Diane Ladd movies and TV shows: Martin Scorsese joins tributes to ' great improvisational actor'

Diane Ladd’s roles ranged from the brash waitress in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to the protective mother in Wild At Heart. Her death was announced on Monday by daughter and fellow actor 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.

Through marriage and blood relations, Ladd was tied to the arts. 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 rare feat of mother-and-daughter nominees for their work in Rambling Rose and they also were memorably paired in Wild At Heart, a personal favourite of Ladd’s and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

In the dark, farcical David Lynch noir, her character, Marietta, is willing to try anything — including murder — to keep her daughter (Laura Dern) away from her ex-con lover, played by Nicolas Cage.

Ladd would be called upon by the director for some Lynchian touches, and countered with some of her own.

“One day, the script said that Marietta gets in bed, curls up with her baby dog, and is sucking her thumb,” she told Vulture in 2024.

“I looked at him and said, ‘David, I don’t want to do that.’ He said, ’What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to put on a long satin nightgown, I want to stand in the middle of the bed holding a martini and drinking it, and I want to sway to the old music within my head.’ He said okay, I did it, and he loved it.”

A native of Laurel, Mississippi, Ladd was born Rose Diane Ladner and was apparently destined to stand out. In her 2006 memoir, Spiraling Through The School Of Life, she remembered being told by her great-grandmother that she would one day in “front of a screen” and would “command” her own audiences.

Before Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, she had been working in television since the 1950s, when she was in her early 20s, with shows including Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and The Big Valley.

By the mid-1970s, she had lived out her fate well enough to tell The New York Times that no longer denied herself the right to call herself great.

“Now I don’t say that,” she said. “I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.”

Ladd was married three times, and divorced twice — from Bruce Dern and from William A Shea, Jr. In 1976, around the time her second marriage ended, she told the Times that neither of her husbands knew “how to show love”.

“I come from the South and from a man, my father, who gave me rocking‐chair love. My people pass love around, and why I selected two men who needed someone to give love and didn’t know how to give it. …” She paused. “I hope I won’t repeat that again.”

Ladd’s third marriage, to author-former PepsiCo executive Robert Charles Hunter, lasted from 1999 until his death in August.

Martin Scorsese said: “I have so many good memories of making Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and my experiences with Diane are among the best.

“I felt that it was so important for the picture to let the actors run with their characters, and what an experience it was to watch Diane take the character of Flo and make something so vivid and funny and alive.

“Diane was a great improvisational actor — a matter of technique and discipline, but most of all instinct and artistry – and she had it all.

“You can really feel it in the sunbathing scene with her and Ellen (Burstyn), one of the best scenes in the picture.

“I loved my time working with Diane, a truly remarkable artist, and I wish we could have worked together again.”

What was Diane Ladd’s cause of death?

Her daughter Laura Dern did not confirm this, but has been reported that she died from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Some of the films in which Diane Ladd appeared

• National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
• Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
• Wild at Heart
• Chinatown
• Primary Colors
• The Wild Angels
• Gaysh
• Rambling Rose
• Ghosts of Mississippi
• Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me

Some of the TV shows in which Diane Ladd appeared

• Gunsmoke
• Love Boat
• LA Law
• Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
• Alice
• 77 Sunset Strip
• Perry Mason