Jack Nance

Up to the last moment, he was considered for the lead in The Graduate (1967), the part that went to Dustin Hoffman .

Born in Boston of Irish ancestry and raised in Dallas, Jack Nance traveled throughout the country doing children's theater. For eight years, he performed with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Later, he became involved with avant-garde theater. He first met David Lynch in the early 1970s in Philadelphia while he was performing in a local theater, and Lynch decided to cast him as the lead in Eraserhead (1977). Originally, it was to be a six-week shooting project, but due to budget restrictions and technical complications, the production and filming took nearly five years to complete.

Goes by his middle name John in Eraserhead (1977) and by the stage name Jack for the rest of his career.

Nance relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, where he appeared in unusual and widely praised films that were not always considered mainstream Hollywood.

He has appeared in almost every movie by Lynch, including the television series Twin Peaks (1990), usually playing secondary characters or quirky supporting parts.

His second wife, Kelly Van Dyke, aka Nancee Kelly, committed suicide by hanging on November 17, 1991. According to his younger brother Richard Nance, Jack, who was in Bass Lake, California, filming Meatballs 4 at the time, attempted to console her on the phone as she threatened suicide. A lightning storm knocked out the phones in Oregon, subsequently taking over 45 minutes for Nance and the director, Bobby Logan, to find a deputy sheriff who contacted Los Angeles police and the apartment manager. They broke into the cabin and found that she had hanged herself.

His death was the result of a brawl in a parking lot outside a Winchell's Donuts store in South Pasadena near his apartment building during the early morning hours of December 29, 1996. Later that day at around 12 noon, he lunched with friends Leo Bulgarini and Catherine Case at a local restaurant. According to them, Nance had a visible "crescent shaped bruise" under his right eye and when they asked him how he got it, he told them the story about the fight by first quoting: "I told off some homeless kids. I guess I got what I deserved." Nance claimed that at around 5:00 am, he got into a fistfight with two men who he referred to as "long-haired hippies" or "homeless crack-heads" in the parking lot outside the donut store while waiting for it to open. According to Nance, "two homeless bums" walked up to him and begged him for spare change. Nance refused to give them any money by mouthing off to them and saying: "get a job and a haircut", and a brawl ensued where Nance received several punches (and possible kicks) to his face during the fight as he was knocked down to the ground. There were no witnesses to the incident and it remains unclear if Nance had been drinking during that morning or who threw the first punch. He soon went home from the restaurant, complaining of a headache. However, the head injuries he received caused a subdural hematoma, resulting in his death the following morning over 24 hours later after receiving the injuries. Nance died alone in his apartment. His dead body, clad in a robe and pajamas, was discovered on the bathroom floor by Bulgarini who checked up at around noon on December 30. An autopsy revealed that the actor's blood alcohol level was .24 percent at the time of his death.

Made a final, posthumous appearance in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), over twenty years after his death, although this was re-used footage of his first scene in the pilot episode.