Diane Ladd, three-time Academy Award nominee and star of Wild at Heart, has died at the age of 89.
Her daughter, actress Laura Dern, confirmed her death on Monday.
“My amazing hero and my profound gift of mother, Diane Ladd, walked by my side this morning,” Dern said in a statement, adding that her final moments were spent at home in California.
Dern, who co-starred with her mother in the 1991 film “Wandering Rose,” did not disclose Ladd's cause of death.
“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and gentle spirit that seemingly only dreams could create,” Dern said. “We're lucky to have her.”
Ladd's career on stage and screen spanned decades. Her big break in film came with her role as a waitress in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore in 1974, which earned her an Oscar nomination.
Since then, she's starred in dozens of films, including most recently in 2022, when she played a grandmother in the coming-of-age film Gigi and Nate, and has also frequently appeared in television shows.
She was married to actor Bruce Dern from 1960 to 1969. The couple had two children, Oscar winner Laura Dern and a girl, Diane Elizabeth Dern, who died in an accident in 1962 when she was 18 months old.
“She fell into the pool. She hit her head and lost consciousness. And everything happened instantly. And she died and you can never get over it,” Ladd told US BBC affiliate CBS News in 2023.
Ladd had a close relationship with Laura, her second child, and they shared the screen many times. When Dern starred in David Lynch's Wild at Heart and then HBO's Enlightened, Ladd played her mother both times.
They were also the first mother-daughter pair to be nominated for an Academy Award for the same film, “Wandering Rose.” Neither of them won that year.
In 2023, they wrote a book together called “Honey, Baby, Mine: Mother and Daughter Talk About Life, Death, Love.”
Ladd told CBS that she initially discouraged Dern from becoming an actress.
“She was only about 11 years old and I said, ‘Don’t be an actress. Be a doctor, be a lawyer,” she said. “Nobody cares if you gain weight or your chin when you cry if you're a doctor. They just want you to be the best you can be. But an actress? They care, they care, they care, they care, they care.”
Dern says she resisted. “No. That’s all I knew,” she said.
