It’s been reported that actress Diane Ladd has passed away at the age of 89, per an announcement from her daughter, Laura Dern. The three-time Academy Award nominee famously starred in acclaimed films such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Chinatown and Wild at Heart.
While not her most famous contribution to the film world, there’s one performance of Ladd’s that a huge number of people watch every single holiday season without fail. In 1989, Ladd played Clark Griswold’s mother Nora in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation – but she wasn’t exactly thrilled about getting the part.
Back in 2020, Ladd told Rolling Stone that working on Christmas Vacation has made her “more money” than any other movie or TV gig. “Every year around this time, I get my own bonus thanks to Christmas Vacation,” she revealed.
“This movie is kind of a turning point in my life. I went there with a British Academy Award and an Oscar nomination under my belt, but Hollywood was very hard on women,” Ladd explained. “When I did Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, I thought it’d change everything for women – a lot of us did. But it didn’t, and I was spending a lot of time in Florida. People would yell at me, ‘What are you doing running away from Hollywood?’ I came back to Hollywood and the first (audition) I got was for Christmas Vacation.”
Not only was the star asked to audition for a relatively thankless older mom role, she was only in her fifties at the time, barely older than her onscreen son Chevy Chase. “Meanwhile, here I am going to audition to play Chevy’s momma, and I’m one year older than him!” Ladd said. “That’s if he was born in 1943, because IMDb lies about everything. They never get it right!”
To be clear, Ladd was reportedly born in 1935, and Chase in ‘43. Still, an eight year-gap is clearly not enough for Ladd to have been his mother. As further evidence of how Hollywood fails women over 40 specifically, Clark’s father was played by John Randolph, who was born in 1915.
“When I got the call that I had the part, I started to cry. I said, ‘Oh my god, my career is over!’” Ladd admitted. “But I laughed myself for the bank for 16 weeks. That part paid money.”
Ladd made the most of her minor role, even sourcing her own costume and improvising moments that gave her relationship with Chase’s character a real sense of history. “Shelly Winters loaned me her dead mother’s dress to wear,” Ladd recalled. “I got some Oxfords and a pair of glasses at the Salvation Army, and I put baby powder in my hair. Here I am looking like an old dog and I thought that if I’m ever up for a sexy part again, I’d be dead. But I marched right over to Chevy and I grabbed his face, pulled open his mouth and played a game: ‘Knock-knock, who’s there?’ That was improvised and something like it wound up in the movie.”
At least this wasn’t the worst experience that someone has had working on a Chevy Chase project.
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