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TWIN PEAKS’ BELOVED LOG LADY HAS DIED

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CATHERINE E. COULSON, the actress best known for playing Margaret Lanterman, AKA the Log Lady, on David Lynch’s landmark television seriesTwin Peaks, has died at age 71. The news first circulated on Twitter after a member of Ashland, Oregon’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival acting company, where Coulson had worked for over two decades, tweeted out a remembrance:

Coulson wasn’t only responsible for one of television’s most indelible oddball characters; she was integral to David Lynch’s success as a filmmaker. She worked at the American Film Institute in the 1970s when her husband, Jack Nance, was cast as the lead in Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead. Due to the low-budget nature of that shoot, Coulson ended up helping out on set, playing the nurse who hands Henry and Mary their child, as well as behind the camera as a boom operator, lighting assistant, Nance’s hairdresser, and production still photographer. She even helped fund the film, and she’s credited as “assistant director” on IMDb.

But as Twin Peaks has endured enough to inspire a reboot series with Showtime, new generations of fans may not know just how important Coulson’s character was to the show. It’s a story Coulson told several times: During production on Eraserhead, Lynch told Coulson he had a vision of her holding a log, and that she’d play the character he imagined on a television series someday. That character held so strongly in his mind that when Twin Peaks came around, he cast Coulson to finally portray the Log Lady in a recurring role throughout the show’s two seasons and Fire Walk With Mefilm. (When the Showtime revival of Twin Peaks hit a budgetary snag earlier this year, Coulson stood firm behind her friend Lynch, who had told her the Log Lady would be making a return at some point within a stretch of new episodes. It remains to be seen if any filming with her character took place before her death.)

Over the course of 22 seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Coulson played 50 roles, appearing in everything from Richard II and The Taming of the Shrew to August: Osage County, and even musicals like Into The Woodsand Guys and Dolls. “She was an integral part of this company, not only as an actor, but as a passionate advocate for the arts, for theatre, for OSF and for the community of Ashland,” Bill Rauch, the OSF’s artistic director, said in a statement. “Catherine was in the first play that I directed at OSF, and her welcoming spirit was directly responsible for me falling in love with this company. Artist, artisan, administrator or audience member, you knew that you were part of the Festival once you were welcomed by Catherine. Her generosity of spirit was only matched by her vibrancy as an actor; she shone onstage in her every appearance. We will miss her with all our hearts.”

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