Los Angeles, Nov 4 (UNI) Three-time Academy Award nominee and acclaimed actress Diane Ladd, best known for her memorable role in “Wild of Heart”, has passed away at the age of 89.
Her daughter, Laura Dern, confirmed the news 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, reports BBC.
“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 illustrious career spanned over six decades across film, television and theatre. She earned her first Oscar nomination in 1974 for portraying the spirited waitress Flo in Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”, a role that cemented her as one of Hollywood’s most versatile character actors.
She went on to star in numerous films and television shows, including her 2022 performance in “Gigi & Nate”, where she portrayed a loving grandmother.
Born in Mississippi, Ladd married actor Bruce Dern in 1960. 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. UNI NST SSP
