Ladd's other film appearances include Chinatown (1974), National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Primary Colors (1998), 28 Days (2000), and Joy (2015).

[10][11] Ladd and Laura Dern co-starred in the films Wild at Heart, Rambling Rose, Citizen Ruth and Inland Empire, and in the HBO series Enlightened.

[12] In 2018, Ladd was misdiagnosed with pneumonia and given six months to a year to live after she inhaled "poison spray" from the farms neighboring her home, constricting her esophagus.

Her subsequent film appearances include Black Widow (1987), National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Primary Colors (1998), 28 Days (2000), and Joy (2015).

She appeared in the independent screwball comedy Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me in 1992, where she played a flirty, aging Southern belle alongside her real mother, actress Mary Lanier.

In April 2006, Ladd released her first book, Spiraling Through The School of Life: A Mental, Physical, and Spiritual Discovery.

The dual mother and daughter nominations for Ladd and Dern in Rambling Rose marked the first time in Academy Awards history that such an event had occurred.

In 1976, she starred in A Texas Trilogy: Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, for which she received a Drama Desk Award nomination.