Diane Ladd, a talented actress from Mississippi known for playing very different kinds of characters during her long career, has died at the age of 89 in Ojai, California. Her daughter, actress Laura Dern, confirmed her death but did not share the cause.
Ladd acted in movies for more than 60 years. Though she never won an Oscar, she was nominated three times for her powerful performances.
She played:
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Flo, a tough but kind Southern waitress, in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974).
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Marietta Fortune, a dangerous former beauty queen, in Wild at Heart (1990).
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A gentle Mississippi housewife who stands up for her maid, in Rambling Rose (1991).
That last film made history — it was the first time a real mother and daughter (Ladd and Laura Dern) were both nominated for Oscars for the same movie.
The film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore later inspired the TV show Alice. When one of the stars left in 1980, Ladd joined the cast as another quick-witted Southern waitress named Belle Dupree.
Over the years, Ladd appeared in many well-known films, including:
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Chinatown (1974)
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Ghosts of Mississippi (1996)
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Primary Colors (1998)
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Joy (2015)
She was admired for bringing warmth, strength, and personality to every role she played.
Diane Ladd was born Rose Diane Ladner on November 29, 1935, in Meridian, Mississippi. She was the only child of Preston Paul Ladner, a country veterinarian, and Mary Bernadette Anderson Ladner Garey. Ladd sometimes said she was born in a small town called Rilberton, Mississippi, which she claimed was later destroyed by a hurricane.
After finishing high school, she moved to New Orleans. Her parents agreed to let her go only if she joined a finishing school there. But her true dream was to work in theater. In 1953, while she was performing in a play at the Gallery Circle Theater in the French Quarter, a colleague of actor John Carradine noticed her and offered her a role as the young bride, Pearl, in the touring play Tobacco Road, which starred Carradine himself.
After that, Ms. Ladd moved alone to New York City. She did many jobs — she worked as a model, gave out product samples at Bloomingdale’s, and danced as a chorus girl for three months at the Copacabana nightclub. In the late 1950s, she started acting on television, appearing as a guest on shows like The Walter Winchell File and The Naked City.
In 1959, she acted Off Broadway for the first time in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending. The New York Times praised her as “a bright, blonde young lady” who did a great job playing Carol Cutrere, a nervous and wild woman once known as a kind reformer.
The review also mentioned that Ms. Ladd was related to Tennessee Williams — both were descendants of the poet Sidney Lanier.
During that play, Ms. Ladd met her first husband, Bruce Dern.
After that came movies. Her first credited film role was in Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966), a motorcycle drama featuring Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern.
In a 2023 New York Times interview with her daughter, actress Laura Dern, Ms. Ladd said, “I didn’t want you to go into acting.” Still, she played Laura’s mother on screen at least five times, most recently in HBO’s Enlightened (2011–13), a short-lived but well-liked series about a woman deeply changed by a New Age rehab program.
Her last movie was The Last Full Measure, where she played the widow of a Vietnam War Air Force veteran. She also acted in the Hallmark Channel series Chesapeake Shores (2016–17).
Theater was her true passion. She appeared on Broadway twice — in Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights (1968), directed by Sidney Poitier, which ran for only seven shows, and in A Texas Trilogy: Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander (1976), which closed after a month but won her a Drama Desk Award for Best Actress.
Ms. Ladd was known for speaking honestly about problems in the entertainment industry. She often criticized the greed of Hollywood studios and Broadway producers, the move of American films to Canada, and the poor treatment of actors. In 1976, she told The New York Times, “People treat actors worse than they treat children.”
Even in her 2006 book Spiraling Through the School of Life, she wrote sharply, saying, “Some folks are so corrupt that hell wouldn’t even have them.”
“Spiraling” was part memoir, part self-help book. It focused on spirituality, healing, past lives, forgiveness, and second chances. Ms. Ladd had unusual beliefs and claimed that the ghost of Martha Mitchell—the outspoken wife of former attorney general and Watergate figure John N. Mitchell—had appeared to her. After that, Ms. Ladd spent many years trying to get support for a movie about Ms. Mitchell’s life.
She also wrote a short story collection called “A Bad Afternoon for a Piece of Cake” in 2016. She directed one film, the 1996 revenge drama “Mrs. Munck,” in which she also acted alongside Shelley Winters, Kelly Preston, and Jeff Dern.
Ms. Ladd and Jeff Dern were married from 1960 to 1969 and had two daughters. Their first child, Diane Elizabeth Dern, died in a swimming accident at 18 months, five years before Laura Dern was born. Ms. Ladd’s second marriage, to Wall Street financier William A. Shea Jr., also ended in divorce. In 1999, she married Robert Charles Hunter, a former CEO of PepsiCo Food Systems, whom she met at a spiritual retreat in Arizona. He passed away in July.
In addition to Laura Dern, Ms. Ladd is survived by two grandchildren.
At a 2016 book signing, she was asked for advice on succeeding in show business. “Nothing’s going to be handed to you,” she said. Even in her 80s, she showed no signs of slowing down: “You have to fight like a dirty rotten dog.”
Published: 4th November 2025
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