Obituary: Diane Ladd, actor

On the first day of filming Wild at Heart, David Lynch’s 1990 black comedy, Laura Dern had to walk downstairs and be confronted by Diane Ladd, who played a malevolent mother who hires a hitman to kill her daughter’s boyfriend.

“Don’t you dare talk to that boy again!” Ladd shouted, pointing her finger. Dern suddenly started laughing, followed by Ladd and then the entire crew. “I’ve seen that finger for 23 years,” Dern later said. “She and I had been there before.” Ladd was also her mother in real life.

If Ladd, who had a 65-year career in film and TV, was born to play any role it was that of her daughter’s screen mother. She also did it in White Lightning, Citizen Ruth, Daddy and Them and the 2011 series Enlightened. They appeared together several other times, notably in the 1991 film Rambling Rose, in which Ladd’s Mrs Hillyer is a mother figure to Dern’s promiscuous Rose. It earned them both an Academy Award nomination, the first time a mother and daughter had been so recognised for the same film.

That was Ladd’s third Oscar nomination, after Wild at Heart and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a 1974 romantic comedy in which she played a sharp-tongued waitress. Dern had a small part in that film, too: as a child eating an ice cream.

A couple of years later, Ladd tried to talk her daughter out of entering her profession. “Be a doctor,” she recalled telling the 11-year-old. “Nobody cares if you put on weight or your chin points when you cry if you’re a docto. They just want you to be the best you can be. But an actress? They care, care, care, care, care.”

Dern ignored her and went on to acting success: in 1993, when Ladd starred in the ludicrous horror film Carnosaur as a scientist who gives birth to a Tyrannosaurus rex, Dern co-starred in the slightly more credible, and certainly more profitable, Jurassic Park.

Born Rose Diane Ladner in Mississippi, the only child of a vet, Ladd wanted to act from the age of six. After high school, she moved to New Orleans, where she sang in a Dixie jazz band and was spotted by the actor John Carradine, who cast her in a touring production of Jack Kirkland’s Tobacco Road.

Aged 17, she changed her name and went to New York, where she danced at the Copacabana before making her off-Broadway debut in 1959 in Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams, a distant cousin. In the cast was Bruce Dern, who she married the next year. They moved into a house that was once owned by Greta Garbo and appeared together in Roger Corman’s 1966 biker film The Wild Angels. In 1968, Ladd made her Broadway debut in Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, which was directed by Sidney Poitier but closed after seven performances.

Tragically, their first daughter, Diane, drowned aged 18 months when left in the care of a teenage maid. Laura was born in 1967; her parents divorced two years later. Ladd was quick to remarry, to the businessman William Shea.

She appeared in a daytime soap opera, The Secret Storm, and Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown as a prostitute who pretends to be a society matron. The same year, she starred as Flo in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, winning a Bafta. The film led to a sitcom, Alice, that ran for nine series, and although Ladd’s character was originally taken by Polly Holliday, she joined the cast in a similar role for a year in 1980 on a reported salary of $400,000, 80 times what she claimed to have made from the film.

She described Scorsese as one of only a handful of great directors she knew, categorising greatness as listening to her ideas. Scorsese called her “a great improvisational actor”. The scene in which she completely covers her face in lipstick in Wild at Heart was her idea. She made her directing debut in 1995 with the film Mrs Munck, casting Bruce Dern as the lead.

Ladd married for a third time in 1999 to Robert Hunter, a chief executive of PepsiCo, who died this year. In 2018, she was given six months to live after developing pulmonary fibrosis that she believed was linked to pesticides. As part of her rehabilitation, she took daily walks with her daughter, who taped their conversations about life. From this, a joint memoir emerged, called Honey, Baby, Mine.

“Most parents lie to their kids because they want to be loved,” Ladd said. “And the kids lie to their parents because they want to be loved. But because we thought I was dying, we opened our big mouths and told everything.”

The book included painful reflections on the death of Diane, in which Dern admits that she felt a responsibility as “the replacement child”. It , but it also had humour, such as when Ladd recalled dusting Norman Mailer’s mantelpiece before discovering she had got rid of a lot of cocaine.

Bruce Dern this week described Ladd as “a tremendous actress” and “a hidden treasure until she ran into David Lynch”. He praised her as “a great teammate to fellow actors … but most importantly, a wonderful mother to our daughter.” On and off screen.

Diane Ladd, actor, was born on 29 November 1935, and died on 3 November 2025, aged 89

Photograph by CBS via Getty Images