Diane Ladd, TV and stage actor, dies at 89 – Nationwide
Diane Ladd, the three-time Academy Award nominee whose roles ranged from the brash waitress in Alice Doesn’t Stay Right here Anymore to the protecting mom in Wild at Coronary heart, has died at 89.
Ladd’s loss of life was introduced Monday by daughter Laura Dern, who issued an announcement saying her mom and occasional co-star had died at her residence in Ojai, California, with Dern at her aspect.
Dern, who known as Ladd her “superb hero” and “profound reward of a mom,” didn’t instantly cite a reason behind loss of life.
“She was the best daughter, mom, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that solely goals may have seemingly created,” Dern wrote. “We have been blessed to have her. She is flying along with her angels now.”
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A gifted comedian and dramatic performer, Ladd had a protracted profession in tv and on stage earlier than breaking by as a movie performer in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 launch Alice Doesn’t Stay Right here Anymore.
She earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for her flip because the acerbic, straight-talking Flo, and went on to look in dozens of flicks over the next a long time.
Her many credit included Chinatown, Main Colours and two different films for which she acquired finest supporting nods, Wild at Coronary heart and Rambling Rose, each of which co-starred her daughter.
She additionally continued to work in tv, with appearances in ER, Touched by Angel and Alice, the spinoff from Alice Doesn’t Stay Right here Anymore, amongst others.
By marriage and blood relations, Ladd was tied to the humanities. Tennessee Williams was a second cousin and first husband Bruce Dern, Laura’s father, was himself an Academy Award nominee. Ladd and Laura Dern achieved the uncommon feat of mother-and-daughter nominees for his or her work in Rambling Rose.
A local of Laurel, Mississippi, Ladd was apparently destined to face out. In her 2006 memoir, Spiraling By the Faculty of Life, she remembered being informed by her great-grandmother that she would someday in “entrance of a display screen” and would “command” her personal audiences.
By the mid-Nineteen Seventies, she had lived out her destiny nicely sufficient to inform The New York Instances that not denied herself the suitable to name herself nice.
“Now I don’t say that,” she mentioned. “I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, faucet dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.”
© 2025 The Canadian Press
