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.”
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