Mädchen Amick

Mädchen Amick was born December 12, 1970 in Reno, Nevada to a musician and a medical office manager. She's 1/2 German, 1/4 Norwegian and 1/4 Swedish, if you want to start your own breeding program and were interested in the ingredients. Mädchen is German for "girl." It's pronounced "maid-shen" and "was chosen by her parents because they wanted an unusual name." She was raised in Sparks, Reno's twin city, and "encouraged by her parents to follow her own creative instincts where she learned .. the piano, bass, violin and guitar as well as .. tap, ballet, jazz and modern dancing." 

I've mentioned that the song I'd watch anyone do a serious karaoke version of is "Total Eclipse of the Heart." I haven't decided what my choice for interpretive dance would be. The frontrunner is "Somebody to Love" by Queen but after seeing this I'm willing to consider "Strong As I Am" by The Prime Movers. There are no videos of Robert McQueen High School's Modern Dance Team (the Lancers) circa 1988 on YouTube, but if there were Mädchen Amick wouldn't be on them because she dropped out of school a year earlier "to move to Los Angeles to model and act." 

Would it have looked like this if she had been in such a video?

No. Tanya dancing to a tape of "Do You Love Me" by The Contours is the least plausible scene in Sleepwalkers and that's a movie with werecats and death-by-corn-on-the-cob. Mädchen Amick dancing to it in 1988 wouldn't be as strange since it was a year after Dirty Dancing but "Do You Love Me" wasn't on that film's soundtrack release so it would've been something like "Hungry Eyes" by Eric Carmen. Now that I say that a 17-year-old Mädchen Amick dancing to "Hungry Eyes" in a park in Reno would be a great YouTube video. I'm sorry that it doesn't exist. (The first result for "madchen amick" on YouTube is "Mädchen Amick takes off her panties." The featured result is a tribute video set to Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful." 584 results for "madchen amick." 6,860 results for "you are so beautiful tribute." It's an impersonal choice.) 

Except for Sleepwalkers I haven't seen her dance in a movie (tap-dancing, appearing as a ballerina, jazz-handsing or in the modern style) and I've never seen her play the piano, bass, violin or guitar so I read that less as her parents encouraging her to follow her own creative instincts than them putting her in a room with a bunch of instruments on one side and hardwood flooring and a ballet mirror on the other and seeing if anything took. It didn't, but when she looked in that mirror she must've thought "I like what I see here. I should move to Los Angeles." The following is an account of what happened next. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation "The Dauphin" (1989)

She worked as a model for Elite. Her specialty was looking back over her shoulder while holding a drink

or pretending to strangle herself. 

She was "one of hundreds of actresses who were specifically auditioned for a role as Wesley Crusher's girlfriend .. She lost the competition to Jaime Hubbard, but appeared on the episode as her friend and bodyguard." 

There are two large gaps in my geek background. I didn't read comic books growing up and I wasn't a Star Trek fan. So, when I skipped through "The Dauphin" on Netflix looking for her scenes I was confused when "Teenage Girl / Anya" looked like Mädchen Amick in one shot 

and this 

in the next. Then I said "Eh, Star Trek" and shrugged. Then I remembered the reason you're reading this is you want me to spend my time finding these things out so you don't have to so: "Anya" is a shapeshifting alien. Mädchen Amick is her "Teenage Girl" form. She's in one scene. 

Baywatch "Panic at Malibu Pier" (1989) 

The pilot episode is available on Disc 5 of Season 1 on DVD from Netflix but I'm not renting Disc 5 of Season 1 of Baywatch and Hector hasn't seen it so here's LavigneLove from the U.K. with an IMDb User Review: 

"As it is the first ever episode, it at least has some more plot development than the later episodes which were all about just showing off beach flesh. Madchen Amick made her screen debut in this (just after a small role in Star Trek TNG) and she looks just as stunning as she does in 'Twin Peaks.' She has a beauty in this that takes it to another level beyond the typical blond beach chick. She also adds a darker edge to the film as a disturbed girl who falls for one of the lifeguards. Strangely, this movie version does involve some topless shots of a woman being photographed (and also another saucy scene in a beach tent) which I cannot imagine the network could show at a prime time hour. Maybe these scenes were added for the video release." 

I know LavigneLove wants me to think that if I rent "Panic at Malibu Pier" it'll end with Amick promising to catch someone with her Death Bag only for David Hasselhoff to run in yelling "Like Hell!" and shoot her but I'm still not putting it in my queue. All I'll ever see of it is this clip (it's set to "The Boy from Ipanema" and that's as random as anything Michael Anderson does in Twin Peaks): 

"The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now Helô Pinheiro), a fifteen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in the fashionable Ipanema district in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Daily, she would stroll past the popular Veloso bar-café, not just to the beach ('each day when she walks to the sea'), but in the everyday course of her life. She would sometimes enter the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother and leave to the sound of wolf-whistles. In the winter of 1962, the composers watched the girl pass by the bar, and it is easy to imagine why they noticed her—Helô was a 173-cm (five-foot eight-inch) brunette, and she attracted the attention of many of the bar patrons. Since the song became popular, she has become a celebrity.

In Revelação: a verdadeira Garota de Ipanema (Revealed: The Real Girl from Ipanema) Moraes wrote she was: 'the paradigm of the young Carioca: a golden teenage girl, a mixture of flower and mermaid, full of light and grace, the sight of whom is also sad, in that she carries with her, on her route to the sea, the feeling of youth that fades, of the beauty that is not ours alone—it is a gift of life in its beautiful and melancholic constant ebb and flow.'" 

Parker Stevenson?

The Great American Sex Scandal / Jury Duty (1990-ABC) 

Hector R. Hecht's review: 

"Sanford Lagelfost (Bronson Pinchot) is an accountant on trial for embezzlement. The voir dire process narrows the jury pool to a group of twelve not-so-ordinary citizens which includes Phil Beckman (Alan Thicke), a businessman; Abby Greyhouwsky (Lynn Redgrave), a community organizer; Rita Burwald (Heather Locklear), a prostitute; Carlucci (Stephen Baldwin), who works in a restaurant but tells everyone he's an entrepreneur; Harold Griffith (William G. Schilling), a retired teacher and widower; and Miss Doddsworth (Mädchen Amick), a spoiled rich girl. Amick doesn't have a single line of dialogue in the first thirty minutes or so of this TV movie, but that's primarily because she has a pair of large headphones that she never takes off and so no one bothers to talk to her. When she finally does open her mouth, it's to urge her fellow jurors to speed things along by going ahead and declaring the defendant guilty, because anyone who's stupid enough to be arrested deserves to be executed and exported (does she mean deported, or is there a market overseas for accountant meat?). 

Then one night, after the judge (Reginald VelJohnson) orders that the jury be sequestered, she wanders out into the...lobby, I guess, of the hotel they're all staying in and starts bitching about how bored she is to Harold, who used to be a teacher and is therefore full of inspiring bits of wisdom. Harold tells her he just lost his wife and was forced to retire from his job, so she should just perk up. And so she does. Like most of the characters in this film do at one point or another, Miss Doddsworth undergoes a dramatic (and more or less instantaneous) transformation. After her talk with Harold, she's social, enthusiastic, and she no longer believes people should be executed for being stupid enough to be arrested (though she still thinks they should be exported). She even helps to kick the shit out of a pimp who's been harassing Rita. At the end of the film, the jurors are all best pals. They're so close that they're the only ones who attend Phil's and Abby's wedding (other than Judge VelJohnson, who presides over the ceremony)."

A collage of Mädchen Amick in TGASS/JD. Pick out your favorite. Is it Miss Doddsworth on barbiturates (third from the right on the top)? Miss Doddsworth convincing someone not to jump (one over)? Or Miss Doddsworth considers the evidence (bottom left)? Other questions: How does that white and orange top not slide down, shoulder adhesive? Why is a trial for embezzlement The Great American Sex Scandal? Is "It's like Twelve Angry Men, only instead of Henry Fonda it has Alan Thicke" the Superlative for Least Enticing Actor Substitution? 

Don't Tell Her It's Me / The Boyfriend School (1990) 

I'm starting the count on Mädchen Amick films with multiple titles: two. 

"Gus Kubicek (played by [Steve] Guttenberg) is a depressed and overweight cartoonist who recently won a battle against Hodgkin’s disease. His caring sister Lizzie Pots ([Shelley] Long), a nosy romance novelist, responds to his sadness by trying to set him up with a suitable woman. Yet to do so she must make him seem more dynamic and attractive. When Gus falls in love with Emily ([Jami] Gertz), he adopts the persona of Lobo Marunga, a leather-clad biker from New Zealand."

IMDb's 4jfmn4e02: "Kyle MacLachlan [as "Trout," Emily's boyfriend] is a very funny two-timer in an off-handed way that is never affected and actually humorous. Not to be overlooked is beautiful American-born Madchen Amick, Trout's secret playmate, who is actually half German, a quarter Norwegian, and a quarter Swedish." If someone asked me to talk about Mädchen Amick's role I'd fall back on the division of her ethnicity, too. "What part did Amick play? Kyle MacLachlan's secret girlfriend. Did you know she went to Robert McQueen High School in Nevada?" For Dale Cooper/Shelly Johnson shippers. 

I'm Dangerous Tonight (1990-USA Network) 

IMDb's melvelvit-1: "The Animism professor at Tiverton College finds a sacrificial cloak hidden in an ancient Aztec altar and goes on a homicidal rampage before committing suicide. Soon after, a campus co-ed (TWIN PEAKS' Madchen Amick) buys the ceremonial cloth at an estate sale and turns it into a ravishing red cocktail dress that removes sexual inhibition and triggers another murder wave before being stolen from the morgue…"

(Why is the delivery guy so well-informed on the history of the Aztec sacrificial altar he's dropping off?) Directed by Tobe Hooper ("Chainsaw" from Summer School pronunciation: "toe-bay huppert"). Anthony Perkins plays a helpful Psychology professor. It isn't available on DVD but after watching this collection of scenes I don't know why this didn't make it onto IMDb's Memorable Quotes page: 

Anthony Perkins (stating his opinion as a scholar): "That's not to say that person would be entirely unaffected. For example, if they were sexually repressed the cloak might transform them into, uh .. " 

Amick: "A whore." 

Perkins: "Exactly." 

Twin Peaks (1990-91, ABC) 

Another count: how many times she's referred to as Twin Peaks' Mädchen Amick or Mädchen Amick from Twin Peaks (or Madchen Amick from Twin Peaks) in external reviews used for this post. If you were interested enough to "Read More," I assume you've seen it but if not, it's the first thing (trying not to say "only thing") you should rent. 

My favorite Shelly scene: 

I can offer trivia: Amick was nominated for a Soap Opera Digest Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress: Prime Time. She lost to Lynne Moody for Knots Landing. What else? If you've ever said to yourself "I'd like to see a well-edited tribute video for Bobby & Shelly and Copper & Audrey set to Lady Gaga," you're welcome?

For the Very First Time (1991-NBC) 

"In the early 1960s, a Catholic teenage girl [Cheryl Pollak, Paige from Pump Up the Volume] and a Jewish teenage boy [Corin "Corky" Nemec] living in the same neighbourhood become friends. Together they experience the first stirrings of their burgeoning sexuality. When the girl's parents become increasingly suspicious, they pressure her to stop spending time with him. The boy, from a liberal family, struggles to comprehend what is happening. Finally, she comes to visit him in the night, and they consummate their relationship--with distressing consequences. Not a morality tale, this film shows how religion can tear people apart."

dragonchariot's User Review (come for the Austin civic pride, stay for the comment about Mexicans that looks bad out of context): 

"i was at first intrigued by the fact that i had never heard of this movie and after seeing that cheryl pollack and corin nemec were in it, i decided to stay awake until 4am to watch it. anyway, the only redeeming thing about this movie is madchen amick's beauty. i suppose pollack's and nemec's acting is okay, but they have a horrid script to work with. unlike the other reviewer who commented on the lack of texan accents (the movie is supposed to take place in austin and very few people there have a twang) i think that the accents were there (in supporting characters like mary margaret's date and john) and were unnecessary. they were also very very bad. i am so very tired of hollywood 'southern' accents that sound nothing like the area where the accent is supposed to be from. and since it was supposed to take place in austin and shooting movies there in 1991 would not have been expensive, i fully expected there to be familiar shots of the town: the beautiful capitol building, the UT tower lit up for a winning football game, etc. none of these things were there. also, it takes about 5-6 hours to drive to mexico from austin. at one point in the movie, michael and his posse take off for mexico to lose their virginities and are able to drive off when it is dark (during the summer and early fall it doesn't get dark in austin until 9pm or so), spend time in mexico getting drunk and having sex with mexican (is there any other kind?) whores, and then return to austin by dawn. while this is theoretically possible it is NOT very likely. and if anyone has started school in the hill country (usually the third week of august, but may have been in september in 1960) they know that unless they want to pass out from heat stroke they DO NOT wear their letter jackets!!!!! in august and september in austin and the surrounding areas it is 90+ degrees. only people with no body temperature would be stupid enough to wear sweaters or letter jackets on the first day of school. all in all, a very bad made for tv movie experience." 

Amick's place in 1991: she can star in a USA movie, but if it's on NBC or ABC she plays a minor character. 

The Borrower (1991) 

Another film unavailable on DVD. You can buy the laserdisc new for $125 on Amazon if you're interested. Directed by John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Mad Dog and Glory and Wild Things). 

" .. about an alien serial killer, who is sent to Earth to live among humans as a form of penalty … The alien's penalty includes having his body genetically transformed to look like a human's, but since this transformation is not perfect, after a while his body starts to revert back to its original form and his head explodes, prompting him to 'borrow' a new head from the next person happening to be present at the time -by squeezing it off with a crab-like claw and placing it on its own neck." 

There's a twist (and I'm not putting that in air quotes, winking at you or saying "Get it?" I'm only calling it a twist) where the alien serial killer has to make temporary use of a dog's head. That's where Amick and her shotgun come in (I don't think the scene loses anything by being dubbed in Italian): 

Sleepwalkers (1992) 

Hector R. Hecht: 

"Mädchen Amick is really smily [and dancy] as Tanya Robertson in this abject failure of a motion picture. Charles Brady (Brian Krause) and his mother (Alice Krige) are sleepwalkers, which means they can shapeshift into 50s sci-fi creatures, turn invisible,and other stupid shit like that. You can't hurt a sleepwalker by shooting it, stabbing it, torching it, running it over, or any of the other customary ways of ending something's life, but one scratch from a cat's claw will turn it into an oozing lump of pulsating flesh. Sleepwalkers have to feed on the lifeforce of virginal females (naturally, because nothing spoils a perfectly good lifeforce faster than a squirt of semen), and in case you ever wondered what lifeforce looks like, it's this purplish lightning-looking shit that shoots out of your mouth when a sleepwalker tries to make out with you. 

Anyway, Charles and his mother move to Travis, Indiana, which is this complete shithole whose cops ride around in their patrol cars singing, 'Here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand, he's a one-ball man and he's off to the rodeo.' Charles attends the local high school during the day, and then goes home and has sex with his mother in the evenings, which I guess is understandable because he's only allowed to date virgins, and if he has sex with any of those their lifeforce won't be any good to anyone. He decides to ask Tanya, who he can tell is a virgin by looking at her yearbook photo (and why does he have a yearbook, anyway? He just moved to the god damn state last week), out, so he goes to the movie theater where she works and finds her rocking out to 'Do You Love Me' by The Contours. The theater is strangely empty of patrons (no surprise there -- once they paid Stephen King $12 million for a script he probably wrote on the back of a napkin while waiting for his kid to finish his Happy Meal, they had to decide whether they wanted to put the remaining $4.25 of the film's budget toward special effects or hiring extras), so Charles has plenty of time to charm her with some of the most inane dialogue ever written. The next day, he gives her a ride home from school and........ah, who cares…"

Why is Enya's ominous humming played over the end credits instead of The Gathering of The Cats? The music they did use sounds like a temp track. 

"RIP CATS WHO FOUGHT THAT MONSTER CAT THING" says YouTube's spawn138. If you've ever said to yourself "I'd like to see a tribute video to the teenage love story in Sleepwalkers set to the Backstreet Boys," you're .. you know what, you're not welcome, because why did you want to see that? You're making me uncomfortable. Stand over on that side of the room for a little while. 

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) 

Shelly's in two scenes. 

Harry Dean Stanton is also in two, but his are better. There's "a cup of Good Morning America" and this, which always does it for me. 

Dream Lover (1993) 

"The movie opens on divorce proceedings involving Ray Reardon (Spader), a successful architect, and his first wife."

That's not correct. The movie opens with this:

"Shortly after their divorce, he agrees to go to a gallery opening to meet a woman that his obnoxious friend, Norman (Larry Miller), sets him up with. While he is there, he embarrasses himself by bumping into a woman (Amick), making her spill wine on herself. She wastes no time verbally abusing him. A week later, he runs into the woman, named Lena, at the supermarket. She apologizes for her behavior and the two go to dinner. They have sex the next day, marry shortly thereafter 

Doesn't match Amick, but damn if they didn't get Spader right.

and become parents.

Despite his happiness in the marriage, Ray becomes suspicious after catching Lena in several lies about her past. Over time, Ray becomes increasingly paranoid when his wife begins sporting bruises that she will not explain and begins doing things that indicate that she is having an affair. During a tense confrontation, Lena taunts Ray by claiming to have had an affair with an unnamed friend of his and refusing to tell Ray if their children are biologically his. Ray hits Lena, who then has him arrested and committed to a mental hospital for observation. Despite an attempt to prove that Lena has been lying, the judge finds Ray to be mentally incompetent and orders him held for six months." 

My favorite part of Ray's defense is his insistence that he didn't cause one of the bruises on Lena's face because he "never hit that high." It's an obvious frame-up! 

"Shortly after Ray has been committed, Lena privately admits to him that his suspicions about her were correct all along and that she did what she did to get his money.

After Ray convinces one of his friends to tell Lena that she has made a mistake in her 'master plan', Lena shows up at his birthday party to talk to him. Ray lures her away from the attendants who are supposed to be supervising him and tells her that having him declared insane was the 'mistake' because he could not be held legally accountable for killing her. He then strangles her to death on the lawn."

Not a bad summary, but it leaves out that the friend who visits Ray and passes his message along to Lena is a lawyer and he whispers his plan in her ear before carrying it out so she can tell him if it'll work. I like to think their conversation after went something like this. 

She was nominated for a Saturn Award ("presented annually by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films." Which one's Logjammin'?) for Best Actress but lost to Angela Bassett for Strange Days. If you've ever said to yourself "I think Ray listened to an Evanescence cover of a Korn song while he put together his elaborate revenge scheme, shouting along 'I want you crying with your dirty ass in front of me!'" You weren't the only one, but why watch that when you can see the original, directed by the Hughes Brothers? 

"The plot of this video revolves around a young individual [Aaron Paul] from high school who is picked on, beaten up, laughed at, and ridiculed with Korn performing inside the brain of the tormented boy. He seeks revenge throughout the video. The final scene shows him arriving at the school prom with an escort. He then vomits at those who had picked on him from across the auditorium, leaving them in disgust and humiliation." 

The vomit is projectile, but it's too late to suggest it for Hector's list and as a music video it wouldn't qualify. 

CrystalxSpinning says "Lena was so pretty, too bad she was such a bitch." I say Mädchen Amick's so pretty, too bad she's marginally talented as an actress and has kind of a flat, affectless voice.

For the Completist 

See Mädchen Amick's career 1994-present. Consider this trajectory in romantic leads: Love, Cheat & Steal (between John Lithgow and Eric Roberts) to Trapped in Paradise (Nicolas Cage) to French Exit (Jonathan Silverman). 

To Kiefer Sutherland in Fallen Angels, "Love and Blood." 

Why the cut? Did Sutherland's character stare at her for a few hours before walking over?

Andrew McCarthy in The Courtyard. Henry Thomas in Bombshell.


To Graham Greene and a camoflauged Adrian Pasdar in Wounded.


Actually, no, but it would've been better that way. Favorite parts of the trailer: Pasdar asking her if she's ever read The Bible, so he can be sure she's familiar with "an eye for an eye," and the gunshot sound effect when Amick puts the gun to her throat at 0:54. Does Julie kill herself halfway into the movie? Watch Wounded and find out! (Don't watch Wounded.)

Bonus clips:

The List


and The Rats.