As Twin Peaks returns for its surprise, belated third season, one original cast member sadly won't be part of the reunion. Catherine E. Coulson, who played the enigmatic Log Lady in the show's original run and in Fire Walk With Me, has died. She was 71.
Coulson's friendship with David Lynch went all the way back to his debut feature Eraserhead in 1977, on which she performed various roles behind-the-scenes (she was officially credited as Assistant Director and Assistant Camera). During the film's tortuous production she also played the title role in Lynch's short film The Amputee. It was during this busy creative period that they first began discussing Lynch's vision of Coulson as a character holding a log. He'd find a way to bring her to the screen 15 years later.
The character, actually named Margaret Lanterman, was seen as a madwoman by the residents of Twin Peaks, but her psychic connection to her always present lump of Ponderosa pine provided Agent Dale Cooper with at least one useful clue to the murder of Laura Palmer. Her gnomic utterances were also used by Lynch for new introductions to each episode when the series was syndicated on the Bravo channel. Coulson described the Log Lady as "the only normal person on the show".
Away from Twin Peaks, Coulson's film and television work was often offscreen. She was an assistant camera operator on Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, Tobe Hooper's The Toolbox Murders, Jim Jarmusch's Night On Earth, and the Gene Wilder / Richard Pryor comedy Another You (in which she also played a nurse).
As an actress, she was in TV-movie Ring Of The Musketeers with David Hasselhoff, Cheech Marin and John Rhys-Davies; and in Calvin Marshall and Redwood Highway, both directed by Gary Lundgren. On television she played the somewhat familiar Wood Woman in an episode of the comedy mystery series Psych, and turned out to play a marionberry famer in a Portlandia sketch. Her stage work was more regular, and she was involved with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for decades.
She was married to Jack Nance - Eraserhead's Henry and Twin Peaks' Pete - for eight years until 1976, and later to rabbi Marc Sirinsky, with whom she had a daughter, Zoey.
“Catherine was solid gold," Lynch said yesterday. "She was always there for her friends. She was filled with love for all people, for her family, for her work. She was a tireless worker. She had a great sense of humor; she loved to laugh and make people laugh. She was a spiritual person; a longtime TM meditator. She was the Log Lady.”