'Wild at Heart' actress Diane Ladd dies at 89

American actress Diane Ladd, a triple Academy Award nominee for her supporting roles in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," "Wild at Heart" and "Rambling Rose," has died at the age of 89, her daughter said on Monday.

Ladd died at her home in California, said Laura Dern, Ladd's daughter with ex-husband Bruce Dern. Both Bruce and Laura are also actors.

Ladd was known for playing strong, intelligent and complex women in roles including a sassy waitress, a domineering, mentally ill mother and an eccentric 1930s housewife during a seven-decade career that began on stage in the 1950s.

The tall blonde starred in films such as "White Lightning" (1973), David Lynch's 1990 crime drama "Wild at Heart" (1990), the black comedy "Citizen Ruth" (1996), "Daddy and Them" (2001) and HBO's "Enlightened" (2011), with her daughter. The two often played mother and daughter.

Ladd and Dern were both nominated for an Academy Award for the 1991 drama "Rambling Rose." They were the first, and only, mother-daughter duo to receive Oscar nominations for the same film in the same year.

"She is just the greatest actress, ever. You don't even use the word brave because she just shows up like that in life. She doesn't care what anybody thinks," Dern said of her mother.

"She leads with a boundarylessness," she added in a 2019 interview with "Inside the Actors Studio."

The mother-daughter duo's talents extended beyond acting.

In 2023, they published a joint memoir, "Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love." The book was based on their conversations during daily walks together after Ladd was diagnosed with a lung disease and given only months to live. Her doctor recommended the walks to strengthen her lungs.

"The more we talked and the deeper and more complicated of subjects we shared, my mother got better and better and better," Dern said in an interview with National Public Radio in 2023. "It's been a great gift."

Southern Belle

Diane Ladd was born Rose Diane Lanier on November 29, 1935, in the small town of Meridian, Mississippi. She was the only child of a country veterinarian and an actress and housewife.

From a young age, the precocious child who finished school at 16 knew she wanted to act.

"Somehow in my soul, even as a child, I felt I was going to be an actress," Ladd said with a southern lilt in a 2022 talk at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

She was offered a college scholarship but instead opted to try her luck in New York where she worked as a model and Copacabana dancer. She joined the Actor's Studio, which is known for method acting.

Ladd made her New York stage debut in 1952 in the off-Broadway production of "Orpheus Descending" by Tennessee Williams, who was her third cousin. It was also where she met her first husband, Bruce Dern.

The actress worked in classic 1960s TV dramas such as "Perry Mason," "77 Sunset Strip" and "The Fugitive" before being cast in Roger Corman's 1966 motorcycle saga "The Wild Angels" with her husband Dern, Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra.

Two years later, Ladd made her Broadway debut in "Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights."

She had more than 120 TV and film credits, including Roman Polansky's "Chinatown" (1974) and David O. Russell's 2015 comedy/drama "Joy," and she earned three Emmy nominations in the 1990s for guest roles in "Touched by an Angel," "Grace Under Fire" and "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman."

Ladd also wrote short stories and screenplays, and directed and starred in the 1995 comedy "Mrs. Munck" with Bruce Dern.

Ladd, Dern and their daughter Laura were each awarded side-by-side stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in a triple ceremony in 2010.

"Diane is a Renaissance woman," film producer Barbara Boyle said during the ceremony. "She has uncanny perception and insight into people that informs her acting and directing."

In her 2006 memoir "Spiraling Through the School of Life," Ladd wrote about the high and low points of her life, including the death of her first daughter in a tragic accident in 1962 when she was a toddler.

Deeply spiritual, Ladd was a proponent of complementary and alternative medicine. After being told she would never be able to have another child, her second daughter, Laura, was born five years later.

Ladd was married three times and continued to work into her 80s.

"Art is just a mirror, and that's why we go see movies: to learn who we are," she told the New York Times in 2023.