Diane Ladd, the high-spirited actress who earned Academy Award nominations for her fiery performances in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Wild at Heart and Rambling Rose, died Monday. She was 89.
“My amazing hero and my profound gift of a mother passed with me beside her this morning at her home in Ojai, California,” her daughter, Oscar winner Laura Dern, said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created. We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”
A no-nonsense Southern belle, Ladd blended strength, vulnerability, wackiness and charm throughout her career. Married to Bruce Dern for nine years starting in 1960 and a second cousin of Tennessee Williams, she was a member of a true show business dynasty.
Ladd was in her late 30s and had appeared often on television and on the stage when she landed a breakout role tailor-made for her talents: Flo, the sassy, blunt waitress with a towering hairdo in Martin Scorsese‘s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974).
Ellen Burstyn, as the title character, may have been the star, but Ladd received the film’s biggest laughs. Her delivery of such lines as “Kiss me where the sun don’t shine” and “I could lay under you, eat fried chicken and do a crossword puzzle at the same time, that’s how much you bother me” had audiences howling. Equally effective, however, were her exchanges in which she softens and befriends Alice.
“The movie’s filled with brilliantly done individual scenes,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film. “Alice, for example, has a run-in with a fellow waitress with an inspired vocabulary [Ladd]. They fall into a friendship and have a frank and honest conversation one day while sunbathing. The scene works perfectly.”
Scorsese cast theatrically trained actors and encouraged them to ad lib.
“The scene where we’re sitting outside with the sun on our face, that was improvised,” she said in a 2014 interview. “My father’s name was Preston Paul. So when I said, ‘My daddy’s P.P., and don’t call me P.P., because I’m all your-in,’ that was a line he used to say that I threw into the movie. So a lot of things like that, Marty let us bring to the table.”
Her knack for improv was instrumental in her getting the part of the deranged Marietta Fortune, the domineering but emotionally damaged mother of Lula (Laura Dern), in Wild at Heart (1990). Guided by director David Lynch, Ladd had a field day with Marietta, who tries to seduce her daughter’s boyfriend (Nicolas Cage). When he rejects her advances, she plots her revenge.
“Ladd squeezes her juicy role with scene-stealing zest,” Peter Travers wrote in his Rolling Stone review. “‘No tongue — my lipstick,’ says Marietta as Johnnie [Harry Dean Stanton] tries to steal a kiss.”
Playing opposite her daughter once again in Martha Coolidge’s Rambling Rose (1991), Ladd received her third Oscar nom, this time for portraying the well-educated, eccentric matriarch of a Southern family turned upside down when the troubled, sexually promiscuous Rose (Dern, also nominated) is hired as a servant. Ladd anchors the film with her character’s thoughtful and caring attempts to aid the troubled young woman.
At the Academy Awards, Ladd lost out to Ingrid Bergman of Murder on the Orient Express in 1975, to Whoopi Goldberg of Ghost in 1991 and to Mercedes Ruehl of The Fisher King in 1992.
Rose Diane Lanier was born on Nov. 29, 1935, in Meridian, Mississippi. Her father was a veterinarian. On her website, she described her mother, Mary, as “a beautiful, blue-eyed, gracious housewife.”
After graduating from high school at age 16, she traveled to New Orleans to attend finishing school and sang with Dixie Hi De Ho Jo, a French Quarter jazz band, on weekends. Offered a scholarship to study law at LSU, she decided to pursue acting instead and got a role in a production of Room Service at New Orleans’ Gallery Circle Theater.
Actor John Carradine spotted her in that and hired her for his national company touring production of Tobacco Road. Soon, she was in New York City, dancing as a Copa Girl at the famed Copacabana nightclub.
In 1958, Ladd met Bruce Dern, a castmate in an off-Broadway production of Williams’ Orpheus Descending. She then appeared opposite Robert De Niro in One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger and with Jane Fonda in Woman Speak, then co-starred with Ben Gazzara in a national tour of A Hatful of Rain.
Ladd made her Broadway debut in 1968 in Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, directed by Sidney Poitier and starring Louis Gossett Jr., David Steinberg and Cicely Tyson.
Meanwhile, Ladd was amassing dozens of television credits, appearing on such series as The Detectives, Naked City, 77 Sunset Strip, Perry Mason, Hazel, The Fugitive, Ironside and Then Came Bronson.
Ladd made her film debut in The Wild Angels (1966), one of Roger Corman‘s youth-oriented motorcycle dramas. Her co-stars were Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra and Bruce Dern. Supporting roles in The Reivers (1969), Rebel Rousers (1970), The Steagle (1971) and White Lightning (1973) followed.
She played a pivotal character, the prostitute Ida Sessions, in Chinatown (1974).
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore also marked Laura Dern’s film debut. (Then 7, she can be seen eating an ice cream cone during the final scene in the diner.)
In 1976, the movie was adapted into the CBS sitcom Alice starring Linda Lavin, with Polly Holliday as Flo. When Holliday exited in 1980 for her own comedy, Ladd was brought in as Belle Dupree, a tough-as-nails waitress once romantically linked to diner owner Mel (Vic Tayback). Ladd won a Golden Globe for her work but left after a season.
In a 1990 interview for the French magazine Positif, Lynch recounted the challenges of getting Ladd to stick to the script in Wild at Heart. “When she was in her first scene, she was miles away from the text that I’d written. She got the spirit of the scene perfectly, but she didn’t re-create a single word,” he said. “So I took her aside and after that we worked very well together. She was bad at sticking to the dialogue, but she really loved to be seized by an emotion and to be carried away by it. It was quite something to contain all that energy.”
She and Laura played mother and daughter on the 2011-13 HBO series Enlightened and also worked together in Citizen Ruth (1996), Daddy and Them (2001) and Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). In 1993, they found themselves in dueling dinosaur movies: Dern in Jurassic Park and Ladd in Carnosaur.
Ladd’s film résumé also included All Night Long (1981), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), Black Widow (1987), National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), A Kiss Before Dying (1991), The Cemetery Club (1993), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Primary Colors (1998), 28 Days (2000), Charlie’s War (2003) and Joy (2015).
She wrote, directed and starred in the comic revenge thriller Mrs. Munck (1995), casting her ex-husband and Shelley Winters, who was Laura’s godmother.
Ladd also earned Emmy nominations for playing Brett Butler’s mom on Grace Under Fire and a midwife who dies in the pilot of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and for a guest-starring stint on Touched by an Angel. More recently, she starred as the matriarch of the O’Brien family on the Hallmark Channel series Chesapeake Shores.
Ladd and Bruce Dern were married from 1960-69. In addition to Laura, the couple had another daughter, Diane Elizabeth, who died in an accidental drowning when she was 18 months old.
Ladd also was married to businessman William Shea Jr. — the son of the lawyer for whom the New York Mets’ old stadium was named — from 1973-76 and to Robert Charles Hunter, a former high-ranking PepsiCo executive, from 1999 until his death in July.
Survivors also include her grandchildren, Ellery and Jaya.
