Sharp, precise, and easily Lynchian: Diane Ladd had serious star power | film

DIan Ladd was part of Hollywood’s aristocracy of character actors who from the golden period of the American New Wave onward provided star quality to supporting roles. She brought an authentic, undiluted American film acting flavor to everything she was in, and ran her film and television careers with great success in parallel for decades, playing waitresses, neighbors, mothers, sirens and daughters, and ranging from comedy to drama.

Best known as the mother of screen actor Laura Dern and wife of Bruce Dern, she repeatedly worked with Laura in a wonderful mother-daughter partnership in which the closeness between the two women always shone through. You could compare her to Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, or Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher – although Diane Ladd and Laura Dern were much more trouble-free and without that kind of angst. They were nominated for an Academy Award together for their appearance together in Martha Coolidge’s 1991 depression drama Rambling Rose. They also both appeared in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Inland Empire, Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth, and Mike White’s HBO film Enlightened – in three of which they played mother and daughter. In Joel Hirschman’s 1992 comedy Catch Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Ladd acted alongside her mother, stage actress Mary Lanier.

She had a small but powerful and mysterious role in Polanski’s Chinatown as Ida Sessions, the woman who poses as Faye Dunaway’s character Evelyn as part of a sinister plot. But most notable was her turn in the time-honoured classic as the brassy waitress in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore — played in a slightly different role in the TV series — whose job is to offer homely banter and hard-earned unaffected wisdom to Ellen Burstyn’s Alice, and to bear witness to the latter’s budding romance with Kris Kristofferson. In Bill Duke’s 1993 comedy The Cemetery Club, Ladd was reunited with Ellen Burstyn and Olympia Dukakis, playing one of three widowed women determined to get some fun out of life.

But perhaps Ladd’s destiny was to play more in an intergenerational context, portraying older characters, mothers and sisters, in various comedic or taboo forms. In Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow, she was the sister of one of the assassins who preyed on Black Widow; On National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation she was Chevy Chase’s mother; And in Mike Nichols’ Primary Colors was John Travolta’s mother, Clintonsky Governor Jack Stanton.

David Lynch exploited the intensity, power, and darkness within or behind the all-American veneer that Ladd could bring to the camera. In Wild at Heart (opposite Laura Dern), she received one of her three Oscar nominations in the highly sensual role of Marita, who feels ambiguous sexual resentment against her daughter’s attachment to the flaming sailor (Nicolas Cage) and tries various ways to sabotage their relationship and kill him. In Lynch’s more complex and experimental Inland Empire, again of course with Dern, she plays the host of a celebrity gossip TV show who’s too preoccupied with Dern’s character actor: again, Ladd is lively, cartoonish, but not sarcastic or grotesque; It’s effortlessly Lynchian.