Audrey Horne's Age

 

Audrey Horne was not included in the first draft of the Twin Peaks script. However, the 4th draft introduces Audrey as follows:

AUDREY HORNE, a delicate, fine-featured, nineteen year old Botticelli-like beauty, exits the hotel and enters the car. We notice her saddle shoes and demure plaid dress. 

Audrey Horne's age is mentioned twice in the televised series.

In episode five (1.005, Cooper's Dreams), Audrey tells Cooper she is eighteen after the Special Agent asks her age. This exchange is absent from the script available online.

Later, in season two, episode 23 (2.016, The Condemned Woman), Audrey tells John Justice Wheeler she is eighteen. Sherilyn Fenn delivers the line in such a way as to indicate Audrey's age will be a deterrent. Such has been Audrey's experience with Cooper. Audrey has no reason to lie. If she were lying, one would think she would increase her age to encourage Wheeler.

 Audrey's Age Based on Johnny Horne's Age

In a deleted scene from episode one (1.001, Traces to Nowhere) Agent Cooper questions Dr. Jacoby about Laura's tutoring of Johnny Horne. Cooper asks Jacoby for Johnny's age during this discussion. Jacoby states that Johnny is 27. This scene was filmed and is included on the Gold Box DVD, The Entire Mystery, etc.

Audrey also says her brother is 27 in a televised scene from the same episode.

In another filmed but deleted scene, this time for season one, episode six (1.006, Realization Time), Sylvia Horne blames her daughter for Johnny's condition. This scene is available on the previously mentioned block of deleted scenes.

This scene is slightly different from the script which has Audrey enter the secret corridor and overhear her mother share her fears with Dr. Jacoby. This is one secret she wishes she had never learned.

MRS. HORNE
Johnny was nine when we brought Audrey home from the hospital. He was so happy, he'd follow me around, making sure I was taking good care of 'our' baby. Audrey was crawling then. She was such an active little thing. We were standing at the top of the stairs, talking. Johnny and I. She tried to stand up and pushed against Johnny's leg. He took a step back onto one of her toys and the next thing we knew ... he was following (*falling?) down the stairs ... All the way down ...

In the scripted scene, Johnny was nine when Audrey was brought home from the hospital. This corroborates with what Audrey told Agent Cooper and John Wheeler. She is eighteen.

In the deleted scene as it was filmed, Audrey is said to have been running when Johnny was nine. According to this site, babies usually begin running at 18 to 24 months, which would make Audrey nineteen or twenty. It's strange that the scripted scene, rather than the filmed scene, matches more closely with other facts as they are presented.

In episode 22 (Slaves and Masters, 2.015), Audrey tells Jerry, "I've examined his will, Jerry. If my father becomes incapacitated, it all goes to me when I'm old enough. And I am old enough, Jer, and he is incapacitated." In the state of Washington, a person of 18 is deemed of age.

Diane... The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper has Cooper mention that Audrey turned 18 last August 24th. He mentions her age twice in the tape.

The Star Pics Twin Peaks trading cards state that Audrey's date of birth is August 15, 1972. This would make Audrey sixteen in February 1989. However, as previously stated on this blog, I believe the Star Pics cards set the series in 1990 or even 1991. The cards are dated 1991, with Mark Frost's card reading, "Coached the Twin Peaks Softball Team to a near perfect 24-and-14 record in the 1989-1990 season". Laura's gravestone in the series has her date of birth as July 22, 1972, as does The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. The series often states the year 1990 in place of 1989. Even if the cards were set in 1990, Audrey would still only be 17, conflicting with the information given in the series. To have Audrey's age match with the age stated in the series, the cards would have to be set in the year the cards were released, 1991.

In Mark Frost's The Secret History Of Twin Peaks, Audrey is said to be 18.

Mark Frost's The Final Dossier states the following:

That evening, the incidents only living survivor, Ben Horne's eighteen-year-old daughter, Audrey, gravely injured in the explosion, was being treated in intense care at Calhoun Memorial Hospital.

And

Audrey awoke from the coma she'd been in as a result of the bank explosion after three and a half weeks. 

Further on,

Then Audrey discovered, two months after her release from the hospital, that she was pregnant.

And,

Audrey had just turned nineteen when her son, Richard, was born.

Audrey's birthday is in August. In The Final Dossier, Cooper's double was admitted to the hospital on the 27th of March and released the next day. If Audrey discovered she was pregnant two months after being released from the hospital - and she'd been in the hospital for three weeks before that - two, if not three months had passed, making the time she became aware of her pregnancy sometime in June. Richard's birth would have had to occur in late December, as Frost wrote that it was almost nine months to the day Doc Hayward saw Cooper's double leaving Audrey's room, meaning several months had passed since her 19th birthday.

In conclusion, despite some conflicting information, the majority of evidence points to Audrey being eighteen during the events of the original series.