Diane Ladd, three-time Oscar nominee, dies at 89

Diane Ladd, a three-time Academy Award nominee and actor of rare timing and intensity whose roles ranged from the brash waitress in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to the scheming parent in “Wild at Heart,” has died at 89.

Actress Diane Ladd passes away at 89

Diane’s death was announced Monday by daughter Laura Dern, who issued a statement saying her mother and occasional co-star had died at her home in Ojai, California, with Laura at her side. Laura, who called Diane her “amazing hero” and “profound gift of a mother,′ did not immediately cite a cause of death.

“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created,” Dern wrote. “We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”

A gifted comic and dramatic performer, Diane had a long career in television and on stage before breaking through as a film performer in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 release Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for her turn as the acerbic, straight-talking Flo, and went on to appears in dozens of movies over the following decades. Her many credits included Chinatown, Primary Colors and two other movies for which she received best supporting nods, Wild at Heart and Rambling Rose, both of which co-starred her daughter. She also continued to work in television, with appearances in ER, Touched by Angel and Alice, the spinoff from Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, among others.

A native of Laurel, Mississippi, Diane was born Rose Diane Ladner and was apparently destined to stand out. In her 2006 memoir, Spiraling Through the School of Life, she remembered being told by her great-grandmother that she would one day in “front of a screen” and would “command” her own audiences. Before Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, she had been working in television since the 1950s, when she was in her early 20s, with shows including Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and The Big Valley.

By the mid-1970s, she had lived out her fate well enough to tell The New York Times that no longer denied herself the right to call herself great.

“Now I don't say that,” she said. “I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.”

Diane was married three times, and divorced twice — from Bruce Dern and from William A. Shea, Jr. In 1976, around the time her second marriage ended, she told the Times that neither of her husbands knew “how to show love.” Diane's third marriage, to author-former PepsiCo executive Robert Charles Hunter, lasted from 1999 until his death in August.

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