SHERYL LEE



Lee was originally cast as the face (and corpse) of bewitching, self-destructive prom queen Laura Palmer on the equally bewitching and self-destructive TV classic Twin Peaks, yet David Lynch was so captivated by the actress that he created a recurring role for her on the show (as Laura’s doomed cousin Maddie), then later placed her at the center of the feature-length Peaks prequel, Fire Walk With Me, a critically-scorned movie that made Lee (and her iconic character) seem, to many, like a guest who’d overstayed her welcome. And yet, even if you’re one of the haters who viewed the film as an unnecessary, self-indulgent folly (rather than an undervalued masterpiece), take another look at Lee’s performance: yes, she gobbles like a turkey at one point (a moment frequently and too easily mocked), but she also commits herself to the role of an abuse victim on the brink of madness with the kind of frightening, vulnerable intensity that would have earned praise and awards buzz if not for the small screen (and Log Lady) associations. Since her fifteen minutes of fame (and undeserved ridicule), Lee has largely flown beneath the radar in projects more interested in her capacity for physical (rather than emotional) nakedness onscreen, but even so there have been some diamonds in the rough: the innocent in This World, Then The Fireworks, the innocent turned deadly in John Carpenter’s Vampires and, most notably (if least interestingly), in her almost comeback roll as the German girlfriend in Backbeat. Lately, Lee’s found a home back on television (most recently on Dirty Sexy Money...remind me to set my Tivo!), but I’d be fascinated to see what she’d bring to a meaty film role now that she’s been seasoned with all these extra years of rejection, experience and wisdom.

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Most low-budget, independently produced horror movies are cheesy gross-outs designed for the straight-to-video market, and that can make it even harder for a real movie maker who's decided to dip a toe into the scare genre; his work may end up tainted by association. When the writer-director Michael Almeda decided to make Nadja (1994), his oddly poetic comedy about a vampire princess in Brooklyn, he had an additional problem in that the children of the night were becoming so goddamn overexposed; Almeda, who has since become best known for his amazing 2000 Hamlet and his documentaries about the creative process (This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World), was competing for attention with Anne Rice and Francis Ford Coppola, with Jess Weldon and lesser pretenders coming up fast. Seen today, Nadja is a flawed but strikingly inventive, great-looking, and sometimes very funny riff on the mythology of the undead. It's also very evocative of a specific time and place, and I don't mean Transylvania. Almeda cast it with what you might call the Mid-Nineties Indie Film All-Stars: The stunning Elina Löwensohn in the title role, Martin Donovan, Suzy Amis, Jared Harris, Karl Geary and, on the comeback trail, Peter Fonda as the vampire killer Van Helsing. (Fonda, who's just arrived in town after finally dispatching Dracula, is especially funny explaining that staking the old Count was no great challenge: "He was like Elvis at the end. . . The magic was gone, and he knew it.") There's also a cameo by David Lynch, who was one of the movie's producers, as a security guard at the morgue. One line in particular also time-stamps the picture, when Jared Harris, as Nadja's brother, describes an ESP message from his sister as "a psychic fax." If the picture had been made twenty minutes later, he would have said "e-mail."

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