One of Hollywood’s worst weeks in years just got worse. David Lynch, the four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man and others who also created the ABC drama series Twin Peaks, has died. He was 78.
His family posted the news on social media but did not provide a date of death.
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Lynch had been diagnosed with emphysema. Sources told Deadline that he was forced to relocate from his house due to the Sunset Fire and then took a turn for the worse. In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine last year, Lynch revealed that due to Covid fears and his emphysema diagnosis, he no longer could leave the house, which meant if he directed again, it would be remotely. He then followed up the interview with a post on social that he “will never retire” despite his physical challenges.
“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” the family’s post reads. “We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”
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Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt in ‘The Elephant Man’
Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection
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An eccentric, visionary outsider, Lynch earned Oscar nominations for writing and directing 1980’s The Elephant Man — which also scored a Best Picture nom — and for directing Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet. In 2020, he received an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement at the Governors Awards. He also took the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Wild at Heart in 1990 and was nominated for that prize three other times. He won Best Director at the fest for Mulholland Drive in 2001.
While Lynch broke stylistic barriers onscreen, behind the scenes, he very much was an iconoclast, and handled affairs his way.
Mulholland Drive originated as a pilot he shot for ABC and Touchstone Television. Upon seeing the pilot, network execs killed it. That didn’t stop Lynch: He released the noir as a feature film, launching Naomi Watts as a global leading actress.
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Naomi Watts and David Lynch on the ‘Mulholland Drive’ set
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Born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, Lynch began his career making short films in the late 1960s and was part of the American Film Institute’s Class of 1970. His first feature film — which he developed during his AFI days — was the influential and ever-quirky Eraserhead (1977), which he wrote and directed and went on to be a midnight-movie cult classic.
That led to his breakout success with The Elephant Man, starring John Hurt as the friendly and smart but disfigured title character in Victorian England and Anthony Hopkins as the doctor who tries to treat him. When chased down by a gang of street toughs, Hurt’s John Merrick memorably cries: “I’m not an animal! I’m a human being — a man!”
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Lynch’s career took off during the 1980s. He followed up the success of Elephant Man with Dune, the 1984 take on Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel. While Dune was noted for being a financial bomb at the time, it wound up being the highest-grossing film on the auteur’s résumé with $31.5M worldwide.
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Next was the 1986 noir psychological thriller Blue Velvet, starring Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper and Laura Dern. The film managed to combine his earlier experiments with a more mainstream structure and recognizably human characters. Lynchian stand-in MacLachlan played Jeffrey, a naive young man who gets entangled in a Hitchcock-like nightmarish series of scenarios after stumbling upon a severed human ear on an otherwise pristine lawn. Once down the metaphoric rabbit hole, Jeffrey encounters any number of spooky miscreants, including Rossellini’s troubled, forever endangered lounge singer; Hopper’s violent, drug-huffing gangster Frank Booth; and Frank’s associate Ben (Dean Stockwell), a ghoulish, sexually ambiguous creep who lip-syncs to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in one of the film’s most famous and unnerving moments.
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Perhaps Lynch’s masterstroke arrived in 1989.
He created, directed co-wrote Twin Peaks, a bizarre sort of detective series/soap opera/sci-fi mystery-adventure and occasional outright Twilight Zone-like horror. Set in the titular fictional Pacific Northwest town, Twin Peaks began with one of the most disturbing and oddly mesmerizing opening scenes in TV history: the beachside discovery of the plastic-wrapped corpse. The town’s popular young high schooler Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) had been murdered, her bluish corpse still oddly beautiful.
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The discovery would draw the quirky FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), a brilliant oddball sleuth given to praising coffee, pie and, eventually, the off-putting town he adopted as his own. Along the way, Cooper uncovered many mysteries in Twin Peaks, a good number of them involving the supernatural. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” became a national obsession.
From left: from left: Michael Ontkean and Kyle MacLachlan in ‘Twin Peaks’ and David Lynch on the set
Everett Collection
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The series lasted for two seasons and ended when Cooper finally discovered Laura’s otherworldly killer. Lynch directed several episodes and also recurred in the series as FBI agent Gordon Cole, appearing in seven episodes. Lesli Linka Glatter, now president of the Directors Guild of America, helmed three episodes of Twin Peaks. In a 2018 interview with the TV Academy Foundation, she said of the experience: “I mean, wow — what an amazing thing to walk into. … I went to the premiere of the pilot and I was completely blown away. It was the best thing I’d seen that year. It was so observant and funny and unique and visual, He’s an extraordinary, extraordinary filmmaker.”
A 2017 Showtime revival series called Twin Peaks: The Return reunited many of the original cast and characters and, under Lynch’s care, became even more bizarre than the original series: The Return‘s final scene remains a standout among TV’s all-time most chilling moments. The so-called third season received widespread critical acclaim.
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Lynch always was the master absurdist, both in the director’s chair and in interviews. During filming on Twin Peaks, he once directed MacLachlan, “I need some Elvis, and a little wind.”
Appearing at TCA in 2017 to promote Showtime’s follow-up Twin Peaks series, Lynch told the press that the first go-round of the series on ABC deflated after the Laura Palmer mystery wrapped. “Who killed Laura Palmer was a question we really never wanted to answer,” he said. “That Laura Palmer mystery was the goose that laid the golden eggs. We were told to wrap that up, and it didn’t get going on again after that.” In regards to the prequel feature film he made, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and how it relates to the new series, Lynch commented, “It’s very important.”
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In revisiting Twin Peaks, Lynch told Deadline, “Right now, cable television is the new arthouse.” That was rather prescient in pre-Covid 2017, as Lynch added, “Arthouses are gone, so hopefully a new wave will come, and they’ll be back at the arthouse.”
Next for Lynch after the first Twin Peaks was writing and directing the 1990 thriller Wild at Heart. Starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, Diane Ladd, Rossellini and Harry Dean Stanton, it took the Cannes Film Festival by storm, winning the Palme d’Or over films by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Clint Eastwood, Ken Loach and Zhang Yimou.
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Lynch also often served as sound designer and wrote music for his films. His feature writing and/or directing credits also include Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999) and his last film as director Inland Empire (2006). He self-financed and self-distributed that movie stateside when no one would buy it — at the time a novel move for an auteur director such as himself. Inland Empire was his longest-running pic at three hours and grossed only $4M-plus worldwide.
Balthazar Getty and Patricia Arquette in ‘Lost Highway’
October Films/Everett Collection
On the response to Inland Empire, Lynch told Deadline’s Damon Wise in 2017: “No one understood it, so it didn’t do real well. And anything that’s not summer blockbuster fare doesn’t do well these days in the theater.”
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In that same sit-down, Lynch said: “You know, in the old days, people came out here to California, and they just made films and had fun doing it. Then they’d go to a great dinner afterwards, when the sun went down, because they were using just sunlight — the light is so beautiful. They’re making it up, they’re getting ideas and they’re working away. There’s no rules, there’s no bullshit, and they just make the films. Then they got rules, more rules, and more rules, and a certain way of going, where directors aren’t given final cut a lot of times, and it’s just ass-backwards. Of course, you want to be involved with everything. It’s making a film.”
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The always-quirky Lynch also told Wise: “I have a sewing machine, an industrial sewing machine, but I don’t know how to use it, and I would like to learn how to sew.”
Lynch played John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s semiautobiographical 2023 film The Fabelmans. What sealed the deal for him to appear in the eventual Best Picture Oscar nominee? A bag of Cheetos.
“I loved David’s films,” Spielberg said in a statement. “Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Elephant Man defined him as a singular, visionary dreamer who directed films that felt handmade. I got to know David when he played John Ford in The Fabelmans. Here was one of my heroes, David Lynch, playing one of my heroes. It was surreal and seemed like a scene out of one of David’s own movies. The world is going to miss such an original and unique voice. His films have already stood the test of time and they always will.”
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David Lynch as John Ford in ‘The Fabelmans’
Universal Pictures
Lynch had dozens of other acting credits including a recurring voice gig as Gus the bartender in Seth McFarland’s Fox comedy The Cleveland Show from 2010-13. Other voiceover roles included episodes of Family Guy, Robot Chicken and his shortform black comedy Dumbland. Lynch’s onscreen live-action credits include TV’s Louie and such features as Lucky and Nadja along with dozens of shorts and bit roles in several of his own movies.
In recent years, Lynch found popularity with a younger generation of cinephiles, largely thanks to videos he began posting on YouTube and other social media sites. The videos were styled as “weather reports,” and Lynch would share the date and current temperature in his quiet California enclave. The series began during the Covid pandemic, and Lynch sometimes also would share updates on his projects and tease that new work was forthcoming.
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In a rare interview with the trades, Lynch told Deadline last year that he still was hoping to find backers for his under-the-radar animated project Snootworld, even if Netflix had recently “rejected” his “fairytale” pitch. He was working on projects last year, and there was interest from industry partners in potentially joining Snootworld following Deadline’s article.
He worked on a new project last year — a reteam with his longtime collaborator Chrystabell for an album titled Cellophane Memories. He had teased the record the record days earlier.
He also was an artist, and Between Two Worlds — an exhibit of his paintings, photography, prints and more — opened in March 2015 at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia.
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Lynch, who was married four times, is survived by four children.
Greg Evans, Andreas Wiseman and Zac Ntim contributed to this report.
