Singer Julee Cruise, who brought a memorable and airy voice to David Lynch’s project, will release an instrumental version on Thursday, the theme of Lynch’s cult-loving TV show, Twin Peaks. died. In Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She was 65 years old.
Her husband, Edward Grinan, said the cause was suicide. She said she was suffering from depression and lupus.
Cruz had a career on Broadway in the early 1980s when chance struck: she met a composer. Angelo Badalamenti When they worked on the show together.
“I was in this country and western musical in East Village,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. Angelo was playing the music for the show and we became friends. “
A few years later, Badaramenti was engaged to Isabella Rossellini’s early-stage vocal coach in the 1986 Lynch movie “Blue Velvet,” and wrote the score for that movie as well. rice field. .. Lynch and Badaramenti wrote songs for movies that needed a vocalist.
“Angelo asked me to find someone to sing a song on the soundtrack. “Mystery of love” But he didn’t like any of the singers I recommended, “she told Chronicles. “He wanted something romantic like a dream. I said,” Let me do it. “
Cruz always thought of himself as a “belt player” (she once played Janis Joplin in a musical review called “Beehive”), but the voice that came up for the “mystery of love” Something completely different, mysterious, and faint. And it was perfect for other Lynch-Badaramenti compositions. One writer called her style “Angel on Quardes Vocals”.
The three soon collaborated on Cruz’s first album, “Floating Into the Night.”This album includes “Mysteries of Love” “Fall.” In addition, he cooperated with the stage production “Industrial Symphony No. 1” held at the New Music America Festival held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1989, and Mr. Cruz played in an elaborate set including an old car. Did.
“Often Ms. Cruz floated far above the stage, like a bleached blonde angel in a prom,” John Pairless wrote in a New York Times review. “At some point, her body plunged to the floor and was stuffed into the trunk of a car by a helmeted worker. Then she reappeared and headed for the video camera,” It’s me in your heart. I sang. Ten choir girls in gold glitter danced next to her image on the TV screen. “
In April of the following year, “Twin Peaks” was premiered at ABC, and the instrumental version of “Falling” was released nationwide as the theme. Cruz appeared as a roadhouse singer in the pilot and subsequent episodes.
The show quickly became a hot topic on television, and in May 1990, Cruz was to appear on “Saturday Night Live.” She wasn’t part of the original lineup, but the controversial comic Andrew Dice Clay (he described himself as “the most vulgar and vicious comic ever to walk the face of the planet.” The cast member who refused to appear in the episode and dropped out of the former musical guest, Sinéad O’Connor, who was the scheduled host and led to a protest from at least one person. Noradan.
Mr. Cruz was one of two acts summoned on her behalf. Mr. Grinnan In a telephone interview, Mr. Cruz, who is not yet well known, said he had to skip work because he was working as a waitress at the time. But he said she was ill and didn’t call.
“She said she called a celebrity,” he said.
“Twin Peaks” gave Cruz a wide range of exposures, but Grinan said he found the stint tour on the B-52 in the 1990s particularly enjoyable. When Wilson took a break from the band, she replaced her former member, Cindy Wilson.
“It was probably the happiest performance in her life,” Grinnan said.
Julian Cruise was born on December 1, 1956 in Creston, Iowa, to Wilma and Dr. John Cruise. Her father was a dentist and her mother was his office manager.
Mr. Cruz was a French horn music genius, and his husband said he had a degree in musical instrument music from Drake University in Iowa. He said she applied the classic French horn delicacy and wording to her voice that she came up with for the Lynch project.
However, after graduating, I found it more attractive to act and sing than to play in an orchestra. She went to Minneapolis, a theater-friendly city, where she moved to New York around 1983 after she played for a children’s theater company for several years.
After “Twin Peaks,” Cruz made another album, “The Voice of Love,” (1993) with Lynch and Badaramenti. She also continued her acting. Grinnan said it was her performance in the 1991 Off-Broadway musical “The Return to the Forbidden Planet” that drew the attention of the B-52. Mel Gassou reviewed the show in the Times and said she stood out.
“Only Julee Cruise will liven up the show with a musical personality,” he writes. “She remembers singing in’Twin Peaks’, but her script puts her behind the scenes in most of her first acting, but she’s fine and funny.”
Cruz later toured with Bobby McFerrin and worked with electronic musicians like Marcus Schmicler. In 2003, when she starred in the musical “Radiant Baby” about graffiti artist Keith Haring, she achieved her long-standing goal of playing at a public theater in New York.
It was a tough mission. As the Times wrote, she played “Andy Warhol, Herring’s mother, a devilish nurse, and a critic similar to Susan Sontag.”
The reporter asked which role was the most difficult.
“The costumes will change,” she said. “I am the oldest in this cast.”
Mr. Cruz alternated between Manhattan and Berkshire homes. She survives by her sister, Kate Cohen, in addition to her husband, who married in 1988.
Cruz replayed her role in “Twin Peaks” in Lynch’s 1992 movie, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” and an episode of the restart of the Showtime television series a quarter of a century later. .. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2017, she looked back on her long “Twin Peaks” ride.
“It was a lot of fun to participate in something that was just booming!” She said. “You didn’t know it would be. What a wonderful and amazing life will take you.”