When Diane Ladd died on November 3, 2025, at the age of 89, due to chronic hypoxic respiratory failure, Hollywood lost one of its longest-running stars; the Academy Award- nominated actress had a career than ran for over six decades. On November 30, 2025 — which would have been Ladd’s 90th birthday — TCM mounts a tribute to the star, airing two of her most beloved films.

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First up, at 8pm EST, is Martin Scorsese‘s 1974 romantic comedy Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in which Ladd plays Flo, a foulmouthed waitress at the diner where widowed Alice (Ellen Burstyn) works. The role garnered Ladd an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, though Burstyn is the one who ended up taking home a statuette for her portrayal of a single woman with a young son who becomes involved with a younger man (Kris Kristofferson, who passed away a little over a year ago).

Ladd became the only actor from the film to appear regularly on Alice, the 1976 spinoff TV series, though she didn’t reprise her movie role (that went to Polly Holliday). Rather, Ladd joined the cast in 1980 as waitress Belle Dupree, added after Holliday left the show for her own spinoff. The performance landed Ladd a Golden Globe — the only major acting accolade she ever took home, despite having three Academy Award nominations, as well as three Emmy nominations. However, in spite of the win, Ladd quit the show in 1981, telling The Phoenix in a February 1981 interview that “The character of Belle just hasn’t developed the way we hoped it would in the beginning. And so we have mutually and amicably decided that we should not continue.”

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Then, at 10pm EST, catch the 1991 mother-daughter feature Rambling Rose, starring Ladd’s daughter Laura Dern as a flamboyant and dramatic twentysomething orphan who comes to work for a wealthy family during the Depression. Ladd played the matriarch, who continually defended Rose’s wild ways, despite the disapproval of her husband, played by Robert Duvall.

The film earned Dern and Ladd Academy Award nominations — marking the first time a mother-daughter duo was nominated in the same year for the same film. Dern and Ladd appeared in many films together — young Dern makes a cameo in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and the pair played a mother and daughter in the 1990 David Lynch film Wild at Heart, the 2001 comedy Daddy & Them, and the HBO series Enlightened, among other projects.

In a 2023 joint interview in The New York Times, Ladd said of Dern, “If the universe gives a child a gift, you have to encourage it. I knew you had the gift when I went to a screening of Foxes. You didn’t have much to do, but my heart just gasped.”