Diane Ladd dead aged 89 as three-time Oscar nominee passes away
Ladd’s death was announced on Monday by daughter Laura Dern, who issued a statement saying her mother and occasional co-star had died at her home in Ojai, California, with Dern at her side.
Diane Ladd, the three-time Academy Award nominee whose roles ranged from the brash waitress in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to the protective mother in Wild At Heart, has died at the age of 89.
Ladd’s death was announced on Monday by daughter Laura Dern, who issued a statement saying her mother and occasional co-star had died at her home in Ojai, California, with Dern at her side.
Dern, who called Ladd her “amazing hero” and “profound gift of a mother”, did not immediately cite a cause of death.
“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created,” Dern wrote.
“We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”
A gifted comic and dramatic performer, Ladd had a long career in television and on stage before breaking through as a film performer in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 release Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
She earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for her turn as the acerbic, straight-talking Flo, and went on to appears in dozens of movies over the following decades.
Her many credits included Chinatown, Primary Colours and two other movies for which she received best supporting nods, Wild At Heart and Rambling Rose.
Back in 1990, Wild At Heart director David Lynch recalled working with Ladd and how she often went off-script: "When she was in her first scene, she was miles away from the text that I’d written."
"She got the spirit of the scene perfectly, but she didn’t re-create a single word so I took her aside and after that we worked very well together.
"She was bad at sticking to the dialogue, but she really loved to be seized by an emotion and to be carried away by it. It was quite something to contain all that energy."
Diane and Laura played a mother-daughter duo in HBO's Enlightened, which ran from 2011 to 2013, and worked together in Citizen Ruth, Daddy and Them, and Inland Empire.