David Lynch, the American filmmaker, writer and artist who scored best director Oscar nominations for Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive and co-created the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, has died aged 78.
“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” a statement on Lynch’s Facebook page said.
“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.'”
No cause of death was released. Lynch disclosed in August 2024 that he had been diagnosed with emphysema, a lung disease, caused by many years of smoking.
With his visually stunning, disturbing and inscrutable works filled with dream sequences and bizarre images, Lynch was considered a master of surrealism and one of the most innovative filmmakers of his generation.
He received an honorary Oscar in 2019 for his lifetime achievements.
The enigmatic artist and devotee of transcendental meditation preferred not to explain his complex, bewildering films, which included Wild at Heart, the 1990 Palme d’Or winner of the Cannes Film Festival, the 1977 horror film Eraserhead and the 1997 mystery Lost Highway.
“A film or a painting, each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there,” he told The Guardian newspaper in a 2018 interview.
His style of filmmaking prompted the term Lynchian, which Vanity Fair magazine described as weird, creepy, and slow. In his films Lynch inserted the macabre and disturbing into the ordinary and mundane and heightened the impact with music.
After his death on Thursday, several filmmakers said Lynch had inspired them. Actor and director Ron Howard, writing on X, called Lynch “a gracious man and fearless artist who followed his heart & soul and proved that radical experimentation could yield unforgettable cinema.”
David Keith Lynch was born on January 20, 1946 in Missoula, Montana, the eldest of three children. His father worked for the US Department of Agriculture and the family moved frequently. Lynch once described his childhood as a “very beautiful, sort of perfect world.”
But as an art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960s he encountered the seedier side of America while living in a crime-ridden, run-down area of Philadelphia with his wife and baby daughter. He described the city as the biggest influence of his life.
The experience inspired Eraserhead, his unsettling, hallucinatory debut feature that became a cult hit in midnight cinemas. After seeing the film, Brooks, the producer of The Elephant Man, hired Lynch to direct it.
The Elephant Man,about a severely deformed man in Victorian London, was nominated for eight Academy Awards in 1981. Although it failed to win an Oscar, it launched Lynch into the mainstream. But his next film, the 1984 science fiction epic Dune, bombed at the box office.
Two years later Lynch was back on top with Blue Velvet, which delved into the mysterious underworld in a small North Carolina town. Some critics considered it his masterpiece and the best film of the decade.
Lynch switched to the small screen in 1990 when he created the mystery crime series Twin Peaks with Mark Frost for ABC. The Emmy-winning series became a cultural phenomenon and was revived in 2017.
Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s 2001 Hollywood mystery, began as a TV pilot but was dropped by the network and eventually made it to the big screen. It was named the best film of the 21st century so far in a 2016 BBC poll of 177 critics worldwide.
In his later years Lynch, a true Renaissance man, devoted himself to making documentaries, short films, painting and a YouTube channel. He released albums, music videos, soundtracks and books, including his 2018 memoir Room To Dream.
The acclaimed director was married four times and fathered four children.
“I love what I do and I get to work on stuff I want to work on. I wish everybody had that opportunity,” he told Vulture.com in a 2018 interview.
