01:00 AM EDT on Friday, June 9, 2006

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

Three-time Academy Award nominee Diane Ladd is spiraling through the school of life, as she says, and it will bring her to Newport tomorrow to receive the Claiborne Pell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Newport International Film Festival.

Spiraling Through the School of Life is also the title of Ladd's new book, a collection of entertaining snippets from her own life mixed with self-help advice on everything from health to happiness. On the phone from her home near Santa Barbara, Calif., Ladd is chatty and friendly. Ask her a question and she's off, sometimes on a subject that has little to do with the question asked, but which she feels passionate about.

She rambles on about the sad state of culture in the United States these days, which she describes as "caught up in such mediocrity," and talks at length about her attempts to get a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives to offer tax credits to filmmakers.

Although, Ladd says, there's the general feeling that actors are rich and liberal, in reality of the 120,000 actors in the Screen Actors Guild, "37,000 didn't make pocket change last year and 31,000 didn't make a dime." She ought to know. She's on the national board of SAG.

Speaking with a slight Southern accent, a product of her childhood years in Mississippi, she decries the annual loss of $200 billion in filmmaking money that goes to other countries, mainly Canada. "For the past four years I could not get a job in our country. I went everywhere, including Sri Lanka. I shot in Canada three times."

She mentions that when the studio and network behind Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital mini-series sought a $2 million tax credit from the state of California, once the movie capital of the world, they were rebuffed and so took their movie shoot to Vancouver, where their $38 million budget was spent.

A recipient of the 2006 Susan B. Anthony "Failure Is Impossible Award," given to her recently in a ceremony at the Rochester (N.Y.) International Film Festival, Ladd gives the impression that she fits the motto of that famous suffragette to a T. One of the reasons she's happy to be getting her award tomorrow at the Chanler House in Newport, she says, is that "I am honored that they have such a great film festival bringing in culture and taste.

"When I started there were 35 [Hollywood feature] movies being made at one time and you could go watch the great Bette Davis or Spencer Tracy and learn from them." Today, she says, few films are made in Hollywood "and there are so many mediocre films. It's an unhealthy attitude because the better films you make, the better people's consciousness is raised. That's why it's important to have these festivals, to bring this out."

The 73-year-old actress has been nominated for supporting actress Academy Awards for the 1974 film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, playing Flo, the down-to-earth waitress; she later appeared in the 1980-81 season of the TV series Alice, playing a different character. She also received supporting actress Oscar nominations for the 1990 film Wild at Heart and the 1991 film Rambling Rose. Her daughter, Laura Dern, was also nominated for the latter film, in the best actress category, the only time a mother and daughter were nominated for the same film. Rambling Rose will be screened at the Opera House at noon tomorrow, immediately following Ladd's book-signing session from 11 a.m. to noon in the theater's lobby.

Currently, she's readying a film biography of Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Richard Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell, which she says she has been working on for 25 years. She hopes to get it before the cameras later this year. "There's no time to waste because a major studio is trying to take my picture from me, trying to get to my major source." She says the script has been rewritten 13 times over the years, but has been given encouragement by Martin Scorsese, for whom she worked on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

There's also her book, which she says took four years to write. Like Ladd, it's friendly and chatty, brimming with power-of-positive-thinking advice that has led her to help heal many people over the years. "I don't advise. I only suggest," she says and is a member of the board of advisors for the National Foundation of Alternative Medicine.

"My advice is this," she writes in her book, "you have to let go, detox, cleanse out your body and circulate positive energy.

"We should all try simply loving ourselves again . . . Try to push away the negativity in your mind; give yourself a vacation from it. Do it for just one day and see how much better you feel physically."

mjanuson@projo.com / (401) 277-7276