American director David Lynch has died at the age of 78.
The visionary filmmaker is best known for the films “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” and the TV series “Twin Peaks.” His work was often characterized by its surrealist and dream-like qualities.
His family announced the news in a Facebook post. The cause of death and location was not immediately available, but Lynch had been public about his emphysema.
“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,’” the post read. “It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”
Tributes to Lynch are pouring in social media.
“So difficult to quantify his impact, on how we understand beauty and darkness, and process our collective hopes and fears,” TV critic Roxana Hadidi wrote on X.
“He made me horrified of what we can’t see in the world and in love with what was out there to be discovered. He will be so goddamn missed.”
“I can’t think of a filmmaker whose work has evolved as much in my mind depending on my age, my position in life or the ambient culture, while also remaining fundamentally rooted in one artist’s perspective,” Toronto-based movie critic and writer Will Sloan told the Star.
“His mysterious, disturbing, and endlessly suggestive films are inexhaustible terrains for thought and feeling. No filmmaker has better captured what a dream feels like, nor has any filmmaker more incisively identified how the line between dream and reality can be porous. It’s just an unimaginable loss.”
Lynch’s movies
Born in Missoula, Montana, Lynch was a one-time painter who started making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film, 1977’s “Eraserhead,” was a surrealist body horror film shot in black and white. The film was met with little interest upon its release, but over time gained popularity as a midnight movie.
Over the next several decades, Lynch directed a total of 10 feature films. He received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director for the biographical drama “The Elephant Man” (1980), “Blue Velvet” (1986) and the neo-noir “Mulholland Drive” (2001).
His other credits included the crime story “Wild at Heart,” winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and the G-rated, aptly straightforward “The Straight Story.” Actors regularly appearing in his movies included Kyle McLachlan, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts and Richard Farnsworth.
Twin Peaks
Lynch also found success with “Twin Peaks,” a television series created alongside novelist and screenwriter Mark Frost and released in 1990l
Set in a fictional Pacific Northwest town, the groundbreaking series was ostensibly a detective mystery, but incorporated the supernatural elements of the horror genre, and the campy melodrama of soap operas. Though the show was cancelled after two seasons, it gained a cult following and received widespread critical acclaim.
In 2017, the show returned for a third season on Showtime.
Last summer, Lynch revealed he’d been diagnosed with emphysema, a chronic lung disease caused by his many years of smoking. However, he said at the time that he would “never retire.”
“I have to say that I enjoyed smoking very much, and I do love tobacco – the smell of it, lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them – but there is a price to pay for this enjoyment, and the price for me is emphysema,” he said in a post on X sharing his diagnosis.
With files from Associated Press.
