It’s Laura Dern’s birthday today, which is cause for celebration. Hell, it should be a national holiday! On my old blog I used to have a tag labelled “The Facial Expressions of Laura Dern” because, well, nobody gives face quite like Laura Dern (Madonna would have to chance the lyrics to “Vogue” if it were made today). I met Laura Dern just last year at a luncheon to celebrate her father, Bruce Dern, and his eventually Oscar-nominated performance in Nebraska. She was a pleasure and a delight and allowed me to geek out about all things Lynch and Enlightened as we sat one-on-one after everybody else had left. She sipped on a coffee and I desperately tried to control with my mind the allergic reaction I was having to the the W 54th Street restaurant’s tree nut-tainted fondant dessert. I spoke of how I had visited the Twin Peaks convention in Seattle that past August and she spoke of potential new developments in the world of David Lynch. I mentioned I watched all of Enlighened in two days and purchased a copy of Wild at Heart on VHS when I found it in an antique store in the town where Twin Peaks was filmed. I even got a photo of her that you can see to your left. It has been my social media profile picture ever since for obvious reasons.

Anyway, as proof of Dern’s amazing face – and general amazing everything – here are 11 more of the best Laura Dern gifs.

Gosh, remember that opening scene of Enlightened? What a way to start a new series. And how about the weird spotlight sequence from Inland Empire. Somebody should host a Halloween party and just have that video sequence playing on a loop for hours on end. And I end on this amusing capsule gif from – again – Enlightened that is basically the exact opposite of all the gifs above, utilising Dern’s still face to just as good comic effect as the mascara-stained, frazzle-haired one above. Such a damned shame that show only lasted two season, but those two seasons are two of the most perfectly complete seasons of a show you could possibly get. It ended on such a great moment that in some ways it’s a good thing it finished when it did because there was no chance of the series’ magical spell ever getting lost or diluted. Laura Dern is 47 today and if directors like Mike White, David Lynch and John Curran keep being brave enough to cast her then we should have the sight of her face contorting and twisting itself into brilliant shapes for years to come.

Most of the images were sourced from the Laura Dern Face tumblr. A treasure-trove of beauty.