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Born in precisely the kind of small-town
American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his
childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research
scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art
schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future director Jennifer
Lynch shortly after he turned 21. That
experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and
run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead
(1977), a film that he began in the early
1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on
obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to
be almost unreleasable weird, but thanks to the efforts of
distributor Ben
Barenholtz, it secured a cult following
and enabled Lynch to make his first mainstream film (in an unlikely
alliance with Mel
Brooks), though The
Elephant Man (1980) was shot through with
his unique sensibility. Its enormous critical and commercial success
led to Dune
(1984), a hugely expensive commercial
disaster, but Lynch redeemed himself with the now classic Blue
Velvet (1986), his most personal and
original work since his debut. He subsequently won the top prize at
the Cannes Film Festival with the dark, violent road movie Wild
at Heart (1990), and achieved a huge cult
following with his surreal TV series Twin
Peaks (1990), which he adapted for the big
screen, though his comedy series On
the Air (1992) was less successful. He
also draws comic strips and has devised multimedia stage events with
regular composer Angelo
Badalamenti. He had a much-publicized
affair with Isabella
Rossellini in the late 1980s. |
