Oscar-Nominated Actress and Laura Dern’s Mom Was 89

Diane Ladd, the Oscar-nominated actress best known for her work in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, has died. She was 89.

Ladd’s daughter, Laura Dern, confirmed her mother’s death in a statement shared with Rolling Stone. An exact cause of death was not given. 

“My amazing hero and my profound gift of a mother passed with me beside her this morning at her home in Ojai, California,” Dern said. “She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created. We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”

Ladd enjoyed a prolific career on stage and screen. While she got her start as a teenager in the late Fifties, it wasn’t until 1974 that she broke through with memorable supporting roles in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. 

In the latter, Ladd played Flo, a candid and cutting waitress who shows her softer side while befriending Ellen Brustyn’s Alice. With an array of quick-witted and memorable lines — many of which she improvised — Ladd earned Best Supporting Actress nominations at both the Oscars and the Golden Globes. (She lost to Ingrid Bergman and Karen Black, respectively.) 

Ladd would earn two more Oscar nominations in the early Nineties, both for films in which she starred alongside Dern. The first was for Wild at Heart, in which she delivered a magnificently deranged performance as Marietta Fortune, the overbearing mother of Dern’s Lulu.

The following year, Ladd delivered a more grounded, but no less eccentric turn in Rambling Rose. Both she and Dern were nominated for their performances in that film, making them the first mother-daughter duo to be nominated at the same time. 

“It’s a very wonderful thing to work with your own, like when you walk into a butcher’s shop and he goes, ‘That’s my son helping me,’” Ladd said of working with Dern in a 2024 interview with Vulture. “If you find the truth, then you remember who you are. So these pictures are to help us all find the truth.”

Ladd was born Nov. 29, 1935, raised in Mississippi, and took to performing at a young age. As a bio on her website notes, she moved to New Orleans to finish school after graduating high school, where she began singing with a band in the French Quarter. She had a chance to study law at Louisiana State University, but turned it down after John Carradine offered her a role in his production of the play Tobacco Road. 

Soon, Ladd was living in New York, where she worked at the Copacabana club and made her off-Broadway debut in Orpheus Rising, a play by her distant cousin, Tennessee Williams. Ladd described Williams as “a great influence on my life” in a 2014 interview, adding, “[H]e took me to his heart, he took me to plays, he and his partner Frank. He was kind and loving and brilliant. He helped me; he fought for me. It’s important that somebody has somebody to fight for. He’s one of the greatest writers who ever lived. He’s our heritage.”

It was also during Orpheus Descending that Ladd met the actor Bruce Dern. The couple married in 1960 and had two daughters: Diane Elizabeth, who died at just 18 months in a swimming pool accident, and Laura, who was born in 1967. Ladd and Bruce split two years later. Growing up, Laura often accompanied her mother to work and even scored one of her first film appearances as a girl eating an ice cream cone in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Ladd’s other notable credits included movies like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Ghosts of Mississippi, Primary Colors, 28 Days, and Joy. She also worked extensively in TV, earning a Golden Globe for her turn in Alice, a sitcom spun off from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; Ladd didn’t reprise her role as Flo, though, instead playing a character named Isabelle “Belle” Dupree. Ladd later scored Emmy nominations for guest appearances in shows like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Grace Under Fire, and Touched by an Angel. 

She would appear in several more films with Dern, too, including another Lynch film, Inland Empire, and an uncredited part in Citizen Ruth. The pair also co-starred on Mike White’s celebrated but short-lived TV show, Enlightened, again playing mother and daughter.