DIANE LADD
(29 November 1935 – 3 November 2025)
Although the American actress Diane Ladd, who has died aged 89 from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, had a long, seventy-year career on stage, in films and on television, she never really became what might be called a household name. However, she received three Academy Award nominations, three Primetime Emmy nominations, four Golden Globe nominations (winning one) and picked up a Bafta for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
Diane Ladd was born Rose Diane Lanier to Preston Paul Lanier, a veterinarian, and his actress wife Mary, in Laurel, Mississippi. She left school aged 16 and moved to New Orleans to become an actress and where she was invited by John Carradine to appear in the play Tobacco Road. She eventually moved to New York and became a model and a nightclub dancer. In 1959 she was cast as a nymphomaniac drunk in Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams (a cousin three times removed) in an off-Broadway production, where she met the actor Bruce Dern whom she subsequently married, and by whom she had a daughter, the actress Laura Dern.
Her first appearance on film was an uncredited bit in Something Wild, a 1961 psychological thriller with Carroll Baker and Ralph Meeker. In 1966 she appeared with Bruce Dern in The Wild Angels, Roger Corman’s biker movie, as well as another biker film with Dern called The Rebel Rousers. She was with Steve McQueen in Mark Rydell’s The Reivers, from the William Faulkner novel, and many more films, including White Lightning with Burt Reynolds, until Roman Polanski cast her in Chinatown (1974) as a woman who hires private eye J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) to spy on her husband. Ladd then received her first Academy Award nomination for Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), a road movie for which Ellen Burstyn won the Oscar. Ladd then played Mrs Nightshade in Jack Clayton’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, based on Ray Bradbury’s fantasy horror book. She did the remake of Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow, and Wild at Heart (1990), David Lynch’s controversial film noir comedy full of sex and violence and in which Ladd played the mother of her own daughter, Laura Dern, who was the sexpot Lula Pace Fortune. Martha Coolidge’s Rambling Rose also starred Laura Dern and both she and her mother were short-listed for Academy Awards, the first instance that a mother and daughter were nominated for the same film. Rambling Rose also won gongs at the Independent Spirit Awards for best picture, best director and for Diane Ladd. In Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, a screwball comedy from Joel Hershman, Ladd appeared with her own mother, Mary Lanier. In 1995 Ladd wrote and directed Mrs Munck and played the title character, a widow looking to revenge her father-in-law for an earlier affair. It also starred Bruce Dern and Shelley Winters.
Later on, Ladd worked with David Lynch again on Inland Empire (2006) with Laura Dern as an actress who takes on the personality of the role she is playing. A roster of famous actors (including Diane Ladd’s husband Robert Charles Hunter) co-starred in what was to be Lynch’s final directorial work. It is not difficult to imagine that Diane Ladd was easy to cast – she had a great range that could fit any genre. For her last film, Damián Romay's Isle of Hope, in 2022, she had top-billing, playing the central role of an actress who has lost her memory.
Diane Ladd’s marriage to Bruce Dern lasted from 1960 to 1969. As well as Laura, they had another daughter, Diane Elizabeth, who died aged 18 months following a drowning accident. Ladd then married William A. Shea Jr (1969 to 1977), and her third husband Robert Charles Hunter (whom she wed in 1999) died this August.
MICHAEL DARVELL