The death of the surrealist film and television director David Lynch on Thursday prompted mourning across the entertainment world, with celebrities and artists paying tribute to Lynch’s work and his stature as an insistently experimental artist.
Lynch was best known for works including “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholland Drive,” an oeuvre that combined cosmic horror and American life, both defying easy definition and inspiring the descriptor “Lynchian” for art in a similar dreamlike register.
The actor Kyle MacLachlan, who starred in many Lynch projects including “Twin Peaks,” where he played the F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper, posted photos of the two of them together across decades on Instagram. In his caption, MacLachlan thanked Lynch for his career, saying the director plucked him “out of obscurity” to cast him as Paul Atreides in the 1984 adaptation of “Dune.”
“What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him,” MacLachlan wrote. “He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.”
In a statement to Variety, the director Steven Spielberg praised Lynch as a “singular, visionary dreamer who directed films that felt handmade.”
“I got to know David when he played John Ford in ‘The Fabelmans,’” Spielberg said in his statement. “It was surreal and seemed like a scene out of one of David’s own movies. The world is going to miss such an original and unique voice. His films have already stood the test of time and they always will.”
The actress Lee Grant, who appeared in “Mulholland Drive,” posted on X that she first became fascinated by Lynch’s work in the ’90s, because the production manager of a film she was working on built the shooting schedule around the “Twin Peaks” broadcast so no one on the crew would have to miss it.
“Years later, when offered the chance to work with him for a day, I jumped at the opportunity to see how a mind like that directed,” she wrote in a post on X. “It was a day on ‘Mulholland Drive.’ He was, in actuality, a one of a kind artist.”
The director Jane Schoenbrun, who has previously discussed the influence of Lynch’s work on their film “I Saw the TV Glow,” compared Lynch to the novelist Franz Kafka and the painter Francis Bacon, saying that all three dedicated their lives to “opening a portal.” “He was the first to show me another world, a beautiful one of love and danger I sensed but had never seen outside sleep,” they wrote in a post on X.
“David Lynch, RIP. At least that’s what the horse wearing a fez just told me* in a dream,” wrote the comedian Patton Oswalt on X, nodding to Lynch’s at times confounding imagery. “(*Backwards and in Swedish.)”
In a post on X, the director Ron Howard called Lynch “a gracious man and fearless artist who followed his heart & soul and proved that radical experimentation could yield unforgettable cinema.”
The drummer, DJ and producer Questlove wrote on Threads that Lynch — who was also a large proponent of transcendental meditation — emphasized to him the importance of self-care. “Lynch was the first human/creative that stressed the importance of not overworking and taking time out to breathe & meditate and searching for creative avenues not in my comfort zone,” he wrote.
“You inspired so many of us,” the director James Gunn wrote in an X post, paired with a still of the actress Isabella Rossellini in Lynch’s film “Blue Velvet.”
The American Film Institute, the school where, as a graduate student, Lynch started to develop his debut feature “Eraserhead” as his thesis film, posted on Facebook that Lynch was “an American original.”
Billy Corgan, the frontman for the rock band The Smashing Pumpkins, which contributed a song to the soundtrack for Lynch’s 1997 film “Lost Highway,” posted on X that he was saddened to hear of Lynch’s passing. “Working with him was like a dream out of one of his movies, and I treasure the times I got to speak with him and hear firsthand his vision for a film.”
Rebekah del Rio, a singer who notably appeared in the Club Silencio sequence of Lynch’s film “Mulholland Drive,” where she was passionately singing an a cappella Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s song “Crying” (which translates as “llorando”) before collapsing on the stage as the song keeps playing, posted a black-and-white photo of Lynch on Instagram.
She captioned it with a single word: “Llorando.”