David Lynch, a movie and television director who radicalized American film with a dark, surrealistic artistic vision in films died on Thursday, 16th January 2025, at the age of 78.
The visionary producer passed away following last year’s reveal of his emphysema diagnosis.
Lynch who moved to Los Angeles, where he studied film-making at the AFI Conservatory, was born January 20 1946, in Missoula, Montana.
He also studied painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the sixties.
Blockbusters Movies Lynch Produced
- The Elephant Man
A story of a Victorian surgeon who rescues a heavily disfigured man mistreated as a sideshow freak. Beneath his monstrous façade lies a person of kindness, intelligence, and sophistications.
The Elephant Man had a powerful emotional impact, and became a box office, grossing about $1.06m with a critical hit. Lynch received Oscar nods as best director and for best adapted screenplay, with the film also taking a nomination for best picture. The triumph led to a multiple-picture deal with Dino Di Laurentiis.
He was hired by Mel Brooks’ production company to write and direct this movie. The feature captured eight Academy Award nominations, including Lynch’s first for best director.
2. Twin Peaks
A series he created with writer Mark Frost. In 1990, he revolutionized American episodic TV with action, springing from the investigation of a high school girl’s mysterious murder in a Washington lumber mill town. The weekly ABC show plumbed disquieting, somewhat taboo subject matter and made the inexplicable, a fixture of modern narrative television.
3. Blue Velvet
In 1986, it starred Kyle McLachlan, who had played the messianic hero of “Dune,” as a small-town boy who is plunged into a whirlpool of sexual violence, murder and sadomasochism.
The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who kidnapped her child.
Featuring a potent cast that included Isabella Rossellini (with whom Lynch became involved romantically), Laura Dern, Dean Stockwell and, most notably, Dennis Hopper as its deranged, out-of-control villain, “Blue Velvet” polarized critics, but it cemented Lynch’s reputation as a fearless and daring film author. The film was the start of his collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti.
4. Eraserhead
A horrific, black-humored work that became a disturbing fixture on the midnight movie circuit. It was released by indie distributor Libra Films International in 1977. This was Lynch’s first full-length movie, that started kicked off his long and fruitful career.
His outré and uncompromising style quickly won the attention of the Hollywood and international movie-making establishment. The disquieting black-and-white film followed the psychological descent of its maladroit hero Henry Spencer (Nance) after the birth of his monstrously malformed baby and tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.
5. Mulholland Drive
After a car wreck on Mulholland Drive renders a woman (Laura Harring) amnesiac, she and a Hollywood-hopeful (Naomi Watts) search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality.
This movie won him the best director award at Cannes in 2001 shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There. Lynch also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Director for the film. The film boosted Watts’ Hollywood profile considerably, and was the last feature film to star veteran Hollywood actress Ann Miller.
Mulholland Drive is often regarded as one of Lynch’s finest works and as one of the greatest films of all time. It was ranked eighth in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics’ poll of the best films ever made and topped a 2016 BBC poll of the best films since 2000.
He is a four-time Oscar nominee, who received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2020. Lynch was married four times and he’s survived by two daughters and two sons.
He will be buried on the 28th of January, 2025.
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