With films as diverse as ‘Eraserhead’ to ‘The Straight story’ taking in ‘Blue Velvet’ along the way David Lynch was one of cinema’s great maverick’s.
Born on 20th January 1946 in Missoula Montana whose scientist father would move the family around the country with his work. Lynch became an art college student at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960’s where he would make his first short film that was typically experimental. After art college he moved to Los Angeles enrolling at the AFI conservatory where he began the lengthy and episodic production on his first feature film ‘Eraserhead’ that was finally released in 1976. Rejected by film festivals and generally met with confusion by distributors it found cult success on the late night circuit. By then he had was divorced from his first wife Peggy Reavey having married in 1967 to the first of what would be four wives and 1977 saw him marry Mary Fisk.
But there was no doubting the impact that Eraserhead made on those who saw it with its grainy black & white and often surreal and or shocking visuals with an industrial soundtrack and it caught the eye, of all people, Mel Brooks who company was to produce ‘The Elephant man’ and offered David Lynch the gig. It was a bold offer for an essentially unknown director. As it turned out it was a savvy move that had identified a fledgling talent with the film earning eight Oscar nominations including one for Best Director. The offers of work came flooding in including that for Return of the Jedi, an offer that in light of his subsequent films seems frankly as surreal and bizarre as his films. Yet the offer he did accept was for Dune based on Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel that was produced by Dino De Laurentiis forever promising greatness with the films he backed yet often falling short on delivery when it came to the budget. Dune was a disaster both critically and commercially.
David Lynch withdrew to revaluate and came back with arguably his first masterpiece, Blue Velvet (1986) a far more personal project and would establish the oeuvre for which he would make his own. Influential and critically acclaimed it earned him his second Best Director Oscar nomination losing to Oliver Stone for Platoon.
But the film’s success was met with the failure of his second marriage that saw him again divorced in 1987 after this he would have a long term relationship with his Blue Velvet star Isabella Rossellini.
David Lynch would follow it with a double whammy this time in TV with Twin Peaks – this was at a time when film directors didn’t do TV and Lynch was ahead of the curve pioneering a murder mystery that was a mix of his offbeat humour and extreme surrealism that played with form, format and technique as Kyle MacLachlan’s coffee and cherry pie loving detective investigate the murder of prom queen Laura Palmer. Predicted to be a flop it was instead a hit and a second series followed in 1990 with a belated third series in 2017 that would be his last major work.
It was the start of a roll of highly regarded work and continued with his next film ‘Wild at Heart’ that would win him the Palme D’or at Cannes in 1990. A Twin Peaks film followed that fans had been demanding but was received a mixed reception in what was often dark and had several deeply unsettling moments. It would be five years before he would make his next feature film ‘Lost Highway’ in 1997 but it flopped. Two years later and in complete contrast to what audiences had expected he then made ‘The Straight Story’ a film that saw a pensioner drive 240 miles across the US on a lawnmower. It was typically Lynchian but sweet natured with none of the darkness his previous films had demonstrated.
It wasn’t long before he would return to those roots with ‘Mulholland Drive’ (2002) widely regarded as one of his best films and yet it almost never happened. Intended as a TV series the pilot that they had shot was cancelled by the ABC TV network. But Studio Canal swept in to finance it as a feature film. The resulting film earned him his third and last Best Director nomination but again the academy got it wrong awarding the Oscar instead to Ron Howard for, ‘A Beautiful Mind’ .
Marrying for a third time in 2006 he would follow up Mulholland Drive in the same year with the surreal thriller ‘Inland Empire’ in what would be his last ever film for the cinema which fared badly at the box office. Less than a year later he would divorce for a third time.
Between the feature films and TV series he was much in demand for music videos and made a long running series of Weather Reports on his youtube channel. He married for a fourth and last time in 2009 having a child as he had with his three previous wives. He was also increasingly in demand for his typically idiosyncratic style of acting appearing in several of his own productions notably in Twin Peaks but also animated series ‘Family Guy’ & ‘The Cleveland show’ with his last notable on screen role for Spielberg in The Fabelmans (2022) as the late director John Ford almost stealing the film in a single scene. By then he had finally been given an honorary Oscar .
A lifelong heavy smoker he was diagnosed with emphysema that made it increasingly difficult for him to even walk across a room without breathing assistance. But he never relinquished the hope to maybe direct a feature again suggesting that he could do it from his bed via phone – a typically and darkly surreal suggestion from a man whose career was full of such moments. The 2025 Los Angeles fires saw him evacuated from his home for his own safety but reports had it that his health took a turn for the worse and on 16th January 2025 he passed away just days short of this 79th birthday.
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