Diane Ladd, a prolific actress who earned Oscar nominations for her supporting roles in \u201cAlice Doesn\u2019t Live Here Anymore,\u201d \u201cWild at Heart\u201d and \u201cRambling Rose\u201d \u2014 playing a spectrum of humanity that encompassed the tartly profane, the violently unstable and the quietly noble \u2014 died Nov. 3 at her home in Ojai, California. She was 89.<\/p>\n
Her daughter, Oscar-winning actress Laura Dern, announced the death in a statement. She did not cite a cause.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u201cRambling Rose\u201d<\/a> (1991).<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u201cAlice Doesn\u2019t Live Here Anymore<\/a>\u201d (1974) \u2014 the basis for the long-running TV sitcom \u201cAlice\u201d \u2014 and the sociopathically protective mother in filmmaker David Lynch\u2019s<\/a> \u201cWild at Heart\u201d (1990).<\/p>\n She spent decades trying unsuccessfully to generate backing for her pet project \u2014 a biopic of Martha Mitchell, the outspoken, alcoholic and estranged wife of convicted Watergate conspirator John N. Mitchell<\/a>, who was President Richard M. Nixon\u2019s attorney general. (Ms. Ladd said the ghost of Martha Mitchell had visited her<\/a> and compelled her to tell her story.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI like to joke that when Shirley MacLaine was out on a limb, I was already out on a branch,\u201d she said, referring to the movie star known for her interest in mysticism and reincarnation.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cthe best damned actress of my time.\u201d<\/p>\n She supported herself as a model and singer in the French Quarter before joining a touring production of \u201cTobacco Road,\u201d based on Erskine Caldwell\u2019s novel about Depression-era tenant farmers.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cA Hatful of Rain,\u201d 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 \u201cOrpheus Descending,\u201d written by her distant cousin Tennessee Williams.<\/p>\n Ms. Ladd\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cThe Secret Storm.\u201d She had innumerable supporting roles in films, from the Roger Corman <\/a>biker exploitation film \u201cWild Angels\u201d (1966) to Roman Polanski\u2019s noir masterpiece \u201cChinatown\u201d (1974). In the latter, she was an actress who mysteriously impersonates Faye Dunaway\u2019s socialite character and later gets murdered.<\/p>\n Her rise to greater fame began with \u201cAlice Doesn\u2019t Live Here Anymore,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Ms. Ladd\u2019s disappointment in her Oscar loss was compounded by her anger that Ingrid Bergman accepted the trophy for \u201cMurder on the Orient Express\u201d with what she viewed as disingenuous modesty.<\/p>\n \u201cShe implied that she didn\u2019t think she deserved to win,\u201d Ms. Ladd told journalist Rex Reed soon after. \u201cNow, honey, if you don\u2019t think you deserve to win, you should decline the nomination. And on top of that to single out [nominee] Valentina Cortese<\/a> as the one who should have won \u2026 well! The old Southerner in me began to rebel. My toes literally curled under my shoes, went through the soles and clawed the carpet.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cLu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander,\u201d part of author Preston Jones\u2019s \u201cA Texas Trilogy.\u201d And while her portrayal of the title character \u2014 as both a fresh-faced 17-year-old and a small-town widow at 37 \u2014 received approving reviews, it seemed that she had failed to seize her moment to secure better parts in Hollywood.<\/p>\n She slummed with Rock Hudson in the horror film \u201cEmbryo<\/a>\u201d (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<\/a> on CBS\u2019s \u201cAlice\u201d after Flo \u2014 popularized on the sitcom by Polly Holliday \u2014 left for a spin-off. Ms. Ladd stayed a season on \u201cAlice\u201d and left with complaints that the writers lacked a clear vision for Belle as a character.<\/p>\n She later appeared as Chevy Chase\u2019s gentle mother in \u201cNational Lampoon\u2019s Christmas Vacation\u201d (1989), then pivoted to Lynch\u2019s \u201cWild at Heart,\u201d with freakish displays of red lipstick<\/a> and boundless malevolence as she tries to prevent her daughter (played by Laura Dern) from dating a former convict (Nicolas Cage). In \u201cRambling Rose,\u201d Ms. Ladd was a good-hearted Southern matriarch who looks after the well-being of her sexually precocious young housekeeper (Laura Dern).<\/p>\n In the early 1990s, Ms. Ladd received Emmy Award nominations for her guest roles on \u201cDr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,\u201d the sitcom \u201cGrace Under Fire\u201d and the faith drama \u201cTouched by an Angel.\u201d She also played the mother to Laura Dern\u2019s lead character on the 2011-2013 HBO series \u201cEnlightened,\u201d about the spiritual journey of a female corporate executive who is recovering from a breakdown.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d she told an interviewer in 2013. \u201cI had this scene where Laura comes in, and she hugs me in one of the opening scenes, and I said, \u2018What\u2019s wrong?\u2019 If my daughter hugs me, I hug her back. I hug everybody. I don\u2019t say, \u2018What\u2019s wrong?\u2019 I say, \u2018Hey darlin\u2019, that\u2019s good sugar.\u2019 That\u2019s Diane Ladd.\u201d<\/p>\n Rose Diane Ladnier \u2014 she sometimes rendered her surname Ladner or Lanier \u2014 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 (\u201ca poor chicken doctor\u201d) from a free-spirited family on what she described as a lower social rung.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cTobacco Road.\u201d She later appeared in summer stock and road shows before being tapped over hundreds of others to be a \u201cCopa girl.\u201d<\/p>\n Her marriages to Bruce Dern and stockbroker William Shea Jr. (whose family name adorned the Mets\u2019 old stadium) ended in divorce. In 1999, she married Robert Charles Hunter, a retired PepsiCo executive. He died in July.<\/p>\n Information on survivors was not immediately available.<\/p>\n Ms. Ladd\u2019s later credits included offbeat mother and grandmother roles in films including \u201cHold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me<\/a>\u201d (1992), \u201cGhosts of Mississippi\u201d (1996), \u201cPrimary Colors\u201d (1998) and \u201cJoy\u201d (2015). She played a celebrity-gossip TV host in Lynch\u2019s \u201cInland Empire\u201d (2006), starring her daughter, and wrote and directed the comedy \u201cMrs. Munck<\/a>\u201d (1995), about a woman\u2019s revenge against the married cad (Bruce Dern) who seduced and abandoned her decades earlier.<\/p>\n In recent years, Ms. Ladd had a recurring role as a wisdom-spouting grandmother on the Hallmark Channel series \u201cChesapeake Shores\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMost actors have healing powers,\u201d Ms. Ladd said, \u201cbecause they\u2019re used to sending their energy across the footlights.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Diane Ladd, a prolific actress who earned Oscar nominations for her supporting roles in \u201cAlice Doesn\u2019t Live Here…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[144527,236,41783,88,75185,144526,144525,144528],"class_list":{"0":"post-269796","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-bruce-dern","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-diane-ladd","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-laura-dern","13":"tag-martha-mitchell","14":"tag-rambling-rose","15":"tag-wild-at-heart"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}