David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks and Muholland Drive, dies at age 78 | Film

David Lynch, the American director who maintained a successful mainstream career while also exploring the bizarre, radical and experimental, has died aged 78.

“There is a great hole in the world now that he is no longer with us,” his family wrote in one Facebook post. “But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not the hole.'”

In August last year, Lynch said he had been diagnosed with emphysema and in November he spoke further about his breathing difficulties. “I can barely walk across a room,” he said. “It’s like walking around with a plastic bag around your head.”

Lynch plowed a highly idiosyncratic furrow in American film: from his beginnings as an art student making experimental short films, to the cult success of his surrealist first feature Eraserhead, and on to a string of award-winning films including Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive, as well as the seminal TV show Twin Peaks. He received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director (for Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive), and received an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement 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 and established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005; he also produced paintings, released albums (including collaborations with Julee Cruise, Lykke Li and Karen O), created a long-running YouTube weather report and opened a nightclub in Paris in 2011. In 2018, he explained his reclusive lifestyle to The Guardian: “I can like to make movies. I like to work. I don’t really like going out.” In 2024, he revealed that his lifelong cigarette habit had resulted in debilitating emphysema.

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

Eraserhead’s influence led to an offer from Mel Brooks’ production company to direct The Elephant Man; starring John Hurt in a biopic of Joseph Merrick, the film about the 19th-century disfigured man was nominated for eight Oscars and secured Lynch’s Hollywood status. After turning down an offer to direct Return of the Jedi, Lynch agreed to make an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel Dune, but the film was significantly reworked in post-production and turned out to be a commercial and critical disaster. Instead of a planned Dune sequel, Lynch decided to make a more personal film: his dark noir thriller Blue Velvet was a cult hit and hugely influential critical success upon its release in 1986, resulting in Lynch’s second Best Director Oscar nomination.

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

When Twin Peaks went into production, Lynch began work on a feature film adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart, casting Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern in the lead roles in a violent, haunting road movie with echoes of The Wizard of 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 flopped at the box office. In stark contrast, Lynch released The Straight Story in 1999, a straightforward story about an elderly man (played by Richard Farnsworth) who drives 150 miles across the country on a motorized lawnmower.

Lynch then embarked on another very successful project: Mulholland Drive. At first it seemed to go horribly wrong as Lynch pitched it as a Twin Peaks-style TV series. A pilot was shot and then canceled by the TV network ABC. But the material was picked up by the French company StudioCanal, which gave him the money to remake it as a feature film. A noir-style mystery drama, it was another major critical success, securing Lynch a third Academy Award nomination for Best Director, and in 2016 was named the Best Film of the 21st Century. Lynch followed it in 2006 with the three-hour surrealist thriller Inland Empire, shot on video and starring Dern as an American movie star who seems to mysteriously transport into the Polish original of a film she is working on.

After that, Lynch seemed to step back from feature films, with only the third series of Twin Peaks in 2017 representing a major film project, although reports suggest he had been working on a series for Netflix. Lynch took acting roles in the work of others, most notably as Gus the Bartender in Seth MacFarlane’s The Cleveland Show, and as legendary director John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 loosely autobiographical film The Fabelmans.

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