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You never can confidently tell which decisions will prove life-changing and which will absorb into the forgotten past. When she took a role in David Lynch’s secretive new pilot, Twin Peaks, at the end of the 1980s, Sheryl Lee had no reason to doubt the experience would be a career highlight. But she also had no reason to think it would become much more than that. When the Blue Velvet director cast her, based on a photo, in the part of Laura Palmer — the girl-next-door homecoming queen whose offscreen murder and slowly uncovered “double life” anchored the bulk of the show’s archly soapy, interconnected storylines — she was scheduled for four days of shooting before calling it good. Given that Palmer was first introduced to viewers wrapped in plastic and definitely dead, Lee would be needed for only a handful of crucial-for-the-show but minor-for-the-actor tasks: posing for in-character photos, doing a few flashbacks, and then holding still as a corpse while being poked at on a morgue slab and at a cold beach, where her character’s body was initially discovered. The Colorado-raised Lee was living in Seattle at the time she was cast, starring in local plays and studying acting under UW School of Drama professor Mark Jenkins. After finishing work on the Twin Peaks pilot, she went back to the life she’d been leading.

That wouldn’t stick. The show was an immediate hit, and Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost decided to bring Lee back to play Palmer’s cousin Maddy — her exact doppelgänger save for a thick head of wavy brunette hair and oft-worn bookish glasses — and again, in 2017, for a more stylistically austere revival series. No Twin Peaks property ceded as much screen time to Lee, though, as the 1992 prequel movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The film, which depicts Palmer’s final days, has some of the deadpan humor that at times made Twin Peaks a charmingly oddball small-town comedy. Otherwise, it’s more pronouncedly scary and sad, humanely giving dimension to a character that in another series would unceremoniously remain the voiceless cipher of the dead girl whose beauty and tormentedness in life were made equal. 

Read the full feature on South Sound.