Diane Ladd obituary

An acclaimed actor – three times an Academy Award nominee – Diane Ladd, who has died aged 89, was a dynamic presence on stage, screen and television for more than half a century. In film roles ranging from a biker chick in The Wild Angels (1966) to the sassy waitress of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and the monster mother in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), Ladd always made an impact. She starred in the latter with her daughter Laura Dern, one of several mother-daughter relationships they portrayed on screen. Their Oscar nominations for the 1991 film Rambling Rose made Academy Award history as a unique mother-daughter double. She was born Rose Diane Lanier in Meridian, Mississippi. Her father, Paul, was a vet and her mother, Mary (nee Anderson), an actor. Ladd once described her young self as “just a pigtailed girl with a curious nature and a wonderfully crazy southern family”; Tennessee Williams was a cousin. After leaving school at 16, she turned down a scholarship to Louisiana State University and moved to New Orleans to pursue a stage career and to attend finishing school, which, she later joked, “almost finished me”. While performing at the Gallery Circle theatre in New Orleans, she was spotted by the actor John Carradine, who hired her to perform in his San Francisco production of Tobacco Road. Ladd then went to New York, where she worked as a model and a dancer at the Copacabana nightclub. But everything changed when she was cast in a 1959 off-Broadway production of Williams’s Orpheus Descending. She played an alcoholic nymphomaniac opposite Bruce Dern as Valentine “Snakeskin” Xavier, a guitar-playing drifter. They were married the following year. Meanwhile, Ladd was in a number of TV series and had bit parts in the films Murder Inc (1960) and Something Wild (1961), before returning to television for another five years. In 1966, Ladd and Dern co-starred in Roger Corman’s seminal biker movie The Wild Angels. Ladd, then pregnant with their second daughter, Laura, played the wife of Dern, an acidhead, rebellious biker called Loser. When he is killed, members of the leather-clad gang drug and rape his widow. The film, which began a cycle of biker and drug movies, established the couple as counterculture figures. They followed it with The Rebel Rousers (1967, released in 1970), another biker movie in which Dern is the leader of the eponymous gang, and Ladd is a groupie who is unmarried and pregnant. “Society can go straight to hell,” she proclaims, “because I’m going to have my baby.” But her film career was spasmodic and her television work continued to dominate, with guest star roles in The Big Valley, Gunsmoke and Ironside. In the 1970s, Ladd began to get better feature film parts. Credited as Diane Lad, she had a small but important role in White Lightning (1973), which starred Burt Reynolds as an ex-con bootlegger. The six-year-old Laura Dern appeared for the first time as her on-screen daughter. In Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Ladd played a key role as the woman calling herself “Mrs Mulwray” (impersonating Fay Dunaway’s character) who hires the private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) to investigate her husband’s alleged affair with another woman. “Let sleeping dogs lie, you’re better off not knowing,” he tells her. But she insists: “A wife can tell ... I have to know! Money doesn’t matter to me, Mr Gittes.” This was followed by her Oscar-nominated supporting role in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, as Flo, a sassy, no-nonsense waitress at a roadside diner where Alice (the Oscar-winning Ellen Burstyn) works. Played to the hilt by Ladd, the character is given to insults such as “I could lay under you, eat fried chicken and do a crossword puzzle at the same time; that’s how much you bother me.” In 1980-1981, Ladd was in 23 episodes of the spin-off TV series called Alice, not as Flo but as Isabelle “Belle” Dupree, a sharp-tongued but kind-hearted waitress, given the catchphrase, “Butter my biscuits!” Although she won a Golden Globe for her performance, the character was written out after two seasons, reputedly because she clashed with her co-stars. Then Ladd, having had to plough though some mediocre films and TV dramas, suddenly found herself bankable and much in demand in middle age for very diverse mother roles. In Lynch’s provocative Wild at Heart, her vengeful schemer, Marietta, mother of Lula (played by Laura), was florid and mad – and earned Ladd her second supporting actress Oscar nomination – while her genteel, free-spirited southern 30s intellectual in Martha Coolidge’s Rambling Rose, opposite Robert Duvall and her daughter, was the warm and nurturing reverse. In a familial twist, Ladd starred in a screwball comedy, Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me (1992), where she played a flirty, ageing southern belle alongside her mother, Mary Lanier. In 1995, Ladd directed her only film, Mrs Munck, a torrid drama in which she plays a hell-hath-no-fury woman bent on wreaking revenge on the now wheelchair-bound man who wronged her. The fact that the latter was portrayed by Bruce Dern, 26 years after their 1969 divorce, was meant to give the movie an extra frisson. A few years later, she was back (in a cameo appearance) with Laura Dern, in Lynch’s haunting, weird and cryptic Inland Empire (2006). Mother and daughter were together again as mother and daughter in the TV series Enlightened (2011-13), taglined as being about “a woman on the verge of a nervous breakthrough”. It was a theme that was dear to Ladd’s heart. In 2006, she published her first book, Spiralling Through the School of Life: A Mental, Physical and Spiritual Discovery. “For 30 years, I led a second life as a medical counsellor, healer, and proponent of alternative medicine,” she explained. “If I can help one person in this world, then it’s enough, and I’ve done my job.” In 2013, she brought out a volume of short stories called A Bad Afternoon for a Piece of Cake. She continued working, appearing in films and TV series until 2022. The following year she and Laura Dern adapted a series of their conversations into a book, Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding). I once met Ladd at the Edinburgh film festival. When she was leaving to return to the US, I accompanied her in the car to the airport. On the way, she suddenly called out, “Stop! I’ve seen a tree that I want to hug.” Despite our protestations that she would miss her flight, she insisted on getting out of the car and hugging the tree that had caught her fancy. Ladd’s second marriage was to William Shea Jr, from 1969 to 1977. In 1999 she married Robert Hunter; he predeceased her by three months. Her first daughter with Dern, Diane, died in an accident at 18 months old. Ladd is survived by Laura. • Diane Ladd, actor, born 29 November 1935; died 3 November 2025 • Ronald Bergan died in 2020