Diane Ladd, the prolific actor who earned Academy Award nominations for her spirited, soulful performances in Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” and Martha Coolidge’s “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,” Ladd’s daughter, Oscar-winning actor Laura Dern, said in a statement.
“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created,” Dern added. “We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”
In a screen career spanning more than 60 years, Ladd portrayed an eclectic gallery of characters, embodying women who were strong-willed but vulnerable, off-kilter but grounded.
Scorsese cast Ladd as a fiery, sharp-tongued Arizona diner waitress in “Alice Doesn’t Live Her Anymore,” released in 1974 to critical acclaim — and a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for Ladd.
The same year, Ladd had a small but memorable role as a mysterious woman who hires Jack Nicholson’s cynical private detective in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”
Lynch cast Ladd as a cartoonishly overbearing mother in “Wild at Heart” (1990), a lovers-on-the-run noir that paid homage to Elvis Presley and “The Wizard of Oz.” Ladd earned her second supporting actress nod in the role of Marietta Fortune.
“There’s not only talk of the Wicked Witch, but Marietta, played with fine, sleazy zest by Diane Ladd, actually wears wicked-witch shoes,” The New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote in his review.
Ladd’s third supporting actress nomination arrived the following year for her work as a Southern family matriarch in “Rambling Rose,” again cast opposite Dern. The two made history as the first mother-daughter duo nominated for Oscars in the same year.
Roger Ebert, praising Ladd’s performance in “Rose,” wrote she managed to “suggest an eccentric yet reasonable Southern belle who knows what is really important.”
Ladd amassed scores of small-screen credits across her career, too, from the police procedurals of the 1950s to the made-for-television movies of the 1980s and beyond.
She was nominated for guest actress Emmys for her appearances on the shows “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” “Grace Under Fire” and “Touched by an Angel.” She most recently cameoed on an episode of the CBS sitcom “Young Sheldon.”
Rose Diane Lanier was born on Nov. 29, 1935, in Laurel, Mississippi, to a veterinarian father and a mother she described on her website as a “beautiful blonde, blue-eyed, gracious housewife.”
Ladd set her sights on the performing arts at a young age. She became one of the “Copa Girls” at New York’s Copacabana as a teenager and made her Manhattan theatrical debut in an off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending.”
She earned her first big-screen credit in B-movie king Roger Corman’s biker picture “The Wild Angels,” released in 1966. Ladd’s other notable film roles from this period included “The Reivers,” “The Rebel Rousers” and “White Lightning.”
Meanwhile, Ladd acted steadily on television, picking up parts on “The Walter Winchell File,” “Naked City,” “Deadline,” “The Detectives,” “Perry Mason,” “The Fugitive,” “Gunsmoke” and other midcentury classics.
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