Audrey Horne
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Audrey Horne is a fictional character from the ABC television series Twin Peaks, played by Sherilyn Fenn. The character was created by David Lynch. She was introduced in the pilot. The daughter of Ben (Richard Beymer) and Sylvia Horne, sister of Johnny Horne (Robert Bauer) and half-sister of Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle), her storylines focused on her infatuation with the series protagonist Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), infiltrating the brothel/casino One Eyed Jacks and becoming an activist through civil disobedience.
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Appearances
Television
Audrey is 18 years old during the series. She eventually discovers that her father, business magnate Benjamin Horne, was the deceased Laura Palmer's lover. Audrey is labelled a troublemaker and she initially lives up to that expectation. In a memorable scene in the Twin Peaks pilot, she derails one of her father's business deals, worth millions of dollars, by interrupting a meeting of Norwegian investors and telling them about Laura's murder. Although Audrey and Laura were not friends, Audrey says she "kind of loved Laura" because she tutored Audrey's mentally handicapped brother Johnny. During the first season of Twin Peaks, Audrey develops a crush on FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. She tries to help him investigate Laura's murder by infiltrating a Canadian brothel, One-Eyed Jack's, as a hostess. She remains at the brothel for several episodes that bridge the series' first and second seasons, in danger of her life, while she makes some profoundly disturbing discoveries.
In the show's second season, writers planned a serious relationship between Cooper and Audrey, but actor Kyle MacLachlan, who played Cooper, vetoed the plan; he argued that Cooper would not become involved with a high school-age woman. Cooper did, however, become involved with another young woman (Annie Blackburn, about 20 years old) toward the end of the season. Cooper admits to Audrey during their last significant conversation that the real reason why he would not pursue her was for her own safety. In a previous FBI case, he had fallen in love with a young woman who was then murdered. Later in the second season, Audrey flirts with Bobby Briggs and then falls in love with one of her father's business associates, John Justice Wheeler (Billy Zane). She finds evidence to exonerate Cooper of charges pressed after his raid on One-Eyed Jack's. She also lets her father pressure her into entering the Miss Twin Peaks beauty pageant, for which she delivers an impassioned speech in favor of saving endangered species. In the series finale, Audrey is engaged in an act of civil disobedience at the local bank to save the local forest. While she is chained to the door of the bank vault, a bomb explodes inside the vault, a booby trap planted by the late Thomas Eckhardt as an ironic reward in a long treasure hunt. Andrew Packard, Pete Martell, and an elderly banker are the ones closest to the blast, and Audrey's fate is left ambiguous. In the finale, it is suggested that Audrey is actually the half-sister of Donna Hayward, whose biological father turns out to be Benjamin Horne.
Sherilyn Fenn stated in an interactive chat on America Online that, if there had been a third season of the show, her character was slated to have survived the explosion.
Sherilyn Fenn is set to reprise her role as Audrey in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks.
Literature
In the 2016 tie-in book "The Secret History of Twin Peaks" it is revealed that Audrey survived the blast but Pete, Andrew and the banker all perished. It is implied that Pete saved Audrey by shielding her with his body.
Merchandise
Funko released a POP! Vinyl figure of Audrey.
Development
Spin-off series and Mulholland Drive concept
Originally, Audrey was set to have a spin-off series but it eventually was scrapped. The concept for the series turned into David Lynch's groundbreaking film Mulholland Drive. In David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Dennis Lim states that "While working on Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost also toyed with the idea of a spin-off series for Sherilyn Fenn's character, Audrey Horne, that would transplant the backwoods femme fatale to Hollywood. They planned to call it Mulholland Drive. While Lynch began to adapt the idea into a feature script, he abandoned it in order to make Lost Highway.
Theme music
Angelo Badalamenti composed the leitmotifs Audrey's Dance, Audrey's Prayer, and Audrey for the character.
