Laura Dern shared a heartfelt birthday message on Instagram Monday to her lifelong collaborator David Lynch, four days after news broke of his death.
“Happy birthday, tidbit,” Dern wrote. “I will love and miss you every day for the rest of my life.”
Since casting Dern in “Blue Velvet” at the age of 17, Lynch has affectionately called her “Tidbit.” In 2019, she presented him with his Academy Honorary Award alongside Kyle MacLachlan — also known as “Kale.”
“His nicknames for us have stuck as we share 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 set that infuses you with that sense that you’re doing what you were always meant to.”
Dern was one of Lynch’s most prominent muses and collaborators. Her career gained steam after she had a supporting role in his 1986 mystery thriller “Blue Velvet” as Sandy Williams, the daughter of a detective who becomes involved in an investigation surrounding a severed ear. The two then worked together again on “Wild at Heart” (1990), in which Dern starred opposite Nicolas Cage as Lula Pace Fortune, who goes on the run from her mother after she hires criminals to kill her boyfriend Sailor. She headlined Lynch’s final film, “Inland Empire” (2006), as an actress who begins to inhabit the character she’s portraying in a film in her real life. Dern also appeared in “Twin Peaks: The Return” in 2017, portraying the previously unseen character of Diane Evans.
MacLachlan also paid tribute to Lynch after the news of his death, writing on Instagram: “I owe my entire career, and life really, to his vision. What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.”
