Diane Ladd, the Mississippi-born film actress who shaped her air of eccentricity and steely determination into wildly different characters over a career of more than six decades, died on Monday in Ojai, Calif. She was 89.
Her death was confirmed in a statement by her daughter, the actress Laura Dern. It did not cite a cause.
Ms. Ladd, who was a respected actress more than a world-famous movie star, never won an Academy Award, but she was nominated three times, in roles that displayed her range.
She was Flo, the sassy and foulmouthed but deeply compassionate Southern waitress, in Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974); Marietta Fortune, a seductive, malevolent former beauty queen who hires a hit man to kill her daughter’s boyfriend, in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990); and a quietly noble Mississippi housewife who defends the family’s indiscreet young maid in Martha Coolidge’s “Rambling Rose” (1991).
That final nomination brought with it the distinction of being the first time in academy history that a real-life mother and daughter (Ms. Ladd and Ms. Dern) had been nominated for the same picture — Ms. Ladd for best supporting actress and Ms. Dern for best actress.
“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” inspired the hit TV show “Alice,” on which Polly Holliday played the role of Flo. In 1980, when Ms. Holliday (who died in September) left to star in a spinoff series, “Flo,” Ms. Ladd joined the cast for a time as another wisecracking Southern waitress, this one named Isabelle (Belle) Dupree.
She made memorable appearances in dozens of films, including “Chinatown” (1974), as a Los Angeles prostitute posing as a society matron; “Ghosts of Mississippi” (1996), as the soignée widow of a Southern judge who would rather play bridge than examine her state’s racist past; “Primary Colors” (1998), as the brash mother of a president modeled after Bill Clinton; and the biographical drama “Joy” (2015), as the relentlessly supportive grandmother of Joy Mangano, a plucky inventor and entrepreneur played by Jennifer Lawrence.
Rose Diane Ladner was born on Nov. 29, 1935, in Meridian, Miss., the only child of Preston Paul Ladner, a country veterinarian, and Mary Bernadette (Anderson) Ladner Garey. Ms. Ladd sometimes reported that she had been born in Rilberton, Miss., a small town that she said was wiped out in a hurricane.
After graduating from high school, she headed for New Orleans, a move her parents allowed only on the condition that she enroll in a finishing school there. Her real goal was theater. While Ms. Ladd was appearing in a play at the Gallery Circle Theater in the French Quarter in 1953, an associate of the actor John Carradine discovered her and cast her as the child bride Pearl in the touring company of “Tobacco Road,” in which Mr. Carradine was starring.
Afterward, Ms. Ladd moved to New York City on her own and took various jobs, among them modeling, handing out product samples at Bloomingdale’s and working as a chorus girl in a three-month stint at the Copacabana nightclub. Her first television roles, in the late 1950s, were guest appearances on series like “The Walter Winchell File” and “The Naked City.”
In 1959, Ms. Ladd made her Off Broadway debut in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending.” Her performance caught the attention of The New York Times, whose review praised her as “a bright, blonde young lady” who “does a superb job of depicting Carol Cutrere, a high-strung, reckless ‘lewd vagrant’ who was once a benign reformer.”
(The review also identified Ms. Ladd as “a kin of Mr. Williams,” adding, “Both are descended from the poet Sidney Lanier.”)
Ms. Ladd met her first husband, Bruce Dern, when he joined the cast of that production.
Movies came next. Her first credited film role was in Roger Corman’s “The Wild Angels” (1966), a youth-oriented motorcycle drama that also featured Peter Fonda and Mr. Dern.
In a Times interview alongside Ms. Dern in 2023, Ms. Ladd said, “I didn’t want you to go into acting.” But she played her daughter’s on-screen mother at least five times, most recently in “Enlightened” (2011-13), HBO’s acclaimed but short-lived series about a woman who takes her New Age rehab experience too much to heart.
Ms. Ladd’s last film role was as the widow of an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War in the drama “The Last Full Measure.” She was also a regular on the Hallmark Channel series “Chesapeake Shores” (2016-17).
As for theater, which she called her first love, Ms. Ladd made it to Broadway twice, but briefly. “Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights” (1968), written by Robert Alan Arthur and directed by Sidney Poitier, ran for only seven performances. “A Texas Trilogy: Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander” (1976), written by Preston Jones, closed after a month but earned her a Drama Desk Award for best actress in a play.
Ms. Ladd developed something of a reputation as an earnest critic of the entertainment industry. At various events, she spoke out against the greed of Hollywood studios and Broadway producers, American film productions that went to Canada, and the industry’s failings in general. In 1976, she told The Times, “People treat actors worse than they treat children.”
Even in her book “Spiraling Through the School of Life” (2006), she couldn’t help observing, “Some folks are so corrupt that hell wouldn’t even have them.”
“Spiraling” was a combination of memoir and self-help manual that focused on spirituality, healing, past lives, opportunity, forgiveness and redemption. Ms. Ladd had unconventional beliefs, and said that the ghost of Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of the former attorney general and convicted Watergate conspirator John N. Mitchell, had appeared to her. Ms. Ladd then spent decades attempting to garner support for a biopic of Ms. Mitchell.
Ms. Ladd was also the author of “A Bad Afternoon for a Piece of Cake,” a 2016 short story collection. She took on film directing once, with the revenge drama “Mrs. Munck” (1996), in which she also starred alongside Shelley Winters, Kelly Preston and Mr. Dern.
She and Mr. Dern, who married in 1960 and divorced in 1969, had two daughters. Five years before Laura Dern was born, their first child, Diane Elizabeth Dern, died in a swimming pool accident at the age of 18 months. Ms. Ladd’s second marriage, to William A. Shea Jr., a Wall Street financier, also ended in divorce. In 1999, she married Robert Charles Hunter, a former chief executive of PepsiCo Food Systems, whom she met through a mutual friend at a spiritual retreat in Arizona. He died in July.
In addition to Ms. Dern, Ms. Ladd’s survivors include two grandchildren.
At a 2016 book signing, Ms. Ladd was asked for advice on succeeding in show business. “Nothing’s going to be handed to you,” she said, suggesting that in her 80s she had no intention of mellowing. “You have to fight like a dirty rotten dog.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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