Diane Ladd, actress nominated three times for an Oscar as a supporting actor for Alicia doesn’t live here anymore. wild heart y The Price of Ambition (Rambling Rose), He died this Monday morning at the age of 89 at his residence in Ojai (California), as announced in a statement by his daughter, actress Laura Dern.
Laura Dern said: “My incredible hero and mother, Diane Ladd, an immense gift to me, passed away this morning with me at her side at her home in Ojai. She was the best daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and compassionate soul I could have ever imagined. We were lucky to have her. She now flies with her angels.”
Together they worked in numerous films and television series, and were the first mother and daughter actresses (for now, the only ones) to receive Oscar nominations for the same film, The price of ambition (1992), in which Ladd played Dern’s defense attorney, a girl as sexy as she was naive, in 1935 Georgia.
Furthermore, both came from working in wild heart (1990), by David Lynch, in which they gave life to a mother and her offspring: Ladd created an evil mother, based on the villainous witch of The Wizard of Oz (Lynch’s favorite childhood film). Of that masterpiece, only the veteran performer was a candidate for the Hollywood Academy Awards.
When Ladd was assured three years ago that due to an illness she only had six months to live, Dern set out to help her regain her lung capacity through doctor-prescribed walks. Inspired by the idea of turning this difficult daily task into a “creative challenge” for her mother, Laura Dern recorded her conversations and encouraged her mother to share anecdotes: from her life in show business to intimate details and family recipes. This is how his book was born Honey, Baby, Mine, with the subtitle, translated from English, of A mother and her daughter talk about life, death, love (and banana pudding). In an interview in The New York Times For the release of this work, Ladd said: “All I can offer is a reflection of life itself. Art is nothing more than a mirror, and that is why we go to see movies: to learn who we are.” And in that same interview her daughter reminded her: “I didn’t want you to go into acting. It’s a tough business for anyone, but, as a woman, they really judge you, and for much more than the work. I told her: ‘Laura, be a lawyer. No one cares if your butt is too big when you’re a lawyer.’ Diane Ladd was married from 1960 to 1969 to actor Bruce Dern, and as a result of that marriage, Laura Elizabeth Dern was born in February 1967. In addition to Laura, the couple had another daughter, Diane Elizabeth, who died of a brain hemorrhage in 1960 after falling into the family’s swimming pool and hitting her head when she was 17 months old.
Diane Ladd was born Rose Diane Ladner in Laurel, Mississippi, on November 29, 1935. Her parents were there, visiting relatives for Thanksgiving. Raised in Meridian, in the same State, she moved to New Orleans as a teenager to sing in a jazz band in the French Quarter and ended up in New York, where she worked as a model and dancer at the Copacabana before making her theater debut with the play Orpheus descends, of Tennessee Williams, with whom, according to various interviews, she was distantly related. In this production he met Bruce Dern.
He worked hard for years in cinema (for example, in The traffickers) and television, and at the age of 26 he achieved a significant character in the soap opera The Secret Storm. Three years later, in 1974, Ladd already appeared in Chinatown, by Roman Polanski, and in Alicia doesn’t live here anymore. by Martin Scorsese, with which she was nominated for the Oscar for supporting actress for the first time when she gave life to Flo, the waitress companion with a good heart and language full of expletives of the protagonist, Ellen Burstyn.
From that moment on, he had almost 140 jobs in film and television. And mother and daughter sought to repeat and coincide in filming: as a child, Laura Dern appeared, uncredited, in a couple of Ladd’s films. Later, after wild heart y The price of ambition, They appeared together in the abortion comedy Ruth, a surprising girl (Citizen Ruth), by Alexander Payne, in which Dern starred and in which Ladd had a cameo. That same year, 1996, both worked—although Dern was the protagonist—in the television film The siege, and they repeated like mother and daughter in Daddy and Them, directed by and starring Billy Bob Thornton. Dern starred and Ladd had a supporting role in another made-for-TV movie about the healthcare system, Medical negligence. And the couple repeated with David Lynch in Inland Empire (2006), in which Dern played an actress who blends into her role and Ladd appeared in a cameo. And they still repeated maternal-filial roles in the series Enlightened, which starred Dern.
But Ladd was much more. He acted in all types of genres in films such as Hell’s Angels, The Pickpockets, Bachelor in Distress, The Carnival of Darkness, Kiss Me Before I Die, The Pickpockets, A Man of Today, The Case of the Black Widow, Help! It’s Christmas, Primary Colors, 28 days, Let’s live it’s two days, Burt Munro. A dream, a legend o Joy.
Additionally, in 1994 he directed, co-wrote and starred alongside Bruce Dern and Kelly Preston in the film for the Showtime channel Mrs. Munck. And she managed to be nominated three more times for the Emmys in series work for her appearances in 1993 in Dr. Quinn; and 1994 and Red hot grace and in 1997 in Touched by an angel.