Wild At Heart actress Diane Ladd dies aged 89
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Diane Ladd was known for playing strong, intelligent and complex women during a seven-decade career that began on stage in the 1950s.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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LOS ANGELES – American actress Diane Ladd, a triple Academy Award nominee for her supporting roles in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Wild At Heart (1990) and Rambling Rose (1991), has died at age 89, her daughter said on Nov 3.
Ladd died at her home in California, said actress Laura Dern, Ladd’s daughter with former husband, actor Bruce Dern.
Ladd was known for playing strong, intelligent and complex women in roles including a sassy waitress, a domineering, mentally ill mother and an eccentric 1930s housewife during a seven-decade career that began on stage in the 1950s.
Actress Diane Ladd at the premiere of the film The Last Full Measure in California, the United States, in 2020.
PHOTO: EPA
The tall blonde starred in films such as White Lightning (1973), David Lynch’s crime drama Wild At Heart, the black comedy Citizen Ruth (1996) and Daddy And Them (2001), and HBO’s TV Series Enlightened (2011 to 2013) with her daughter.
The two often played mother and daughter.
Ladd and Dern were both nominated for an Academy Award for the drama Rambling Rose.
They were the first and only mother-daughter duo to receive Oscar nominations for the same film in the same year.
“She is just the greatest actress, ever. You don’t even use the word brave because she just shows up like that in life. She doesn’t care what anybody thinks,” Dern said of her mother.
“She leads with a boundarylessness,” she added in a 2019 interview with American talk show Inside The Actors Studio.
The duo’s talents extended beyond acting.
In 2023, they published a joint memoir, Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother And Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (And Banana Pudding).
The book was based on their conversations during daily walks together after Ladd was diagnosed with a lung disease and given only months to live.
Her doctor recommended the walks to strengthen her lungs.
“The more we talked and the deeper and more complicated of subjects we shared, my mother got better and better and better,” Dern said in an interview with National Public Radio in 2023. “It’s been a great gift.”
Actresses Diane Ladd and Laura Dern at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, California, in 2020.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Southern belle
Diane Ladd was born Rose Diane Lanier on Nov 29, 1935, in the small town of Meridian, Mississippi. She was the only child of a country veterinarian and an actress and homemaker.
From a young age, the precocious child who finished school at 16 knew she wanted to act.
“Somehow in my soul, even as a child, I felt I was going to be an actress,” Ladd said with a southern lilt in a 2022 talk at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
She was offered a college scholarship, but opted to try her luck in New York, where she worked as a model and Copacabana dancer.
She joined the Actor’s Studio, which is known for method acting.
Ladd made her New York stage debut in 1952 in the off-Broadway production of Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams, her third cousin.
It was also where she met her first husband, Bruce Dern.
She worked in classic 1960s TV dramas such as Perry Mason, 77 Sunset Strip and The Fugitive before being cast in Roger Corman’s 1966 motorcycle saga The Wild Angels with Dern, Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra.
Two years later, she made her Broadway debut in Carry Me Back To Morningside Heights.
She had more than 120 TV and film credits, including Roman Polansky’s Chinatown (1974) and David O. Russell’s 2015 comedy/drama Joy, and earned three Emmy nominations in the 1990s for guest roles in Touched By An Angel, Grace Under Fire and Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman.
Ladd also wrote short stories and screenplays, and directed and starred in the 1995 comedy Mrs Munck with Dern.
Ladd, Dern and their daughter Laura were each awarded side-by-side stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in a triple ceremony in 2010.
Actress Diane Ladd with her star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, California, in 2010.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“Diane is a Renaissance woman,” film producer Barbara Boyle said during the ceremony. “She has uncanny perception and insight into people that informs her acting and directing.”
In her 2006 memoir Spiralling Through The School Of Life, Ladd wrote about the high and low points of her life, including the death of her first daughter in a tragic accident in 1962, when she was a toddler.
Deeply spiritual, Ladd was a proponent of complementary and alternative medicine.
After being told that she would never be able to have another child, her second daughter, Laura, was born five years later.
Ladd was married three times and continued to work into her 80s.
“Art is just a mirror, and that’s why we go see movies: to learn who we are,” she told the New York Times in 2023. REUTERS
