It’s not every day that a cult icon dies. For Catherine E. “Log Lady” Coulson, that day came on September 28th, the unfortunate cause being of cancer. Beloved as one of Twin Peaks’ most mysterious and campiest characters, Coulson was an accomplished actress outside of the lauded series as well.
Additionally, she appeared in films like The Amputee, also a Lynch collaboration, in which she plays a woman frantically writing a letter while her nurse (played by Lynch) attends to her stumpy legs (again, trees are at play in her work). It is narratives like these that made Coulson a true original in terms of her willingness to embrace kitsch without any sense of irony. Perhaps it had something to do with with being born in Oregon and raised in California that imbued her with such liberality and calmness.
Elsewhere, she dabbled in the theater with roles in plays put on by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in her hometown. And yet, in spite of having “branched out” from the Log Lady role on more than one occasion, she will always be one of the few actors to have made a legendary name for herself based on one character. Apart from Paul Reubens, very few others hold this remarkable distinction. So throw a log on the fire to celebrate Coulson, and, remember, her log does not judge–except with regard to how the Twin Peaks reboot is going to function without its caretaker.
