Obit watch: January 17, 2025.

As promised, David Lynch. NYT. This is the same THR obit link from yesterday, but I think they’ve substantially updated it since I originally posted.

David Lynch PSA for the New York City Department of Sanitation. (Hattip: NYPost.)

Roger Ebert’s one-star review of “Blue Velvet”.

Joan Plowright, actress. IMDB. I feel bad that I don’t have more to say about here, but I just don’t.

Nathalie Dupree, cookbook author and personality. She’s actually someone I’d heard of, but didn’t really have a lot of context for. The obit makes it sound like she would have been a fun person to know, more so in her Diet Coke days.

Ms. Dupree had a particular blend of Southern hospitality and risqué charm. Over the course of her career she was called “the Julia Child of the South,” “the queen of Southern cooking” and “the anti-Martha Stewart.”
She shocked the host Katie Couric by ending an elegant entertaining segment on the “Today” show, in which she prepared an entire pork crown roast, by presenting a supermarket chocolate cake. She filmed episodes of her television show with a red AIDS ribbon pinned to her apron, a bold move in the 1980s, when conservative suburban women made up much of her audience.
“She is one of the few people in my life who seems more like a fictional character than a flesh-and-blood person,” the novelist Pat Conroy wrote in “The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life” (2009), after taking one of Ms. Dupree’s classes. “You never know where Nathalie is going with a train of thought; you simply know that the train will not be on time, will carry many passengers and will eventually collide with a food truck stalled somewhere down the line on damaged tracks.”

Her early television shows, orchestrated solely by Ms. Graubart, were sponsored by a Southern flour company. Ms. Dupree wanted the kitchen segments to run with no edits. With a smear of flour on her face, she might leave ingredients half prepared or forget to add them altogether. She wiped her hands on her apron a lot and once searched around for her diamond ring that had fallen off as she cooked.
“Whatever happens to me is going to happen to you,” she’d tell audiences after a mistake.
“She was a hot mess, and that’s what people loved her for,” Ms. Graubart, who coauthored “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” in 2012 with Ms. Dupree, said in a phone interview.

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