Diane Ladd was part of a Hollywood aristocracy of character actors who from the golden period of the American New Wave onwards lent star quality to supporting roles. She brought an authentic, undiluted American screen-acting flavour to everything she was in, and ran hugely successful movie and TV careers in parallel for decades, playing waitresses, neighbours, moms, sirens and daughters, and ranging from comedy to drama.
She was famously the mother of screen actor Laura Dern and wife of Bruce Dern, and repeatedly acted with Laura in a remarkable mother-daughter partnership in which the two women’s closeness always shone through. You might compare it to Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, or Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher — although Diane Ladd and Laura Dern were far more trouble-free and without that kind of angst. They were Oscar-nominated together for their joint appearance in Martha Coolidge’s Depression drama Rambling Rose from 1991. And they also both appeared in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Inland Empire, Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth, and in Mike White’s HBO drama Enlightened – and in three of these they played, naturally, a mother and daughter. In Joel Hershman’s 1992 comedy Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Ladd acted alongside her own mother, the stage actor Mary Lanier.
