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.
She had a minor but potent, mysterious part in Polanski’s Chinatown as Ida Sessions, the woman who has posed as Faye Dunaway’s character Evelyn as part of a sinister conspiracy. But more prominent was her role in the classic and time-honoured role as the brassy, heart-of-gold diner waitress in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore – playing a slightly different part in the TV spinoff – whose job is to deliver down-home banter and hard-won unimpressed wisdom with Ellen Burstyn’s Alice and to be the witness of the latter’s budding romance with Kris Kristofferson. In Bill Duke’s silver-years comedy The Cemetery Club from 1993, Ladd was reunited with Ellen Burstyn and Olympia Dukakis, to play one of three widowed women who are determined to get some enjoyment out of life.
But it was perhaps Ladd’s destiny to play more in an intergenerational context, portraying older characters and mothers and sisters, in various comic or forbidding forms. In Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow she was the sister of one of the murderer’s black-widow predations; in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation she was Chevy Chase’s mom; and in Mike Nichols’ Primary Colors she was the mother of John Travolta’s Clintonesque Governor Jack Stanton.
David Lynch tapped into the sharpness, the astringency and the darkness within or behind the all-American veneer that Ladd could present to the camera. In Wild at Heart (opposite Laura Dern), she got one of her three Oscar nominations in the very sensual role of Marietta, who conceives a sexually ambiguous resentment against her daughter’s association with the smouldering Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and tries different ways to sabotage their relationship and murder him. In Lynch’s far more complex and experimental Inland Empire, again of course with Dern, she plays the host of a TV celebrity gossip show which is very preoccupied with Dern’s actor character: again, Ladd is vivid, cartoony, but not satirical or grotesque; she is an effortlessly Lynchian character.
