Diane Ladd: Three-time Academy Award nominee and mother of Laura Dern, dies
Diane Ladd, a three-time Oscar-nominated actress who won acclaim for her work in films including “Rambling Rose,” “Wild at Heart” and “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” has died. She was 89 years old.
Academy Award winner Laura Dern, Ladd’s daughter with Oscar-nominated actor Bruce Dern, announced her mother’s death in a joint statement on Monday. “My incredible hero and profound gift of a mother, Diane Ladd, stopped by this morning, at her home in Ojai,” Dern wrote. The cause of death was not revealed.
“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and compassionate soul that only dreams can create,” “Marriage Story” star Dern, 58, said in her statement. “We are blessed to have her.”
A Mississippi native, Ladd was a versatile and enduring talent whose screen career included more than 200 films and features spanning the 1960s through the 2020s, resulting in multiple Emmy and Oscar nominations. She is best known for appearing in director Martin Scorsese and writer Robert Getchell’s 1974 film Alice Don’t Live Here Anymore in the role of waitress Florence Jean “Flo” Castleberry.
She elevated her side character to so much more, earning an Academy Award nomination for Supporting Actress for the role and inspiring new iterations of the smart-ass waitress in the TV series adaptation “Alice” and the spinoff “Flo” starring Polly Holiday. She previously appeared as Isabelle “Belle” Dupree.
Ladd often thrived in supporting roles, receiving additional Academy Award nominations in this category for her work in Wild at Heart and Rambling Rose in 1991 and 1992, respectively. Although she was no stranger to stealing the spotlight, she also had a talent for sharing it with her daughter, Laura Dern, in several films.
Ladd and her daughter, born in 1967, co-starred in David Lynch’s “Rampling Rose,” “Citizen Ruth,” “Wild at Heart” and “Inland Empire.” The mother-daughter duo also appeared in HBO’s “Enlightened.”
Dern has openly embraced her family’s Hollywood lineage. At the Palm Springs International Film Festival in 2020, the “Blue Velvet” star told attendees that Ladd and her ex-husband Bruce Dern — who were married from 1960 to 1969 — gave birth to her in the nearby mountain town of Idyllwild during the production of Roger Corman’s 1966 biker film “The Wild Angels,” Ladd’s breakthrough film.
Throughout her career, Ladd has collaborated with notable filmmakers, including Roman Polanski on Chinatown, Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of Mississippi, and David O. Russell’s Joy. Her film credits include “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me,” “Cemetery Club,” and others. She directed Bruce Dern in her directorial debut, Mrs. Monk in 1995.
Ladd has enjoyed a long film career, but her television career was much more extensive, with roles in a variety of projects ranging from Gunsmoke and Alice to ER, Ray Donovan and Young Sheldon. In 1980, she won a Golden Globe Award for her work in “Alice,” and from 1993 to 1997, she received three Emmy Award nominations as a guest star for “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” “Grace Under Fire,” and “Touched by an Angel.”
Rose Diane Lanier was born on November 29, 1935, to a veterinarian father and a homemaker mother. She began performing as a child and sang with the French Quarter Dixie band Hi De Ho Jo while attending finishing school in New Orleans, according to her. Website. After turning down a scholarship to study law at Louisiana State University, she sought entertainment, performing with a band created by John Carradine, father of “Kill Bill” star David Carradine.
Ladd continued to perform at New York’s Copacabana, taking roles in several stage productions, including “Noisy Passengers” with Robert De Niro and “Woman Speak” with Jane Fonda, according to her website.
After her marriage to Bruce Dern ended, Ladd married William A. Shea Jr., and they divorced in 1977. She married for the third time in 1999 to Robert Hunter, who He died earlier this year. In addition to “Little Women” and “Big Little Lies” stars Dern, Ladd and Bruce Dern are parents to a second daughter. Diane Elizabeth was born in 1961 but died at 18 months old in a drowning accident.
“She’s flying with her angels now,” Laura Dern said of her mother on Monday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.