Martin Scorsese has led the tributes to Diane Ladd after the three-time Academy Award nominee’s death, aged 89.
Ladd, who was directed by Scorsese when she played the brash waitress Flo in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, also featured in Wild At Heart and Rambling Rose.
Ladd’s death was announced on Monday by her daughter Laura Dern, who said in a statement her mother and occasional co-star had died at her home in Ojai, California, with Dern at her side.
Scorsese said: “I have so many good memories of making Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and my experiences with Diane are among the best.
“I felt that it was so important for the picture to let the actors run with their characters, and what an experience it was to watch Diane take the character of Flo and make something so vivid and funny and alive.
“Diane was a great improvisational actor — a matter of technique and discipline, but most of all instinct and artistry – and she had it all.
“You can really feel it in the sunbathing scene with her and Ellen (Burstyn), one of the best scenes in the picture.
“I loved my time working with Diane, a truly remarkable artist, and I wish we could have worked together again.”
Dern, who called Ladd her “amazing hero” and “profound gift of a mother”, did not cite a cause of death.
“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created,” Dern wrote.
“We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”
Ladd had already enjoyed an extensive television and stage career when she was handed her film breakthrough in Scorsese’s 1974 release Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which earned her the first of her Oscar nominations for supporting actor.
She was shortlisted for the same category for her roles in Wild At Heart and Rambling Rose.
The playwright Tennessee Williams was a second cousin of Ladd’s and her first husband Bruce Dern, Laura’s father, was also an Academy Award nominee.
Ladd and Laura Dern achieved the rare feat of mother-and-daughter nominees for their work in Rambling Rose and they were memorably paired in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart, a personal favourite of Ladd’s and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.
A native of Laurel, Mississippi, Ladd was born Rose Diane Ladner and was apparently destined to stand out.
In her 2006 memoir, Spiraling Through The School Of Life, she remembered being told by her great-grandmother that she would one day be in “front of a screen” and would “command” her own audiences.
Before Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, she had been working in television since the 1950s, when she was in her early 20s, with shows including Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and The Big Valley.
By the mid-1970s, she told The New York Times she no longer denied herself the right to call herself great.
“Now I don’t say that,” she said. “I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.”
Ladd’s third marriage, to author-former PepsiCo executive Robert Charles Hunter, lasted from 1999 until his death in August.
