American filmmaker and artist David Lynch was BOTD in 1946. Born in Missoula, Montana, he studied painting at college before enrolling in the American Film Institute’s graduate programme. His 1977 debut feature Eraserhead, a surrealist nightmare about the horrors of parenthood, became a cult classic. He achieved critical and commercial success with 1980’s The Elephant Man, a period piece about a severely deformed man rescued from life as a circus freak, based on the life of Joseph Merrick. After the failure of his adaptation of sci-fi epic Dune, he returned to the horror of the everyday in Blue Velvet, a psychosexual thriller set in an idealised American suburbia. He achieved wider public attention withTwin Peaks, a thrillingly bizarre television series about the murder of a teenaged girl in a remote mountain town. His 1990 film Wild at Heart, an enjoyably pulpy road movie about two lovers on the run, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival. Other notable projects include 2001’s Mulholland Drive, a sumptuous portrait of merged identities and shattered dreams set in a corrupt Hollywood, and his rapturously-received 2017 reboot of Twin Peaks. Critically praised and attracting substantial cult followings, Lynch’s work utilised lavish colour and set design, non-linear editing and ambient sound to create atmospheres of mounting dread. Breaking with Hollywood narrative traditions, his characters were typically freaks and outsiders, gripped and destroyed by atavistic forces beyond their control. His relentless depiction of sexual obsession and sado-masochistic sex often provoked accusations of misogyny, while his depiction of a lesbian relationship in Mulholland Drive was criticised for reflecting a voyeuristic straight male gaze. More recently, his work has been embraced by queer audiences for its persistent identification with otherness, the dismantling of the “normality” of heterosexual desire and an undercurrent of wickedly subversive humour. Oscar-nominated three times, he received an honorary Oscar in 2019 as well as numerous lifetime achievement awards. Lynch was married four times and had four children (including the filmmaker Jennifer Lynch). He also had a well-publicised long-term relationship with the actress Isabella Rossellini, who appeared in many of his films. Though clearly straight, he earns Honorary SuperGay status for being queerer than most LGBTQ artists and giving his audiences permission to embrace their inner freaks. He died in 2025 after a long battle with emphysema, aged 78.