Sometimes Hollywood deaths happen with a strange sense of coincidence. Just two months after Polly Holliday–who played wisecraking waitress Flo on the ’70s sitcom Alice–departed, the Oscar-nominated actress who originated the role in the 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore also died. Diane Ladd, the ex-wife of Bruce Dern and mother of Laura Dern, passed away Monday at the age of 89.
The Mississippi native was born Rose Diane Ladner in 1935 (she once claimed that her tiny hometown had been destroyed by a hurricane), daughter of a veterinarian and a one-time actress. Eager to follow in her mother’s footsteps, Ladd left the Magnolia State for New Orleans after graduating high school and began working on the local stage. In 1953 she joined a touring company of the steamy drama Tobacco Road starring John Carradine, and later moved to New York City to pursue an acting career in earnest.
During the late 1950s and early ’60s Diane worked various Big Apple jobs (including a nightclub chorus girl) while landing small TV roles on such shows as Decoy and Naked City. Her off-Broadway came in 1959 with Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams, to whom she was distantly related. It was on the set of Orpheus that she would meet actor Bruce Dern, whom she wed the following year (they were married until 1969). After uncredited turns in Something Wild (1961) and 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962), Ladd got her first major screen role playing Dern’s girlfriend in Roger Corman’s brutal 1966 biker drama The Wild Angels. The couple also appeared together in another cycle thriller, 1970’s The Rebel Rousers.
Ladd continued turning up on TV (Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, Ironside, and a recurring role on the soap opera The Secret Storm) in the ’60s and early ’70s. Moviegoers saw her in supporting turns in The Reivers (1969) with Steve McQueen; WUSA (1970) with Paul Newman; and White Lightning (1973) with Burt Reynolds. The last film also marked the first screen appearance of Diane’s daughter, a six-year-old Laura Dern.
1974 would be Ladd’s breakout movie year. She played call girl/actress Ida Sessions in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and was sharp-tounged diner worker Florence Jean Castleberry in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a performance which garnered Best Supporting Actress nominations at the Golden Globes and Academy Awards. Diane turned down the chance to reprise her role in the popular TV comedy Alice, but–in another one of those Hollywood coincidences–after Polly Holliday left she joined the show for two seasons as a new character, Isabelle “Belle” Dupree.
Some of Ladd’s notable ’70s/’80s movie appearances included Embryo (1978), Mrs. Nightshade in Something Wicked This Way Comes (1982), the telefilm Grace Kelly (1983), Black Widow (1987), and as Clark Griswold’s mother Nora in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989). Speaking of mothers, she and daughter Dern played a far-less friendly parent-child couple in David Lynch’s off-kilter road movie/romance Wild at Heart (1990), which got Ladd a second Best Supporting Actress Oscar nom. One year later Diane and Laura would go to become the first mother and daughter to receive Oscar nominations for the same film in Rambling Rose. They also worked together in Citizen Ruth (1991), Daddy and Them (2001), Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), and the short-lived 2011-13 HBO series Enlightened.
Along with ’90s turns in A Kiss Before Dying (1991), Carnosaur (1993), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), and Primary Colors (1998), Ladd also starred in, scripted, and directed the 1995 dark comedy Mrs. Munck, which co-starred Bruce Dern. She appeared with Sandra Bullock in 2000’s 28 Days, Anthony Hopkins in 2005’s The World’s Fastest Indian, and as Jennifer Lawrence’s mother in 2015’s Joy. Diane was also a regular on the 2016-22 Hallmark Channel series Chesapeake Shores. Her final screen role came in 2022, as an actress recovering from a stroke who is cared for by her university professor daughter (Mary Stuart Masterson), in Isle of Hope.
Upon hearing of her passing at her California home earlier this week, Bruce Dern recalled Ladd by saying, “She lived a good life. She saw everything the way it was. She was a great teammate to her fellow actors. She was funny, clever, gracious. But most importantly to me, she was a wonderful mother to our incredible wunderkind daughter. And for that I will be forever grateful to her.” Laura Dern called her “My amazing hero and my profound gift of a mother,” adding “She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist, and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created.”