Laura Dern shared a heartfelt birthday message on Instagram on Monday to her frequent partner David Lynch, four days after news of his death broke.
“Happy birthday, delicious food,” Dern wrote. “I will love and miss you every day for the rest of my life.”
Since Lynch cast Dern in Blue Velvet at the age of 17, she has affectionately nicknamed her “Tidbit.” In 2019, she presented him with an honorary Academy Award alongside Kyle MacLachlan – also known as “Kale”.
“His titles have stuck with us because we’ve shared the privilege of working with him our entire adult lives,” Dern said, later adding: “Everyone who works alongside David feels that electricity. It’s his enthusiasm and passion that he brings to a place that instills in you that feeling of being… Doing what you were always meant to do.
Dern was one of Lynch’s most prominent inspirations and collaborators. Her career gained momentum after she played a supporting role in the 1986 mystery thriller “Blue Velvet” as Sandy Williams, the daughter of a detective who is involved in an investigation into a severed ear. The two then worked together again in Wild at Heart (1990), in which Dern starred opposite Nicolas Cage as Lola Peace Fortune, who is on the run from her mother after she hires criminals to kill her boyfriend Sailor. She headlined Lynch’s last film, “Inland Empire” (2006), as an actress who begins to inhabit the character she portrays in a movie in her real life. Dern also appeared in 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, portraying the never-before-seen character Diane Evans.
MacLachlan also paid tribute to Lynch after news of his death, writing on Instagram: “I owe my entire career, and really my life, to his vision. What I saw in him was a mysterious, intuitive man with a creative ocean bubbling inside him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could access.” To him.
