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VOLUME 37 NUMBER 4 | WINTER 2019
Lady Ladd Moving in a straight line is a narrow way to live. Circling just brings you back to where you started. But spiraling — soaring, falling, twisting — is dynamic.
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iane Ladd is spiraling through life. As an accomplished actress, director, writer, activist, healer and concerned Ojai resident, she’s always swirling around a project or cause, full of momentum. “Science uses the spiral as a symbol of all energy,” she wrote in her 2006 self-help memoir, “Spiraling Through the School of Life: A Mental, Physical, and Spiritual Discovery.” “I believe that we’re all circling the tree of life as we evolve. What goes up has got to come down; what comes down needs to go back up. The latter is the real tricky part.” The times Ladd has lifted herself from a fall are among the most interesting parts of her helix of a history. Ladd is a native Southerner from Mississippi. With her warm, lilted accent and sassy attitude, she’s a natural storyteller, brimming with tales of her part-Cherokee psychic greatgrandmother; entertainment beginnings as a Copacabana girl; her hundreds of film and TV roles; daughter Laura Dern; first husband Bruce Dern and current (third) husband Robert Hunter; work and friendships with stars and directors
By Karen Lindell
from Peter Fonda to Martin Scorsese; and interest in alternative medicine, arts education, runaway production, environmental activism, and little-known Watergate-era figure Martha Mitchell. Although she’s probably most known as an actress, Ladd is a quintuple-threat artist who can act, sing, dance, write and direct. She has received three Oscar nominations for best supporting actress: as Flo in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974); Marietta Fortune in “Wild at Heart” (1990); and Mother in “Rambling Rose” (1991). Daughter Laura Dern received a best actress nomination for “Rambling Rose” — the first and only time a mother-daughter pair has been nominated for the same film. Ladd has also been nominated for three Emmy Awards (for guest actress in “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” “Grace Under Fire,” and “Touched by an Angel”), won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award, and Golden Globe. Like many aspiring actresses, Rose Diane Ladnier started out on small stages in her hometown. After graduating from high school at 16, she attended a finishing school in New Orleans and sang with a French Quarter band. She gave up a scholarship to study law at Louisiana State University in favor of show biz, when actor John Carradine saw her in a local theatrical production and asked her to join the national tour of “Tobacco Road.”
At age 17, she changed her name to Diane Ladd and moved to New York City to dance for the famed Copacabana in New York City — a notoriously difficult dancing gig to land. She made her stage debut in the off-Broadway version of “Orpheus Descending,” written by relative Tennessee Williams and starring her future husband, Bruce Dern. Ladd’s first big-screen role was in “The Wild Angels.” Numerous other film and TV credits over the years include “Chinatown,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” “Joy” (as grandmother to Jennifer Lawrence’s Joy), Stephen King’s “Kingdom Hospital,” “Primary Colors,” “The World’s Fastest Indian,” and “Alice” (the TV show). Most recently, Ladd starred from 2011-13 in HBO’s “Enchanted,” with daughter Dern; and since 2016 has played Nell O’Brien, the matriarch of a Maryland family, on the Hallmark Channel drama “Chesapeake Shores.” Ladd made her directing and writing debut with the 1995 film “Mrs. Munck,” which screened at international festivals and earned Ladd three director awards. Her career is full of highlights, but Ladd’s personal life has taken a darker turn at times. One of the deepest sorrows of Ladd’s life, and possibly her lowest spiral, was the death of Diane, her first daughter with Bruce Dern, to a swimming-pool accident in 1962 when the little girl was 18 months old.