diane ladd

Source: Nick Agro/AMPAS

Diane Ladd

Diana Ladd, the three-time Oscar nominee whose credits included Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Wild At Heart, and Chinatown, has died. She was 89.

In a statement on Monday the actress Laura Dern, Ladd’s daughter, confirmed her death. “My amazing hero and my profound gift of a mother, Diane Ladd, 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.”

Born in Mississippi on November 29 1935, Ladd moved to Louisiana for school and worked in theatre there, before going into television. She made her feature debut on Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels in 1966 and got her break playing the sassy waitress Flo in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in 1974, for which she received her first Oscar nod.

Scorsese issued a statement on Monday that read: ”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, 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.”

In 1974 Ladd also played a small yet significant role in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. She went on to earn two more Academy Award nominations for Wild At Heart and Rambling Rose in 1990 and 1991, respectively.

The latter two films starred Dern, Ladd’s daughter by her first husband Bruce Dern, and indeed mother and daughter frequently appeared together in films and television, and published a book together. Ladd and Bruce Dern’s first daughter Diane Elizabeth died in infancy in 1962.

Ladd’s feature credits included Ghosts Of Mississippi, Joy, White Lightning, Primary Colors, and The Last Full Measure.

Ladd and Bruce Dern were divorced in 1969. She married two more times: to financier William A. Shea Jr, and to former PepsiCo Food Systems CEO Robert Charles Hunter, who died earlier this year.

Ladd is survived by Laura Dern, and two grandchildren.

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