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      Stephen Boss, Dancer and Reality TV Star Known as tWitch, Dies at 40

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      Mr. Boss spent nine years with “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” as D.J., guest host and, eventually, an executive producer.Stephen Boss, a charismatic hip-hop dancer and television personality known as tWitch who rose to fame on the reality show “So You Think You Can Dance” before becoming a regular on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” died on Tuesday in a motel room in Los Angeles. He was 40.The death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office.Mr. Boss joined “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2008 as a 25-year-old with a talent for popping — a dance form associated with hip-hop that involves isolating parts of the body with a staccato rhythm — and an ability to make the judges burst into laughter with his facial expressions and theatrics.He soon found himself dancing unfamiliar styles like the waltz and the tango on national television, and he finished the show’s fourth season as runner-up. Later on in the series, Mr. Boss performed a hip-hop duet with Ellen DeGeneres — featuring him as a therapist in a sweater vest and her as his client — that would end up shaping the rest of his career.As a bubbly presence on TV who liked to wear a fedora and often broke into dance, Mr. Boss spent nearly a decade with “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” as D.J., guest host and, eventually, an executive producer. “I count on him to look over at and make silly jokes,” Ms. DeGeneres said in an episode this year, the show’s last. “He’s my pal, he’s my sidekick.”In a statement on Wednesday, Ms. DeGeneres said she was “heartbroken” over the death, calling Mr. Boss “pure love and light.”Stephen Laurel Boss was born on Sept. 29, 1982, in Montgomery, Ala., to Connie Boss Alexander and Sandford Rose. He started dancing as a teenager and earned the nickname tWitch because he could not stop moving in school or in church.“Dance constitutes a lot of the conversation that I have,” Mr. Boss told the website Collider in 2014. “While I’m not a ridiculous wordsmith and I can’t clearly verbalize the things that I’m feeling sometimes, I’d say that I can emote how I feel by dancing, 100 percent of the time, and fearlessly at that.”By the time Mr. Boss made it onto “So You Think You Can Dance,” he had already competed on “Star Search” and the MTV show “The Wade Robson Project,” in addition to more traditional dance training at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.If he had not been chosen for “So You Think You Can Dance,” he said in interviews, he planned to join the Navy. But the show embraced him, and for years he would return to dance with new contestants and serve as a judge.Mr. Boss’s marriage also had its origins on the reality show. After dancing with Allison Holker — a contemporary dancer who had performed on Season 2 — at a party at the end of a later season, they became inseparable.“We danced and we were together, like holding hands the very next day, and never looked back,” Ms. Holker Boss told People magazine this year.Dance was often at the center of their relationship: Mr. Boss proposed while the couple were filming choreography for a Microsoft commercial, and the dance — later posted online — turned into a romantic duet. They married in 2013 and built a significant social media following, hosting a reality TV show and posting both dance videos and peeks into their life raising a family.“Stephen lit up every room he stepped into,” Ms. Holker Boss said in a statement. “He valued family, friends and community above all else, and leading with love and light was everything to him.”In addition to his wife and his parents, Mr. Boss is survived by a son, Maddox; a daughter, Zaia; a stepdaughter, Weslie; a brother, Deondre Rose; a grandfather, Eddy Boss; and two grandmothers, Elnora Rose and Marie Boss.After finding fame as a dancer, Mr. Boss explored an acting career. He appeared in films in the “Step Up” franchise and in the second “Magic Mike” movie. (In his role as Ms. DeGeneres’s sidekick, he had his body hair waxed on her show in preparation for “Magic Mike XXL.”)With Ms. DeGeneres’s show ending this year after 19 seasons, Mr. Boss called his return to “So You Think You Can Dance” as a judge a “full-circle moment” in an interview on the “Today” show. He then put his talk-show charm on display as he gave the hosts dance lessons in salsa, popping and locking, and the robot.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. More

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      Stephen Colbert Doesn’t Want to Editorialize, but He Will

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      Colbert was shocked by a report that 34 lawmakers texted Mark Meadows about subverting the 2020 election. “That is unbelievable — 34 people wanted to talk to Mark Meadows!” he said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.He Gets AroundStephen Colbert was amazed by a report that 34 Republican lawmakers had exchanged text messages with Mark Meadows, the former Trump chief of staff, about overturning the 2020 election results.“That is unbelievable — 34 people wanted to talk to Mark Meadows!” Colbert said on Tuesday night.“These members of Congress communicating with Meadows were — and it’s not my place to editorialize — stupid, evil traitors who were trying to do crimes against democracy, for which they should be punished with decades of jail time.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Turns out the calls were coming from inside the House — and the Senate.” — JIMMY KIMMELJimmy Kimmel said “all the usual suspects” were among the 34, including Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan. “It’s like a gang of Batman’s dumbest enemies,” he said. Another was Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who was said to have written that “we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic!! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!!”“But instead of ‘martial’ he spelled it ‘Marshall,’ like the chain of off-price department stores. And if Marshall Law doesn’t work, we’ll mobilize the TJ Maxxinistas.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Thank God this coup wasn’t planned by people who could solve the Wordle. We’d all be in a lot of trouble right now.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Respecting Marriage Edition)“Today, President Biden hosted a ceremony on the South Lawn to sign a bill that mandates federal recognition for same-sex marriages. When he heard, Mike Pence was like, ‘Barkeep, give me a shot of whole milk. Just leave the whole carton.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Respecting marriage? Wow, he really is undoing all of Trump’s orders.” — SETH MEYERS“That bill passed with strong bipartisan support in the House and Senate. Wow, even the partisanship was bi. That’s really great.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yeah, the bill protects all marriages, unless you’re one of those couples who feed each other in public. Then you’re on your own.” — JIMMY FALLON“That is great news. And I hope you were listening, Alan and Brad. No more excuses. Grandma’s not going to live forever. I booked the Doubletree by the lake for June 9. Get a linen suit.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingSeth Meyers took Lizzo day drinking on Tuesday’s “Late Night.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightTegan and Sara will perform a song from their new album “Crybaby” on Wednesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutSZA revels in mixed emotions on her second studio album. Jemal Countess/Getty ImagesSZA puts complex craftsmanship into songs that sound like spontaneous confessions on her new album, “SOS.” More

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      Stuart Margolin, Emmy Winner for ‘The Rockford Files,’ Dies at 82

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      A sought-after character actor for decades, he worked frequently with James Garner. He also wrote and directed.Stuart Margolin, a character actor best known for playing the sidekick to James Garner’s private detective on the hit series “The Rockford Files,” a role that won Mr. Margolin back-to-back Emmy Awards as best supporting actor in 1979 and 1980, died on Monday in Staunton, Va. He was 82.His family said the cause was complications of pancreatic cancer.Mr. Margolin was all over television from the early 1960s into this century, turning up in episodes of dozens of shows as well as in assorted TV movies. He also had a substantial behind-the-scenes career: He wrote several TV movies and directed episodes of “The Rockford Files,” “The Love Boat,” “Touched by an Angel” and numerous other series. In 1987 he and Ted Bessell shared an Emmy nomination for directing for “The Tracey Ullman Show.”Mr. Margolin’s career was tied to that of Mr. Garner, one of Hollywood’s top stars, at several points. Before “The Rockford Files,” which was seen on NBC from 1974 to 1980, he and Mr. Garner were in “Nichols” (1971-72), a short-lived western; Mr. Garner played the title character, a sheriff, and Mr. Margolin played his deputy.After “Rockford,” the two men were in another western, “Bret Maverick” (1981-82), a sequel to “Maverick,” the show that helped make Mr. Garner a star in the 1950s and early ’60s. Mr. Margolin also directed Mr. Garner in several “Rockford Files” TV movies.“Jim has been better to me than anyone else in my life except my father,” Mr. Margolin was quoted as saying in “The Garner Files,” a 2011 memoir by Mr. Garner, who died in 2014.Mr. Margolin in 1978. His ability to create memorable impressions, often with very little screen time, made him a fixture of casting directors’ call lists. Associated PressMr. Garner may have helped his career along, but it was Mr. Margolin’s ability to create memorable impressions, often with very little screen time, that made him a fixture of casting directors’ call lists. That was true even of his Emmy-winning role as Angel Martin, who once served prison time with Rockford and was both his friend and a thorn in his side.“Stuart Margolin, as Angel, is not on the show every week,” the syndicated columnist Dick Kleiner wrote in 1979. “And even when he is on, mostly he is in for little bits and pieces.”“But,” he added, “Margolin has created a vivid character in Angel, no matter how little he is seen. He is notably sleazy — in mind and body — and that’s what makes him fun.”In his memoir, Mr. Garner gave Mr. Margolin full credit for making the most out of the character.“I confess that I’ve never understood why Rockford likes Angel so much, because he’s rotten to the core,” he wrote. “But there’s something lovable about him. I don’t know what it is, but it’s all Stuart’s doing.”NBC had not wanted Mr. Margolin, Mr. Garner wrote. But he was cast in the pilot, and Angel made several more appearances.“NBC still didn’t want him and they told us point-blank not to use him again,” he wrote. “Then he got an Emmy nomination.”Stuart Margolin was born on Jan. 31, 1940, in Davenport, Iowa, to Morris and Gertrude Margolin. He spent much of his childhood in Dallas, where he learned to golf. His first newspaper mentions were in write-ups of the results of golf tournaments.He became good enough at the sport that, he said, he had scholarship offers from several universities. But he was more interested in acting — he caught the bug when he played Puck in a local production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at age 8 — so, after graduating from a boarding school in Tennessee, he went west to study at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.He appeared in numerous stage productions, and he continued to work in the theater throughout his career. But in 1961 he landed his first TV role, on “The Gertrude Berg Show,” and soon television was dominating his résumé.He achieved a new level of visibility when he landed a role as a regular on “Love, American Style,” a buzz-generating series that debuted in 1969 and on which his brother Arnold was an executive producer.That series consisted of several vignettes per episode, with comic skits in between. He was among the cast members performing those skits. Sample bit: Mr. Margolin is behind the wheel in a car, complaining to someone in the back seat that “every time you fix me up with a chick, she turns out to be a dog.” The camera pans to the passenger seat, where, sitting next to Mr. Margolin, is an actual dog.In a 1981 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Garner said Mr. Margolin’s work on that show caught his attention, especially a skit in which Mr. Margolin had a cell door slammed in his face.“I fell out of my chair,” Mr. Garner said. And he knew he had found his “Nichols” sidekick.“I love comedy and I study comedy and comedians,” Mr. Garner recalled. “I said, ‘That’s the guy.’”Mr. Margolin, who lived in Staunton, is survived by his wife, Patricia Dunne Margolin, whom he married in 1982; his brothers, Arnold and Richard; a sister, Anne Kalina; two stepsons, Max and Christopher Martini; a stepdaughter, Michelle Martini; and four step-grandchildren. His marriage to Joyce Eliason ended in divorce.In addition to acting and directing, Mr. Margolin dabbled in music. In 1980 he released a country-rock album, “And the Angel Sings,” for which he was a co-writer on some of the songs. Reviewing it in The Detroit Free Press, Mike Duffy called it “an album of style, wit and lowdown fun.”“It’s almost as if Soupy Sales and Willie Nelson got together,” he wrote. More

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      How Science Fiction Movies Prepared Us for the Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

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      The promise of a new, bountiful energy source, not to mention the giant lasers, may sound familiar to fans of science fiction and comics.Today we step into the future. And it looks a lot like a movie we’ve all seen.Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced Tuesday that they had made a major breakthrough in studying fusion, a.k.a. the thermonuclear reaction that keeps the sun going. The news, about trying to harness literal star power the likes of which Hollywood could only dream, stirred great hopes because, if replicated and controlled, it could one day provide a bountiful source of carbon-free energy.If that sounds like science fiction, well, that’s because we’ve been amply primed for this discovery in pop culture, where alternative versions of our present and fantastical imaginings of our future have shown us impossible technologies powered by some combination of special effects and incomprehensible jargon.You probably already have some familiarity with fusion thanks to movies.At the end of the 1985 sci-fi classic “Back to the Future,” Dr. Emmett Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, soups up his tricked-out time-traveling DeLorean by feeding trash into a canister called the Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor attached to the top of the car. And in “Spider-Man 2,” from 2004, the well-meaning scientist Dr. Octavius (a.k.a. Doc Ock, played by Alfred Molina) creates a fusion reactor with an artificial sun at the center. But when it gets out of control, so does he, transforming into a villain who aims to re-create the dangerous machine.Pop culture’s fascination with fusion goes beyond a process that sustains robotics and machinery; our culture’s collective dreams of safe, unlimited energy have even been epitomized by some of our heroes.Comic book protagonists like Captain Atom and Doctor Solar have bodies that can manipulate atoms to create blasts of energy. Firestorm, who was a regular in the CW’s Arrowverse, can change the particle structures of any substance and transmute it; and he himself is a kind of metaphor for the power of fusion, in that he was, in his first incarnation, a combination of two different people, Ronnie Raymond (played by Robbie Amell) and Martin Stein (Victor Garber). The DC Comics hero Damage has a body that functions as a biochemical fusion reactor, and then there’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s darling, Tony Stark, an engineer who Einsteins himself a miniature arc reactor (that glowing bit of chest jewelry) to power his Iron Man suit and keep him alive.The New York City of the M.C.U. is transformed by Stark technology, most prominently the arc reactor. Stark Tower appears in various Marvel movies and TV shows as the symbol of an alternate reality in which energy — and possibilities, superheroic or otherwise — are limitless.The same is true in many popular science-fiction universes, like “Star Wars,” where there are mentions of fusion generators and fusion reactors, and “Star Trek,” where the engineering systems of Federation starships use a “fusion reaction subsystem.”The workings of these fictional sciences are functional, plot-wise, but not always precise, clear or accurate. No matter how many times I watch my favorite sci-fi films and series, I still can’t tell a parsec from a cylinder of drugstore plutonium. And even now that fusion energy might be in our future, my relationship with it remains unchanged: Leave science to the scientists and MacGuffins to the writers.As long as we’re not breaking any scientific laws or introducing blatant contradictions, as a viewer I’m just here for the ride. Because it will be some time before we’re using fusion reactors to power our personal supersuits and fly off to boldly go where no sci-fi creator has gone before. Still, the science of today will lead us into a tomorrow where — great Scott! — there is no cap on the possibilities. More

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      The ‘Twin Peaks’ Theme Isn’t Just a Song. It’s a Portal.

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      Angelo Badalamenti, who died at age 85, left behind the bum-bommm that feels like home.Suffering from a case of middle age, I recently decided to learn the piano as an adult. The lesson I played on Monday was the theme from “Twin Peaks” — well, the idiot-proof, one-hand version that my iPad teaching app prepared for me, built around that low, hypnotic pattern. Bum bommm. Bum BOMMM.Later that day, in the sort of coincidence that seems to happen only in dreams and in small, spirit-afflicted logging towns in Washington, came news that the song’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, had died at age 85.Badalamenti was a classically trained composer with a long résumé, including the scores for David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive.” But his memory is secured by those mesmeric notes, which opened the red curtains on Lynch and Mark Frost’s eerie mystery, and which stand above and apart from most music written for television like an ancient evergreen in an old-growth forest.In a recent list of the 100 greatest TV themes ever, Rolling Stone ranked “Twin Peaks” at 35. It would be unfair to use Badalamenti’s passing to dunk on that choice. (Counterpoint: Come on.) But whether or not it is the best theme of all time, it may be the most otherworldly, the most unlike anything that came before it.TV themes before 1990, when “Twin Peaks” premiered, tended to be come-ons or introductions. They whipped up a sense of excitement and adventure, like the theme from “Mission Impossible.” Or they outlined characters and told a story, like Waylon Jennings’s “Good Ol’ Boys” from “The Dukes of Hazzard.”Badalamenti’s theme is not a synopsis. It is not a fanfare. It is a passageway, a portal. It is slow, spare and meditative, even by the relatively languid TV pacing of three decades ago. It tells you to reset your pulse, abandon your expectations and step for an hour into a dark wood where the owls are not what they seem.Angelo Badalamenti was a classically trained composer with multiple film scores to his name. His memory is secured by the opening notes of the “Twin Peaks” theme.Nancy Wegard for The New York TimesThat opening motif seems to be plucked on the strings of an instrument that no human ever played, because in a way it is. According to Badalamenti, it began as a sample on a synthesizer, pitched lower and doubled with another guitar sound. “There’s no synth that has that sound, and it’s much too low to be an electric guitar, and it’s not a bass,” Badalamenti told Vulture in 2016. “We kept that quiet because we didn’t want anyone else to use it.”The resulting sound is simultaneously twangy and chthonic. It seems to vibrate from the earth, from your bones, from inside a tree trunk. It is, like the series, both filled with ghostly dread and saturated with romantic emotion.The theme couples that figure with a wash of dreamy synthesizers. Their interplay sets up contrasts that Lynch and Frost built into their supernatural murder mystery. It’s spooky but also naïve. It’s retro, with echoes of a rockabilly riff, and space-age. (The synthesizers, the critic John Rockwell wrote in The Times in 1990, “invest everything with an electronic glow, as if the music were radioactive.”)The music for “Twin Peaks” had to make realistic and surrealistic sense. It needed to work in a cherry-pie all-American diner and in the anteroom of the underworld. Badalamenti met the challenge in his playful and minimal score for the rest of the series, from the wistful “Laura Palmer’s Theme” to the seductive “Audrey’s Dance” to the jazzy, twitchy “Dance of the Dream Man.”The score played with Americana and pop history, but despite coming out at the dawn of the age of TV irony — “Seinfeld” had premiered a year before — it never winked. Like “Twin Peaks” itself, it meant what it said, even if you could spend your life grasping after that meaning.When Lynch and Frost brought “Twin Peaks” back for a revival in 2017, it was in many ways a different series with a different sound: even more gorgeously and truculently experimental, with an audio palette that leaned heavily on Lynch’s eerie, mechanical sound textures.But as the opening sequence began, there it was again: Bum bommm. Bum BOMMM. TV series are rituals, and those opening notes feel quasi religious, like an “om,” the one true bass line thrumming under eternity.Those notes live somewhere deep in my brain; I could feel that as I clumsily plunked them out on my piano. This is the power of a great theme: However disorienting things might get, on the screen or in life, you can always return to that musical mantra. Angelo Badalamenti is gone now. But his song remains, pulling me ever deeper into the woods. More

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      Adam Sandler to Receive Mark Twain Prize for American Humor

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      The comedian will receive the Kennedy Center’s annual comedy honor at a ceremony in March.Adam Sandler has had a busy 2022: He starred as a basketball scout in a critically acclaimed performance in the Netflix sports drama “Hustle”; he won an honorary Gotham Award, giving a speech that brought the house down; and undertook his first nationwide arena tour in three years. Now, he’ll be able to start off 2023 with at least one sure thing: a comedy prize.The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced on Tuesday that it will recognize the 56-year-old comedian’s satire and activism when it presents him with its 24th Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, given to luminaries who have “had an impact on American society” in ways similar to Twain, at a ceremony on March 19.In his 30-year career, Sandler, who is known for his loopy, lewd sense of humor and amiable charm, has served as a comedian, actor, writer, producer and musician, starring in films like “The Waterboy” (1998), “Grown Ups” (2010) and “Hotel Transylvania” (2012). After getting his start telling jokes in comedy clubs, he shot to fame as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” then went on to release blockbuster albums and make critically panned comedies. Though he’s also racked up critically acclaimed star turns in the Safdie brothers’ 2019 dark comedy “Uncut Gems” and “Hustle,” among others.Deborah F. Rutter, the president of the Kennedy Center, said in a statement that Sandler had “created characters that have made us laugh, cry and cry from laughing.”Previous winners of the Mark Twain Prize include Jon Stewart, Bill Murray, Dave Chappelle, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Carol Burnett and Ellen DeGeneres. The award has been presented annually since 1998, excepting the pandemic years 2020 and 2021. More

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      Late Night Isn’t Amused by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jan. 6 Joke

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      The Republican congresswoman said that if she and Steve Bannon had planned the Capitol riot, “we would have won.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Coulda Shoulda WouldaAt a Republican gala on Saturday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made a joke about the Jan. 6 riot: “If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won.” She added, “Not to mention, it would have been armed.”“You see, the joke is, conservatives are such bloodthirsty psychopaths, if they had actually planned the insurrection on the Capitol, it would have been way more violent,” Seth Meyers said on Monday. “That’s like if Holiday Inn ran an ad that said, ‘If “White Lotus” took place here, a lot more people would have died.’”“Now, let me just say if I saw Greene with a gun, I would definitely be scared, but I refuse to believe Steve Bannon knows how to use one. No one who layers polo shirts is good with a firearm. In a way, they’d make fun partners in a buddy cop movie.” — SETH MEYERS“So, by ‘we’ she means the rioters, and by ‘would have won’ she means ‘overthrown the government’?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“[Imitating Marjorie Taylor Greene] If I had been in charge of invading my own office, Mike Pence wouldn’t just look like a ghost, he’d be one!’” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Keep Your Day Job, Elon Edition)“Elon is being slammed for a tweet he posted yesterday that said, ‘My pronouns are prosecute and Fauci.’ Fauci was like, ‘Yep, much like a Tesla battery, Elon’s on fire.’” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s like a joke generated by A.I. — it makes no sense. The structure is wrong, it doesn’t rhyme with anything, there are too many syllables. It’s exactly the kind of joke you would expect from a guy who named his son after the bottom row of an eye chart.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yeah, you could tell Fauci wasn’t having it because he wrote back, ‘Congrats on making Twitter the Johnson & Johnson vaccine of social media.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingMichelle Obama exchanged Christmas gifts with Jimmy Kimmel on his Monday night show.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightStanley Tucci will pop by “The Tonight Show” on Tuesday.Also, Check This OutSteve Tientcheu in “Les Misérables.”Julien Magre/Amazon StudiosMovies about soccer are often eclectic and at times unclassifiable, drawing from multiple continents and genres. More

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      Angelo Badalamenti, Composer for ‘Twin Peaks,’ Is Dead at 85

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      The filmmaker David Lynch turned to his haunting work again and again, for “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” and other neo-noir films.Angelo Badalamenti, an internationally sought-after composer who wrote the hypnotic theme to “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch’s 1990s television drama series, and the music for five Lynch films, including “Blue Velvet” (1986), died on Sunday at his home in Lincoln Park, N.J. He was 85.His niece Frances Badalamenti confirmed the death. She said she did not know the cause.Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano behind Isabella Rossellini when she sang “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club in Lumberton, N.C., a flower-filled, picket-fence kind of town with a very dark side. Aside from the title song, a Bobby Vinton hit from 1963, he had composed much of the film’s music.He also wrote the music for Mr. Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir mystery “Mulholland Drive” and had a small role in the film as one of two mobster brothers who spits out his espresso in a conference-room scene.His best-known work was the “Twin Peaks” theme, recognizable from its first three ominous, otherworldly notes. He won the 1990 Grammy for best instrumental pop performance for the number, which was, according to the Allmusic website, “dark, cloying and obsessive — and one of the best scores ever written for television.”In 2015, a Billboard writer described the theme as “gorgeous and gentle one second, eerie and unsettling the next.” It was, according to Rolling Stone, the “most influential soundtrack in TV history.”Mr. Badalamenti didn’t really disagree.“Music and composing — I almost feel a little guilty about it — come so easily for me,” he told the north New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2004. “It’s like the well doesn’t seem to run dry.”Angelo Daniel Badalamenti was born on March 22, 1937, in Brooklyn. A second-generation Italian-American, he was the second of four children of John Badalamenti, a fish market owner, and Leonora (Ferrari) Badalamenti, a seamstress.Growing up in the Bensonhurst section, he started piano lessons at 8 but quit because he preferred playing stickball outdoors with his friends. He took it up again at his older brother’s insistence and came to appreciate the piano when girls admired his playing. He was soon accompanying vocalists and other acts at Catskills resorts during summers off from high school and college.Mr. Badalamenti attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music in 1960.His first job was teaching the seventh grade in a public school, but when he wrote a musical Christmas program for his students, members of the Board of Education saw the production and told the local public TV station Channel 13 about it. The station videotaped and broadcast the show, and the Monday after Christmas, Mr. Badalamenti got a call from a Manhattan music publisher with a job offer.Nina Simone recorded some of his first songs, including “I Hold No Grudge,” in 1965. Nancy Wilson sang “Face It, Girl, It’s Over” (1968).Mr. Badalamenti got started in films by writing music for “Gordon’s War,” a 1973 blaxploitation film. Ossie Davis, the director, wanted an all-black crew, all “brothers,” he said. Mr. Badalamenti pointed to Sicily on a world map. “You do seven strokes from Sicily, and you’re in Africa,” he said he told Mr. Davis. “I may not be your brother, but I’m certainly your cousin!”Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano when Isabella Rossellini sang “Blue Velvet” in the 1986 David Lynch movie of the same title. De Laurentis Group/Courtesy Everett CollectionHe and Mr. Lynch met when Mr. Badalamenti was called in as a vocal coach for Ms. Rossellini on the set of “Blue Velvet.”Jamie Stewart, whose band Xiu Xiu did an album of “Twin Peaks” music, saw Mr. Badalamenti’s Lynchian work in a historical midcentury context: a postwar world where everything appeared to be sunshine and pastels but where the evil unleashed by World War II still lurked.“It’s very romantic but can be terrifying,” Mr. Stewart said of the music, speaking to The Guardian in 2017. “It has a violence and a sincere sentimentality — sadness but not despair.”Mr. Lynch, who described Mr. Badalamenti’s work as having “a deep and powerful beauty,” said that he and the composer would be entirely in sync in expressing Mr. Lynch’s vision for a film. “I sit next to him and I talk to him, and he plays what I say,” he said in an interview with the American Film Institute.As Mr. Badalamenti explained on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” that’s how he wrote “Laura Palmer’s Theme” for “Twin Peaks.” Sitting beside him at his Fender Rhodes keyboard, Mr. Lynch began talking.“It’s the dead of night,” Mr. Badalamenti said. “We’re in a dark wood. There’s a full moon out. There are sycamore trees that are gently swaying in the wind. There’s an owl.”The words became notes that evoked the story of a murdered homecoming queen in the Pacific Northwest.They collaborated again and again, on the films “Wild at Heart” (1990), “Lost Highway” (1997) and “The Straight Story” (1999), in addition to “Mulholland Drive.” There were five iterations of “Twin Peaks,” including the film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992) and an 18-episode sequel series (2017).In between, Mr. Badalamenti wrote for a wide variety of movies, among them “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (1987), “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), “Naked in New York” (1993), “The City of Lost Children” (1995), “A Very Long Engagement” (2004) and “The Wicker Man” (2006).He used what he called his “classical chops” to score “Stalingrad” (2013), a wartime love story set against that pivotal 1942 battle. It was an enormous box office success in Russia, where it was produced.One of his longest-running projects was the music for the PBS program “Inside the Actors Studio,” which was on the air from 1994 through 2019, hosted by James Lipton.Writer’s block was rarely a problem for Mr. Badalamenti, but composing a torch-lighting theme for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona had him stumped. The notes finally came to him in the shower, he recalled, and he hurried downstairs to his piano. “I wrote it in half an hour,” he said.He received the Henry Mancini Award from Ascap, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and a Lifetime Achievement honor from the World Soundtrack Awards.Mr. Badalamenti is survived by his wife, Lonny; his daughter, Danielle; and four grandchildren. His son, André, died in 2012.His niece Frances interviewed him for a magazine, The Believer, in 2019. He remembered being drawn to film noir in his youth, telling her, “The haunting sounds have been there, the off-center instrumentals, ever since I was a child.”Alex Traub More