Rebekah Del Rio, the virtuosic singer best known for her forlorn Spanish-language rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in David Lynch’s 2001 film “Mulholland Drive,” died on June 23 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 57.

Her death was confirmed by the Los Angeles County medical examiner, who said the cause was under investigation. Ms. Del Rio disclosed in 2018 that a malignant tumor in her brain had been surgically removed. In her final months, she told friends that the cancer had returned.

In a career marked by misfortune and tragedy, Ms. Del Rio, a self-taught vocalist, never made it beyond the music industry’s revolving door. But her transcendent vibrato found a home in a surreal corner of Hollywood occupied by Mr. Lynch.

One day in the mid-1990s, Ms. Del Rio, a young country singer, arrived at Mr. Lynch’s Los Angeles home for an introductory meeting arranged by their mutual agent, Brian Loucks. The instructions Mr. Loucks gave her were simple: Show up on time, look cute and be ready to perform “Llorando,” her a cappella version of Mr. Orbison’s “Crying.”

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Dressed head to toe in light blue, she sang until Mr. Lynch cut her off halfway through. He ushered her into his home recording studio, where she recorded the song in a single take.

“Ding dang, Rebekah Del Rio, that was aces!” she recalled him saying.

That recording would be heard in a pivotal scene in “Mulholland Drive,” at a fictional nightclub called Club Silencio. Ms. Del Rio, who is introduced as “La Llorona de Los Angeles,” emerges onstage from behind a velvet curtain wearing a dark red minidress, with smudged mascara and a crystalline teardrop under her right eye.

She is seen at various moments, standing before a microphone and, in close-up photos, singing expressively. The center photo shows the two actresses sitting side by side.

A montage of the pivotal scene in “Mulholland Drive” in which Ms. Del Rio sings “Llorando,” her mournful a cappella version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” while characters in the audience played by Laura Harring (at left in center photo) and Naomi Watts listen transfixed.NBC Universal/StudioCanal, montage by The New York Times

In the scene, her singing rattles the film’s protagonists, Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring). When Ms. Del Rio abruptly collapses, her singing continues to echo in the nightclub, revealing that the character was lip syncing. The moment marks the film’s shift to a more nightmarish reality.

“Mulholland Drive,” a neo-noir mystery, was nominated for a Palme d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where Mr. Lynch, who died in January at 78, shared the award for best director with Joel Coen (for “The Man Who Wasn’t There”). The film, which also earned Mr. Lynch an Oscar nomination for best director in 2002, has ranked among the greatest films of the 21st century in lists by the BBC, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter and, most recently, The New York Times: In separate polls, Hollywood figures and readers both placed it at No. 2.

The Club Silencio scene is considered one of the most indelible in Mr. Lynch’s body of work. In a 2001 review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that the ballad was “sung stunningly,” giving the movie “an expressionistic flourish.” Rolling Stone in 2017 said the film hinged on Ms. Del Rio’s “extraordinarily strange performance.”

While “Mulholland Drive” raised her profile for a time — she often spoke of the professional opportunities it afforded her — her music career never really took off.

In 1994, she moved to Nashville, where she signed with Giant Records and recorded an album, “Nobody’s Angel.” But the promotional tour was canceled after she was in a car accident, and the album was never released. She made a second album for the label, but Giant was bought out by Warner Records in 2001, and that album was shelved as well.

Soon after, Ms. Del Rio returned to Los Angeles and recorded the album “All My Life/Toda Mi Vida,” which she released independently in 2011.

In Los Angeles, she also reconnected with Mr. Lynch, collaborating with him on “No Stars,” a poem he wrote that she turned into a bilingual ballad. She included the song on “Love Hurts Love Heals,” another album she self-released, also in 2011, two years after her 23-year-old son, Phillip C. DeMars, died of cancer.

“My voice lends itself to that sadness,” she told The Guardian in 2022, on the tail end of her tour marking the 20th anniversary of “Mulholland Drive.” “I carry a lot of that grief inside.”

She was born Rebekah Coronado on July 10, 1967, in San Diego County. Little information about her upbringing or survivors was immediately available.

She adopted the surname Del Rio early in her career and trained herself to sing vibrato by listening to Linda Ronstadt; she also loved the music of the Carpenters and Dolly Parton.

As a young artist in Los Angeles, Ms. Del Rio sang in talent shows and country bars, often ending performances with an a cappella cover of “Crying.” In the early 1990s, she approached Thania Sanz, a Venezuelan singer-songwriter, with $100 and a request: to write Spanish-language lyrics for the ballad. The song became a crowd favorite, gaining the attention of Mr. Loucks, the agent, and landing Ms. Del Rio her initial record deal.

After “Mulholland Drive,” she made brief appearances in several movies, including the crime drama “Sin City” (2005) and a black-comedy thriller, “Southland Tales” (2006), as well as in Mr. Lynch’s eerie web sitcom, “Rabbits” (2002), pieces of which were used in his film “Inland Empire” (2006). She also recorded songs with Danny Elfman, Heather Holley and Il Divo, a vocal quartet. And in 2017 she sang “No Stars” for an episode of the TV series “Twin Peaks.”

Her final performance, at a charity event in Los Angeles, was on June 14.

Ms. Del Rio married Steve Eugene Demars when she was 18; they later divorced. In 2009, soon after the death of their son, she married Eric Skotnes, a muralist; they separated in 2014 and divorced in 2023.

Ms. Del Rio lamented the difficulties of a life in the arts in a 2022 interview with “Creamed Corn and the Universe,” another podcast focused on “Twin Peaks.”

“It’s hard being a woman of a certain age and weight and demographic to stay relevant,” she said. “You struggle, you struggle, then you get something really big, and then it’s more struggle.”

She added: “Why can’t I stay on top for just a little bit?”

That same year, after the death of Angelo Badalamenti, Mr. Lynch’s longtime composer, Ms. Del Rio reminisced on social media about his reaction to her performance of “Llorando.”

“How do you do that?” he asked her.

“It’s pain and grief, Angelo,” she told him. “We call it llanto.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 12, 2025, Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Rebekah Del Rio, 57, Singer Who Made Indelible Mark in ‘Mulholland Drive’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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