Diane Ladd, three-time Academy Award nominee and star of Wild at Heart, has died at 89.
Her daughter, actress Laura Dern, confirmed her death on Monday.
“My amazing hero and my profound gift of a mother, Diane Ladd, passed with me beside her this morning,” Dern said in a statement, adding that her final moments were spent at home in California.
Dern, who starred with her mother in 1991’s Rambling Rose, did not share Ladd’s cause of death.
“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created,” Dern said. “We were blessed to have her.”
Ladd’s career on stage and screen spanned decades. Her big break in film came as a waitress in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in 1974, which earned her an Oscar nomination.
She went on to appear in dozens of films after that, including as recently as 2022, when she played a grandmother in the coming-of-age film Gigi & Nate, and also acted frequently on television shows.
She was married to actor Bruce Dern from 1960 to 1969. The couple had two children, Oscar-winner Laura Dern and a baby girl, Diane Elizabeth Dern, who died in an accident in 1962, when she was 18 months old.
“She fell into the pool. She hit her head and knocked herself out. And it all happened instantly. And she died, and you will never get over that,” Ladd told the BBC’s US partner CBS News in 2023.
Ladd had a close relationship with Laura, her second child, and they shared the screen many times. When Dern starred in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and later in the HBO series Enlightened, Ladd played her mother both times.
They were also the first mother-daughter pair to be nominated for an Academy Award for the same movie, Rambling Rose. Neither won that year.
In 2023, they wrote a book together called Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love.
Ladd told CBS that she originally discouraged Dern from becoming an actress.
“She was only, like, 11 years old, and I said, ‘Don’t be an actress. Be a doctor, be a lawyer,'” she said. “Nobody cares if you put on weight or your chin points when you cry if you’re a doctor. They just want you to be the best you can be. But an actress? They care, care, care, care, care.”
Dern says she pushed back. “No. It is all I knew,” she said.
Credit: BBC
