David Lynch

David Lynch once said he was inspired to become a filmmaker when, while painting, he inexplicably heard a gust of wind and saw the artwork move on canvas.

The moment defined his obsession with "seeing paintings move", but also his flair for the bizarre - twisting realities on the small and big screen for almost 40 years.

I wrote about Lynch yesterday but wanted to return to him again. I met him once while doing a review for Time Out of The Elephant Man and I have never forgotten the charisma of the man.

He became the contemporary face of weird, unsettling worlds often hidden within everyday society - from TV series Twin Peaks to films like Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire.

A self-professed daydreamer, Lynch burst onto the scene via the midnight movie circuit with 1977's Eraserhead. The disorientating horror, a comment on male paranoia, set the layered template that ran through his work.

Four decades later, he lived to see his style immortalised as an adjective in the Oxford dictionary. Lynchian, it reads, external, blurs "surreal or sinister elements with the mundane" - an accolade fitting of the four-time Oscar nominee turned lifetime achievement recipient, whose character was as big as his films.

David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. The son of a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, he spent much of his early life moving around from state to state with his brother and sister.

However, Lynch's parents encouraged his artistic ambitions from an early age. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1990, he said his mother "saved" him by encouraging him to draw on scrap paper rather than using colouring books, where "the whole idea is to stay between the lines".

This ethos inspired his films, tinged by a rebellious streak which he teased lasted from the age of 14 to 30. "People rebel that long these days", he reasoned, "because we're built to live longer".

Youthful frustration at the calm of suburban life left him craving for "something out of the ordinary to happen" to challenge the superficiality of 1950s family ideals - a dark dream his films and shows brought to life.

Lynch's black-and-white debut feature Eraserhead achieved this vision far more successfully than his years at art school, with its central character descending into madness after fathering a terrifying baby.

Critics were left confused, but its late-night cinema success sparked a breakthrough when one audience member recommended him to Mel Brooks, who asked him to helm Elephant Man.

Co-written by Lynch, the film's cast of eventual screen icons, including John Hurt as Merrick and Anthony Hopkins, transformed the story of stigma into an emotional, critical hit, outpacing the original stage play.

It saw Lynch receive Oscar nominations for best director and adapted screenplay, as part of the film's eight nominations that included best picture.

Blue Velvet, starring Kyle MacLachlan from Dune, followed a small-town boy caught up in the underworld after he discovered a severed ear. Brutal and violent in part, it divided critics but won Lynch his second Oscar nod for best director.

He won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival for romance Wild at Heart in 1990, starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe.

But it was Lynch's belief in American beauty and horror being two sides of the same coin, perfected in his TV project Twin Peaks released the same year, that came to define him.

But viewers were truly captivated by what it offered onscreen: a dreamlike nightmare of wonderfully idiosyncratic characters, including FBI agent Dale Cooper, again played by Kyle MacLachlan, in the apparent comfort of picket-fenced America - cherry pie and coffee included - before unflinchingly reaching into living rooms with its chilling undercurrent of sexual abuse and murder. It was one that had no prior place on US TV.

He would eventually shift focus back to the big screen to attack Hollywood's devilish tricks of fame, glamour, deceit and identity loss, in films unofficially known as his Los Angeles trilogy.

This began with 1997's Lost Highway, before 2001's Mulholland Drive - perhaps the closest in aesthetic to Twin Peaks.

Last came 2006's Inland Empire, Lynch's final feature film, which proved as mind-melting as ever - showing Hollywood star culture no mercy.

Although Lynch never did return to feature film directing to give himself another shot at an elusive Oscar win, he was granted an honorary lifetime achievement statuette by the Academy in 2019. He also made a cameo in Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical 2022 film, The Fablemans, playing filmmaker John Ford.

His artistic pursuits increasingly diversified toward the end of his life, from his original passion for painting to music. Just last year, he released Cellophane Memories, an album with Chrystabell. This added to his previous work producing music videos for artists like Moby and Nine Inch Nails.