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Diane Ladd, the three-time Academy Award nominee whose roles ranged from the brash waitress in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to the scheming parent in Wild at Heart, has died at 89.
Ladd’s death was announced Monday by daughter Laura Dern, who issued a statement saying her mother and occasional co-star had died at her home in Ojai, Calif., 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 life in the arts
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 appear in dozens of movies over the following decades.
Her many credits included Chinatown, Primary Colors and two other movies for which she received best supporting nods, Wild at Heart and Rambling Rose, both of which co-starred her daughter.
She also continued to work in television, with appearances on ER, Touched by Angel and Alice, the spinoff from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, among others.
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.
A native of Laurel, Miss., Ladd 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 be in “front of a screen” and would “command” her own audiences.
By the mid-1970s, she had lived out her fate well enough to tell the New York Times that she 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.”
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