The role Diane Ladd called the hardest of her career: “I would do a bit of method acting”
Diane Ladd, who sadly passed this week at 89, was an actor who perhaps never got or sought the kind of limelight her famous ex-husband Bruce Dern or daughter Laura Dern got during her long career, but she did appear in a lot of very important movies, earning major acclaim in the process.
Ladd was a three-time Oscar-nominated actor who worked throughout the 1960s but started to pick up more prominent roles the following decade, especially in 1974 when she played Ida Sessions in Jack Nicholson’s multi-award-winning noir Chinatown, and the same year made Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
That movie was an early Martin Scorsese-directed drama about a woman who loses her husband in a car accident and sets off on a road trip with her son in search of a new life. Ladd was nominated for a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ Oscar for her work on the movie, which proved a huge success with critics and audiences alike, serving as a breakout part for the 29-year-old.
In fact, it proved so successful that it was spun off into a long-running TV series titled Alice, and Ladd appeared in that too, winning a Golden Globe for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in 1980. Over the next couple of decades, she didn’t work prolifically but was consistently award-nominated when she did make films, including Wild at Heart in 1990 with her daughter Laura, and again the following year with the drama Rambling Rose, which Laura also starred in.
In 2015, she took on a dual role in the Jennifer Lawrence movie Joy, a semi-biographical comedy from Silver Linings Playbook director David O Russell, who reunited Lawrence with Robert De Niro for the vehicle. Ladd served as a narrator on the film as well as the titular character’s grandmother, and noted it was the hardest work she had done in her 50-year career, mainly because she had also started to make another film around the same time.
She said, “I went off and created a whole new character, so when I came back, David was quite incredible in guiding me. He helped me lower my voice three octaves so I would sound older and give off more wisdom and age. To prepare myself, I would do a bit of method acting, or more specifically, method narration. I would sit in meditation and put myself in a state of unconditional love.”
In the end, Joy was a moderate success, earning mixed reviews, but it did earn a ‘Best Actress’ Golden Globe for Jennifer Lawrence, whose experience making the movie was marred by tabloid speculation about on-set issues with the director, which she eventually had to put out a public statement to deny.
Ladd went on to make two movies the following year, Sophie and the Rising Sun and the ‘Government attacks the people’ action movie Amerigeddon, directed by Chuck Norris‘ son; she made her final film appearances in 2022 at the great age of 86.
This week, her former husband Dern paid tribute to her with a nod to her work in the ‘90s, writing, “Diane was a tremendous actress and I feel like a bit of a ‘hidden treasure’ until she ran into David Lynch. When he cast her as Laura‘s mom in Wild at Heart, it felt like the world then really understood her brilliance.”
