At 50, actress Diane Ladd still has the honeyed drawl of her Southern girlhood. But she's worked hard to overcome her roots.
"Southern women are supposed to be the greatest wives - next to the Japanese; we were raised to be slaves," says Ladd during a break in a whirlwind trip to Manhattan to promote her new film, "The Cemetery Club."Ladd swivels around in her chair and pauses dramatically for emphasis.
"They've got to be the best cook in the kitchen, a lady in the parlor and a whore in the bedroom. I believed that totally. I've come a long way."
It is not yet noon and Ladd already has done the "Today" show, taped an hour with Joan Rivers and called her mom in California. ("I'm just checkin' on you, Mother," she croons into the phone. "I love you!")
But in the quiet of a hotel room, Ladd summons the kind of energy usually associated with television evangelists.
Don't even get her STARTED on the subject of being a woman in Hollywood, even though she has star billing with Ellen Burstyn and Olympia Dukakis in a movie centered on older women.
"Gawd, they dissect you like you were a piece of hair or a hunk of bone," says Ladd, her voice rising. "They want to know how big your breasts are. . . . Age is a big thing, I've lost jobs because they think I'm either too old for a part or too young."
At the moment, Ladd is up for a part that's "perfect" for her.
"The character is 44 years old," she says. "But the studio is already thinking of making her 30 and casting Jodie Foster or Michelle Pfeiffer."
Ladd rolls her eyes heavenward and pushes back the cascade of black curls that frame her face. She's wearing a flowing black pantsuit with a floral jacket. A cane rests nearby. She needs it for a few weeks after a minor accident on the set of a new film she's making in which she plays Patrick Swayze's mother.
Swayze, by the way, is "only eight years my junior."
But don't mistake Ladd's complaints for bitterness. She's like the Southern eccentrics who people the novels of Flannery O'Connor or William Faulkner. (Tennessee Williams, Ladd points out, was her second cousin.)
She likes to hold forth and tell stories. After 34 years in show business, she takes few prisoners.
Even her ex-husband, Bruce Dern, whom she met at age 16 in an off-Broadway production of Williams' "Orpheus Descending," is not immune from her sitcom-like punchlines.
"He was playing Orpheus and, let me put it this way, darlin' - he descended," says Ladd, cackling in delight.
Show business may be tough on women but Ladd has made it work since she was a teenager. After marrying and later divorcing Dern, the father of her actress daughter, Laura, she went on to win three Academy Award nominations, a British film award and a Golden Globe.
She made her film debut as a biker chick in 1966's "Wild Angels." After years of such roles as Flo in Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," she came full circle in 1990 when she played Marietta in David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" opposite her daughter and Nicolas Cage.
"You can cry or you can laugh," says Ladd of the ups and downs of her career. "It's great for learning detachment."
Detachment is one of what Ladd calls her three "Divine D's." The others are "discretion and discernment." Ladd moved to the New Age mecca of Sedona, Ariz., a few years ago to escape Los Angeles. Her mellifluous Mississippi speech is peppered with jarring references to holistic medical miracles and phrases like "birthing a role."
But beneath the entertaining stories and earnest aphorisms is a strong spine. Ladd has survived more than career disappointments; her first child, a daughter, died in an accident when she was 2. Though she eventually had Laura, after being told she couldn't have any more children, her marriage to Dern collapsed.
"We were starving actors, kids," says Ladd. "A tragedy like that can tear you asunder and it did with us. Even though Laura came along."
Her face lights up whenever she mentions her daughter. The two were nominated for Oscars last year for their mother-daughter roles in "Ramblin' Rose."
Though she remarried briefly after her nine-year marriage to Dern and recently ended a five-year relationship, she seems to retain a strong feeling for Dern.
She's busy with at least three upcoming films. She plans to direct as well as act in the upcoming, "Mrs. Munck." Ladd also wrote the script after optioning the novel.
"You have to go out there and make it happen," says Ladd. "I'm like the little red hen that could."
Guess who Ladd hired to co-star in "Mrs. Munck"? None other than Bruce Dern. He's now remarried and Ladd said they are strictly friends.
"You know what I tell everyone," Ladd says, grinning wickedly. "If you want revenge, direct your ex-husband."