Sherilyn Fenn (born Sheryl Ann Fenn; February 1, 1965) is an American actress. She played Audrey Horne on the television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991, 2017) for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award.
She also had film roles in Wild at Heart (1990), Of Mice and Men (1992), Boxing Helena (1993) and The United States of Leland (2003) and appeared in the television series Rude Awakening (1998–2001), Shameless (2016), and Shining Vale (2022).
Early life
Fenn was born Sheryl Ann Fenn on February 1, 1965, in Detroit, Michigan. She comes from a family of musicians: her mother is keyboard player Arlene Quatro, her aunt is singer Suzi Quatro, and her grandfather, Art Quatro, was a jazz musician. Her father, Leo Fenn, managed rock bands including Suzi Quatro's The Pleasure Seekers, Alice Cooper, and The Billion Dollar Babies. Fenn is of Italian and Hungarian descent on her mother's side, and Irish and French descent on her father's. She was raised Catholic.
Fenn frequently traveled with her mother and two older brothers before the family settled in Los Angeles when she was 17. Not wanting to start with a new school again, Fenn dropped out after her junior year and decided to pursue acting, enrolling at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. In 1987, she joined Depp in a season-one episode of 21 Jump Street called "Blindsided".
Fenn has described many of these early films as sexploitation films "where directors tried to convince [her] to appear naked after the contract was signed." In a February 1993 interview she explained:
Fenn landed her first starring role, as an engaged heiress to an old Southern family who falls for carnival worker Richard Tyson, in Zalman King's erotic drama film Two Moon Junction, after which she wanted to hide for a year: Two Moon Junction was meant to be Fenn's big break, but the film turned into another sexploitation film.