Nostalgia: the women of Twin Peaks, part 2: Sherilyn Fenn.

Sherilyn Fenn, like her Twin Peaks castmate Madchen Amick (covered in part 1 of this series), did one of the greatest nude scenes in history. In fact, you could make a good argument for awarding the #1 spot to her performance in Two Moon Junction, competing with Eva Green in The Dreamers, Daddario in True Detective and a handful of others.

There are several factors that make her career quite different from Amick’s:

(1) Fenn also did many other terrific nude scenes.

(2) Fenn did most of her nudity, including her all-timer, before she was on Twin Peaks.

(3) Although Amick was credible as a high school senior (she was 19 when Twin Peaks began), Fenn was easily old enough to be an experienced teacher in that school (she’s almost six years older than Amick) – Fenn was then competing for the Jason Priestley award for “oldest high school kid.” Fenn was 26 and still in school when season two of Twin Peaks ended. Priestley was only 23 when his TV class graduated. According to the comments, there were (at least) three high school kids played by actresses in their thirties: Gabrielle Carteris on 90210, Stacy Dash in the Clueless series, and Stockard Channing in Grease. While the former two were kinda-sorta believable, Channing looked every bit her age and then some. On the satirical side, Steve Buscemi was about 54 when he went undercover as a high school student and uttered the immortal line, “How do you do, fellow kids?” To be fair, Buscemi probably looked like he was 54 when he actually was in high school.

(4) Fenn took a 23-year break in compiling her nudography, did no nudity in her 30s or 40s, then came charging back with two good nude scenes in season six of Shameless, when she was already in her voluptuous 50s.

Two Moon Junction is an amazing redneck raunch-fest (my review of the film), competing with Road House to be the Citizen Kane of that genre. It scores a perfect zero at Rotten Tomatoes, which makes me love it even more! In addition to Fenn’s epic performance, this film featured additional female nudity from Kristy McNichol, and in the full-screen version, a full erection from Richard Tyson!

True Blood (1989)

Crime Zone (1989)

Meridian (1990)

Backstreet Dreams (1990)

Boxing Helena (1993)

Shameless (s6e7, 2016)

Shameless (s6e8, 2016)

Also in this series:

Part 1 covers Madchen Amick;

Part 3 covers Sheryl Lee

Part 4 covers Lara Flynn Boyle

Part 5 covers Joan Chen

Part 6 covers Heather Graham

Part 7 covers Anne Gaybis

Part 8 covers Moira Kelly

Incidentally, when I post these collections to the Fun House, there are film clips for all of the entries.