Diane Ladd, a prolific actress who earned Oscar nominations for her supporting roles in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “Wild at Heart” and “Rambling Rose” — playing a spectrum of humanity that encompassed the tartly profane, the violently unstable and the quietly noble — died Nov. 3 at her home in Ojai, California. She was 89.

Her daughter, Oscar-winning actress Laura Dern, announced the death in a statement. She did not cite a cause.

With her Southern lilt, helmet of flaxen hair and expressive face, Ms. Ladd built a more than six-decade career on stage, TV and film. She portrayed a cotillion’s worth of Dixie belles, some sweet, others imbued with a primal drive for vengeance, and appeared on-screen several times with Dern, a daughter from her early marriage to actor Bruce Dern. The two women became the first mother-daughter pair to earn Academy Award nominations for the same film, the Depression-era coming-of-age story “Rambling Rose” (1991).

Starting with TV work in the late 1950s, Ms. Ladd amassed a portfolio of more than 140 Hollywood credits. She was drawn, she said, to playing unconventional truthtellers, such as the salty waitress Flo in director Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974) — the basis for the long-running TV sitcom “Alice” — and the sociopathically protective mother in filmmaker David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990).

She spent decades trying unsuccessfully to generate backing for her pet project — a biopic of Martha Mitchell, the outspoken, alcoholic and estranged wife of convicted Watergate conspirator John N. Mitchell, who was President Richard M. Nixon’s attorney general. (Ms. Ladd said the ghost of Martha Mitchell had visited her and compelled her to tell her story.)

Ms. Ladd had long found solace in psychic healing, astrology and her belief in reincarnation, following the accidental pool drowning of her toddler daughter, also named Diane, in 1962. As a writer and lecturer, she became an ardent promoter of New Age philosophies and alternative-healing techniques.

“I like to joke that when Shirley MacLaine was out on a limb, I was already out on a branch,” she said, referring to the movie star known for her interest in mysticism and reincarnation.

A self-described misfit from small-town Mississippi, Ms. Ladd said she was an intuitive and psychic child who found in acting a way to channel her emotional sensitivity. She completed Catholic high school at 16, then lit out for New Orleans determined to become “the best damned actress of my time.”

She supported herself as a model and singer in the French Quarter before joining a touring production of “Tobacco Road,” based on Erskine Caldwell’s novel about Depression-era tenant farmers.

By 20, she was working in Manhattan as a sequined Copacabana nightclub chorine. She demonstrated her dramatic prowess in a 1957 road company production of the drug-addiction play “A Hatful of Rain,” became a favorite pupil of Actors Studio artistic director Lee Strasberg, and played a strong-willed young woman in a 1959 off-Broadway revival of “Orpheus Descending,” written by her distant cousin Tennessee Williams.

Ms. Ladd’s work in the play, which also starred her future husband Dern, briefly ignited film-studio interest in her. But she blanched at the prospect of conforming to a screen archetype of the glamorous blond goddess and elected instead to follow the serious theater path of her idols Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page.

As a result, however, she spent nearly 15 years in relative obscurity. She appeared in short-lived plays and worked for a year on the CBS soap opera “The Secret Storm.” She had innumerable supporting roles in films, from the Roger Corman biker exploitation film “Wild Angels” (1966) to Roman Polanski’s noir masterpiece “Chinatown” (1974). In the latter, she was an actress who mysteriously impersonates Faye Dunaway’s socialite character and later gets murdered.

Her rise to greater fame began with “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” starring Ellen Burstyn in an Oscar-winning performance as a widowed mother and aspiring singer who takes a waitressing job at an Arizona greasy spoon. Ms. Ladd impressed critics with her portrayal of a wisecracking older waitress who can put any man in his place.

Ms. Ladd’s disappointment in her Oscar loss was compounded by her anger that Ingrid Bergman accepted the trophy for “Murder on the Orient Express” with what she viewed as disingenuous modesty.

“She implied that she didn’t think she deserved to win,” Ms. Ladd told journalist Rex Reed soon after. “Now, honey, if you don’t think you deserve to win, you should decline the nomination. And on top of that to single out [nominee] Valentina Cortese as the one who should have won … well! The old Southerner in me began to rebel. My toes literally curled under my shoes, went through the soles and clawed the carpet.”

Fresh off her Oscar nomination, Ms. Ladd frustrated her agent by turning down TV and film parts in favor of starring in the Broadway-bound play “Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander,” part of author Preston Jones’s “A Texas Trilogy.” And while her portrayal of the title character — as both a fresh-faced 17-year-old and a small-town widow at 37 — received approving reviews, it seemed that she had failed to seize her moment to secure better parts in Hollywood.

She slummed with Rock Hudson in the horror film “Embryo” (1976) and had roles in a few made-for-TV films. In 1980, she was hired to play a new sassy Southern waitress named Belle Dupree on CBS’s “Alice” after Flo — popularized on the sitcom by Polly Holliday — left for a spin-off. Ms. Ladd stayed a season on “Alice” and left with complaints that the writers lacked a clear vision for Belle as a character.

She later appeared as Chevy Chase’s gentle mother in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” (1989), then pivoted to Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” with freakish displays of red lipstick and boundless malevolence as she tries to prevent her daughter (played by Laura Dern) from dating a former convict (Nicolas Cage). In “Rambling Rose,” Ms. Ladd was a good-hearted Southern matriarch who looks after the well-being of her sexually precocious young housekeeper (Laura Dern).

In the early 1990s, Ms. Ladd received Emmy Award nominations for her guest roles on “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” the sitcom “Grace Under Fire” and the faith drama “Touched by an Angel.” She also played the mother to Laura Dern’s lead character on the 2011-2013 HBO series “Enlightened,” about the spiritual journey of a female corporate executive who is recovering from a breakdown.

“I think that Laura might have been basing her character on me, and I was basing my character on my mother, [who] was a wonderful woman, very wonderful, but she was a passive aggressor,” she told an interviewer in 2013. “I had this scene where Laura comes in, and she hugs me in one of the opening scenes, and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ If my daughter hugs me, I hug her back. I hug everybody. I don’t say, ‘What’s wrong?’ I say, ‘Hey darlin’, that’s good sugar.’ That’s Diane Ladd.”

Rose Diane Ladnier — she sometimes rendered her surname Ladner or Lanier — was born Nov. 29, 1935, and grew up near Meridian, Mississippi. She said her mother was a homemaker with a social register background, and her father was a veterinarian (“a poor chicken doctor”) from a free-spirited family on what she described as a lower social rung.

Ms. Ladd began acting in high school, and her parents allowed her to pursue her career in New Orleans on the condition that she attend finishing school at the same time. Her career got a boost when actor John Carradine selected her as the child bride Pearl for his touring production of “Tobacco Road.” She later appeared in summer stock and road shows before being tapped over hundreds of others to be a “Copa girl.”

Her marriages to Bruce Dern and stockbroker William Shea Jr. (whose family name adorned the Mets’ old stadium) ended in divorce. In 1999, she married Robert Charles Hunter, a retired PepsiCo executive. He died in July.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Ladd’s later credits included offbeat mother and grandmother roles in films including “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me” (1992), “Ghosts of Mississippi” (1996), “Primary Colors” (1998) and “Joy” (2015). She played a celebrity-gossip TV host in Lynch’s “Inland Empire” (2006), starring her daughter, and wrote and directed the comedy “Mrs. Munck” (1995), about a woman’s revenge against the married cad (Bruce Dern) who seduced and abandoned her decades earlier.

In recent years, Ms. Ladd had a recurring role as a wisdom-spouting grandmother on the Hallmark Channel series “Chesapeake Shores” and wrote books of spiritual advice and short stories. Her daughter once described her as a person of insatiable curiosity, drive and emotional giving, in life and on the stage and screen.

“Most actors have healing powers,” Ms. Ladd said, “because they’re used to sending their energy across the footlights.”