Laura Dern honors mother Diane Ladd through IPF awareness campaign

Jurassic Park actress Laura Dern is honoring her late mother, actress Diane Ladd, with an awareness campaign for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Dern, 58, stopped by Today on Wednesday to discuss Beyond the Scars.

Ladd, who starred in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, had IPF and died in November.

"I promised her, in fact, she demanded from me that I keep the promise of continuing her passion to utilize her experience to help serve others with this campaign I get to talk to you about -- Beyond the Scars," Dern said on Today.

IPF, a form of interstitial lung disease, is easy to miss, and when Ladd was diagnosed with the condition, she rejected the doctor's recommendation that her loved ones "be gentle with her."

"So she would always say, 'They told me three months, and instead of dying, I did two movies, a TV show, wrote a book with you and did my autobiography, and wrote a screenplay," Dern said.

Dern added that she wished she'd had access to a campaign like Beyond the Scars to help her identify the warning signs and the resources available to people diagnosed with IPF.