David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, dies aged 78 | Movies

David Lynch, the maverick American director who had a successful career while exploring the bizarre, the radical and the experimental, has died at the age of 78.

“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and artist David Lynch,” we can read on Facebook. “We would appreciate some privacy right now. There is a big hole in the world now that he is no longer with us. But as he said: “Keep your eye on the donut and not the hole.” It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies throughout.

Last August, Lynch said he was diagnosed with emphysema, and in November he spoke more about his breathing difficulties. “I can barely walk across a room,” he said. “It’s like you’re walking around with a plastic bag around your head.”

Lynch has carved a very unique furrow in American cinema: from his beginnings as an art student directing experimental short films, to the cult success of his first surrealist feature film Eraserhead, via a series of award-winning films including Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart. and Mulholland Drive, as well as the iconic TV show Twin Peaks. He has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director (for Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive) and received an honorary Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 2019; he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Wild at Heart in 1990.

Lynch also avidly practiced transcendental meditation, establishing the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005; he has also produced paintings, released albums (including collaborations with Julee Cruise, Lykke Li, and Karen O), created a long-running weather report on YouTube, and opened a nightclub in Paris in 2011. In 2018, he explained his reclusive lifestyle to the Guardian: “I like making films. I like to work. I don’t really like going out. In 2024, he revealed that his lifetime cigarette smoking had led to debilitating emphysema.

Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, Lynch attended art school in the 1960s and made his first experimental short film, Six Men Getting Sick, while a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1971 and studied film at the AFI Conservatory, where he began filming his first feature film Eraserhead. Finally completed in 1976, the surreal black-and-white fable was greeted with bemusement and rejected by most film festivals, but by the late ’70s it became a hit on the “midnight movie” circuit of late evening.

The impact of Eraserhead led to an offer from Mel Brooks’ production company to direct The Elephant Man; Starring John Hurt in a Joseph Merrick biopic, the film about the disfigured 19th-century man was nominated for eight Academy Awards and secured Lynch Hollywood status. After turning down an offer to direct Return of the Jedi, Lynch agreed to make an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune, but the film was significantly recut in post-production and proved a disaster commercial and critical. Instead of a planned sequel to Dune, Lynch decided to make a more personal film: his noir-ish thriller Blue Velvet was a cult hit and a hugely influential critical success when it was released in 1986, and it earned Lynch the second Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

Lynch then embarked on another noirish project, the opaque and surreal murder-mystery Twin Peaks which – unusually for notable directors of the era – was envisioned as a television series; Lynch developed it with former Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost. A blend of small-town comedy, police procedurals, and a surreal dream world, and described as “the most haunting original work ever made for American television,” Twin Peaks defied early predictions of failure when it aired in 1990; as a pioneer of “high-end television”, it is arguably Lynch’s most influential work. A second series was later broadcast in 1990, a prequel to the feature film Fire Walk With Me was released in 1992, and a third series was launched over a quarter of a century later, in 2017.

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As Twin Peaks entered production, Lynch began work on a film adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart and cast Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern in the lead roles in a violent, haunting road movie with echoes of The Wizard of Dern. ‘Oz. Wild at Heart premiered at Cannes in 1990 and won the Palme d’Or.

In 1997, Lynch began returning to his avant-garde roots with Lost Highway, a surreal thriller starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette, which failed at the box office. In contrast, Lynch published The Straight Story in 1999, a frankly simple story about an elderly man (played by Richard Farnsworth) who travels 240 miles across the country with a motorized lawn mower.

Lynch then embarked on another very successful project: Mulholland Drive. Initially it seemed to have gone wrong, as Lynch pitched it as a Twin Peaks-style TV series. A pilot was filmed and then canceled by the ABC television network. But the material was picked up by the French company StudioCanal, which gave him the money to turn it into a feature film. A noir-style mystery drama, it was another major critical success, earning Lynch a third Academy Award nomination for Best Director, and in 2016 it was voted the best film of the 21st century. Lynch followed it in 2006 with the three-hour surreal thriller Inland Empire, shot on video and starring Dern as an American movie star who seems mysteriously transported into the Polish original of a film about which she works.

Subsequently, Lynch appeared to retreat from feature films, with only the third series of Twin Peaks in 2017 representing a major filmmaking project, although reports suggested he had worked on a series for Netflix. Lynch has had acting roles in other people’s work, including as Gus the bartender in Seth MacFarlane’s The Cleveland Show, and as legendary director John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s loosely autobiographical 2022 film, The Fabelmans.

Lynch was married four times and had a long-term relationship with his Blue Velvet star, Isabella Rossellini.