By Jordan Grim • November 04, 2025 • 06:05 AM (PDT)
By Jordan Grim • November 04, 2025 • 06:05 AM (PDT)
In a hugely successful TV and film career, she played waitresses, neighbors, mothers, and daughters, spanning everything from comedy to drama and David Lynch films, always with compelling authenticity.
Oscar-nominated star Diane Ladd, who starred in ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’, has died at the age of 89.
Diane Ladd was part of that elite class of Hollywood character actors who brought star quality to supporting roles from the golden period of the American New Wave onwards. She brought a genuine, unadulterated American screen-acting flavor to every film she was in, and forged a hugely successful career in both film and television for decades, playing waitresses, neighbors, mothers, sirens, and daughters, and doing everything from comedy to drama.
She was famously the mother of screen actor Laura Dern and the wife of Bruce Dern, and she worked repeatedly with Laura in a wonderful mother-daughter partnership, in which the closeness between the two women was always evident. You could 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 both nominated for Oscars for working together in Martha Coolidge’s 1991 depression-era drama ‘Rambling Rose’. And they also appeared together in David Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart’ and ‘Inland Empire’, Alexander Payne’s ‘Citizen Ruth’, and Mike White’s HBO drama ‘Enlightened’ – and in three of these, of course, they played mother and daughter. In Joel Hershman’s 1992 comedy ‘Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me,’ Ladd worked alongside her mother, stage actress Mary Lanier.
She had a small but memorable, mysterious role as Ida Sessions in Polanski’s ‘Chinatown,’ the woman who impersonated Faye Dunaway’s character, Evelyn, as part of a dangerous conspiracy. But her classic and enduring role was as the brassy, gold-hearted diner waitress in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’—a slightly different character in the TV spinoff—whose job was to trade domestic banter and hard-won wisdom with Ellen Burstyn’s Alice and witness the latter’s burgeoning romance with Kris Kristofferson. In Bill Duke’s 1993 comedy film ‘The Cemetery Club,’ Ladd appeared again with Ellen Burstyn and Olympia Dukakis, playing one of three widowed women who want to enjoy life.
But perhaps Ladd was destined to play more roles in an intergenerational context, portraying older characters, mothers, and sisters in various comic or sinister guises. In Bob Rafelson’s ‘Black Widow,’ she was the sister of one of a murderer’s black-widow victims; in National Lampoon’s ‘Christmas Vacation,’ she was Chevy Chase’s mother; and in Mike Nichols’ ‘Primary Colors,’ she was the mother of John Travolta’s Clinton-esque Governor Jack Stanton.
David Lynch recognized the intensity, bitterness, and darkness that Ladd could bring to the screen. In ‘Wild at Heart’ (with Laura Dern), she received one of her three Oscar nominations for the very sensual role of Marietta, who is sexually disturbed by her daughter’s smoldering affair with a sailor (Nicolas Cage) and tries various ways to sabotage their relationship and even kill him. In Lynch’s far more complex and experimental film ‘Inland Empire’, again with Dern, she plays the host of a TV celebrity gossip show who takes a keen interest in Dern’s actress character: again, Ladd is vivacious and cartoonish, but not satirical or bizarre; she is effortlessly a Lynchian character.