Diane Ladd, a three-time Academy Award nominee and an actress of rare timing and intensity whose roles ranged from the brash waitress in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” to the scheming mother in “Wild at Heart,” has died at age 89.
Ladd’s death was announced on Monday by her daughter, Laura Dern, who issued a statement saying that her mother and her sometimes co-star died at her home in Ojai, California, with Dern by her side. Dern, who called Ladd an “incredible hero” and “a mother’s profound gift,” did not immediately provide a cause of death.
“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and compassionate soul that only dreams can create,” Dern wrote. “We are blessed to have her with us. She is flying with her angels now.”
A talented comedian and dramatic actor, Ladd had a long career in television and on stage before breaking out as a film actor in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 release Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the acerbic and outspoken Flo, and went on to appear in dozens of films over the following decades.
Her numerous credits include Chinatown, Primary Colors, and two other films for which she received Best Supporting nominations, Wild at Heart and Rambling Rose, both of which co-starred her daughter. She also continued to work in television, with appearances in “ER,” “Touched by Angel,” “Alice,” the spinoff of “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and others.
Through marriage and blood relations, Ladd was connected to the arts. Tennessee Williams was a second cousin and first husband, and Laura’s father, Bruce Dern, was an Oscar nominee. Ladd and Laura Dern achieved the rare feat of mother-daughter nominations for their work in Rambling Rose, and were also memorably involved in Wild at Heart, a favorite of Ladd’s and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.
In Darkness, a David Lynch comic noir, her character, Marita, is willing to try anything — including murder — to keep her daughter (Laura Dern) away from her former lover, played by Nicolas Cage. Ladd will be called upon by the director for some Lynchian touches, and he will counter her with some of her own.
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“One day, the script said Marita is lying in bed, curled up with her little dog, sucking her thumb,” she told Vulture in 2024. “I looked at him and said, ‘David, I don’t want to do that.’ And he said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to wear a long satin nightgown, and I want to stand in the middle of the bed and hold a martini and drink it, and I want to sway to the old music inside my head.’” Well, I did that, he said. And he liked it.”
Ladd was born Rose Diane Ladner in Laurel, Mississippi, and was clearly destined for prominence. In her 2006 memoir, Rising Through the School of Life, she recalled her great-grandmother telling her that one day she would stand “in front of the screen” and “lead” her audience.
Before “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” she had been working in television since the 1950s, when she was in her early 20s, with shows like “Perry Mason,” “Gunsmoke” and “The Big Valley.”
By the mid-1970s, she had lived her fate well enough to tell The New York Times that she no longer denied herself the right to call herself great.
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“Now I don’t say that,” she said. “I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, dance, sing, and look seventeen or sound seventy.”
Ladd was married three times and divorced twice – to Bruce Dern and William A. Shea Jr. In 1976, around the time her second marriage ended, she told The Times that neither husband knew “how to show love.”
“I come from the South and from a man, my father, who gave me love in a rocking chair. My people pass down love, and why would you choose two men who needed someone to give them love and didn’t know how to give it…” She paused. “I hope I don’t do that again.”
Ladd’s third marriage, to author and former PepsiCo CEO Robert Charles Hunter, lasted from 1999 until his death in August.
(tags for translation) Diane Ladd
