 1969.
While Beckett, a fledging actress also from Santa Monica, used her maiden name as her stage name, the 28-year-old widow signed the application with her married name, Andrea R. Kermott.
Justice of the Peace Pete Supera, who had presided over the Gould-Streisand wedding six years earlier, conducted the ceremony for Dern and Beckett on October 20.
“Andrea and I had been living together about four months, and we decided we wanted to get married,” Dern writes in his memoirs.
He noted that the money he earned from acting in the B-horror--he called it a Z-horror--film The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant paid for the wedding.
“Andrea won’t have a shot of any kind, so we wanted to get married in Nevada because they don’t require blood tests there.
We were going to Tahoe in October after I’d run in the American Fifty Mile Championship at Rocklin outside of Sacramento.”............
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.