|
|
I'm still very busy writing my own David Lynch biography, but until it's finished
there will be a copy on this page of the biography as it can be found at the
Internet Movie Database.
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 attenden various art schools,
married, and fathered future director Jennifer Chambers Lynch shortly after he turned
21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down
area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1976), 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 unreleasably weird, but thanks
to the effort 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 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 with the movie Fire Walk With Me (1992), though
his comedy series "On The Air" (1992) was less successful. He also draws a comic strip
(The Angriest Dog In The World) and has devised multimedia stage events, like Industrial
Symphony #1 (1991) with regular composer Angelo Badalamenti. He had a much-publicised affair
with Isabella Rossellini in the late 1980s.
|
|
