Rambling Rose is the most part a flashback, related by grown-up Southerner Buddy Hillyer ( John Heard ). The bulk of the film takes place in 1935, when rambunctious backwoods housekeeper Rose ( Laura Dern ) virtually invades the Hillyer household. Daddy Hillyer ( Robert Duvall ), a bed-rock Southern gentleman, welcomes the congenitally amoral but basically goodhearted Rose into his house, carefully fending off her ill-timed romantic advances. But Rose can't help herself, and soon she is sexually initiating young Buddy ( Lukas Haas ). Disturbed at the number of lascivious young swains hanging around his yard, Daddy grudgingly agrees with a narrow-minded local doctor ( Kevin Conway ) that perhaps Rose should be "fixed" so she won't become pregnant. Based on the novel by screenwriter Calder Willingham , Rambling Rose was not the box-office breakthrough that many expected for director Martha Coolidge ; though it fizzled financially, the film did manage to secure Oscar nominations for both Dern and her real-life mother Diane Ladd . — Hal Erickson