Geena Davis
Virginia Elizabeth "Geena" Davis is an American actor. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award.
Davis made her acting debut in the satirical romantic comedy Tootsie and starred in the science-fiction horror The Fly, one of her first box office hits. While the fantasy comedy Beetlejuice brought her to prominence, the romantic drama The Accidental Tourist earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She established herself as a leading lady with the road film Thelma & Louise, for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and the sports film A League of Their Own, garnering a Golden Globe Award nomination. However, Davis's roles in the box office failures Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight, both directed by then-husband Renny Harlin, were followed by a lengthy break and downturn in her career.
Davis starred as the adoptive mother of the title character in the Stuart Little franchise and as the first female president of the United States in the television series Commander in Chief, winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama for her role in the latter. Her later films include Accidents Happen and Marjorie Prime. She has portrayed the recurring role of Dr. Nicole Herman in Grey's Anatomy and that of Regan MacNeil/Angela Rance in the first season of the horror television series The Exorcist.
In 2004, Davis launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which works collaboratively with the entertainment industry to increase the presence of female characters in media. Through the organization, she launched the annual Bentonville Film Festival in 2015, and executive produced the documentary This Changes Everything in 2018. Davis received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2019 and the Governors Award in 2022.
Early life and education
Virginia Elizabeth Davis was born on January 21, 1956, in Wareham, Massachusetts. Her mother, Lucille , was a teacher's assistant, and her father, William F. Davis, was a civil engineer and church deacon. Both were from small towns in Vermont. Davis has an older brother, Danforth.She became interested in music at an early age. She learned piano and flute and played organ well enough as a teenager to be organist at her Congregational church in Wareham. Davis was also a cheerleader and was cheer captain her senior year of high school. She attended Wareham High School and was an exchange student in Sandviken, Sweden, where she became fluent in Swedish and got engaged to classmate Mats Dahlsköld, with whom she still corresponds by letter. She wanted to study acting at Boston University but missed the required audition during her year in Sweden, so she began her college education at New England College before transferring to Boston University; she did not earn enough credits to graduate, having received an incomplete in at least one class and an F in movement class. Her first post-university work was as a model for window mannequins at Ann Taylor; she then signed with New York's Zoli modeling agency. Davis is a member of Mensa.
In her 2022 memoir, she states that her brother came up with the nickname Geena shortly after her birth to differentiate her from her Aunt Virginia, who went by the nickname Ginny.
Career
Rise to fame (1982–1987)
Davis was working as a model when she was cast by director Sydney Pollack in his film Tootsie as a soap opera actor, whom she has described as "someone who's going to be in their underwear a lot of time". It was the second most profitable film of 1982, received ten Academy Awards nominations and is considered a classic. She next won the regular part of Wendy Killian in the television series Buffalo Bill, which aired from June 1983 to March 1984; and had a writing credit in one episode. Despite the series' eleven Emmy Awards nominations, lukewarm ratings led to its cancellation after two seasons. Davis concurrently guest-starred in Knight Rider, Riptide, Family Ties and Remington Steele, and followed with a series of her own, Sara, which lasted 13 episodes.During this period, she also auditioned for the 1984 science fiction/action film The Terminator, reading for the lead role of Sarah Connor, which eventually went to Linda Hamilton. In Fletch, an action comedy, she appeared with Chevy Chase as the colleague of a Los Angeles Times undercover reporter trying to expose drug trafficking on the beaches of Los Angeles. She also starred in the horror comedy Transylvania 6-5000 as a nymphomaniac vampire alongside future husband Jeff Goldblum. They also starred in the sci-fi thriller The Fly, loosely based on George Langelaan's 1957 short story of the same name, where Davis portrayed a science journalist and an eccentric scientist's love interest. It was a commercial success and helped establish her as an actor. In 1987 she appeared with Goldblum again in the offbeat comedy Earth Girls Are Easy.
Recognition and praise (1988–1993)
Director Tim Burton cast Davis in his horror comedy Beetlejuice as one of a recently deceased young couple who become ghosts haunting their former house; it also starred Alec Baldwin, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder. It made $73.7 million from a budget of $15 million, and Davis's performance and the overall film received mostly positive reviews.Davis took on the role of an animal hospital employee and dog trainer with a sickly son in the romantic drama The Accidental Tourist, alongside William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. Critic Roger Ebert, who gave the film four stars out of four, wrote: "Davis, as Muriel, brings an unforced wackiness to her role in scenes like the one where she belts out a song while she's doing the dishes. But she is not as simple as she sometimes seems ". The film emerged as a critical and commercial success, and Davis' performance earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Davis appeared as the girlfriend of a man who, dressed as a clown, robs a bank in midtown Manhattan, in the comedy Quick Change. Based on a book of the same name by Jay Cronley, it is a remake of the 1985 French film Hold-Up starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. Despite modest box office returns, the Chicago Tribune found the lead actors "funny and creative while keeping their characters life-size". Davis next starred with Susan Sarandon in Ridley Scott's road film Thelma & Louise, as friends who embark on a road trip with unforeseen consequences. A critical and commercial success, it is considered a classic, as it influenced other films and artistic works and became a landmark feminist film. Davis' performance in the film earned her nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress, the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. It also featured Brad Pitt in his breakout role as a drifter; in his 2020 Oscar acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor, Pitt thanked director Ridley Scott and Davis for "giving me my first shot."
In 1992, Davis starred alongside Madonna and Tom Hanks in the sports comedy-drama A League of Their Own as a baseball player on an all-women's team. It reached number one at the box office, became the tenth highest-grossing film of the year in North America, and earned Davis her first nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. She played a television reporter in the comedy Hero alongside Dustin Hoffman and Andy Garcia. Although it flopped at the box office, Roger Ebert felt Davis was "bright and convincing as the reporter ".
Downturn, hiatus and television roles (1994–2009)
In 1994's Angie, Davis played an office worker who lives in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and dreams of a better life. The film received mixed reviews from critics, despite much praise for Davis, and was a commercial failure. In her other 1994 release, the romantic comedy Speechless, Davis reunited with Michael Keaton to play insomniac writers who fall in love until they realize that both are writing speeches for rival candidates in a New Mexico election. Despite negative reviews and modest box office returns, she earned her second nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for her performance.Davis teamed up with her then-husband, director Renny Harlin, for the films Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight, with Harlin hoping that they would turn her into an action star. While The Long Kiss Goodnight managed to become a moderate success, Cutthroat Island flopped critically and commercially and was once listed as having the "largest box office loss" by Guinness World Records. The film is credited to be a contributing factor in the demise of Davis as a bankable star. By the mid and late 1990s, Davis's film career had become less noteworthy as she divorced Harlin in 1998 and took an "unusually long" two years off to reflect on her career, according to The New York Times. In a 2016 interview with Vulture, she recalled: "Film roles really did start to dry up when I got into my 40s. If you look at IMDb, up until that age, I made roughly one film a year. In my entire 40s, I made one movie, Stuart Little. I was getting offers, but for nothing meaty or interesting like in my 30s. I'd been completely ruined and spoiled. I mean, I got to play a pirate captain! I got to do every type of role, even if the movie failed." Davis was in talks to play Queen Beryl in a live-action adaption of Sailor Moon in 1997, produced by Disney, but the project was scrapped very early on. She appeared as Eleanor Little in the well-received family comedy Stuart Little, a role she reprised in Stuart Little 2 and again in Stuart Little 3: Call of the Wild.
Davis starred in the sitcom The Geena Davis Show, which aired for one season on ABC during the 2000–01 U.S. television season. She went on to star in the ABC television series Commander in Chief, portraying the first female president of the United States. While this role garnered her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama Series in 2006, the series was cancelled after its first season; Davis admitted she was "devastated" by its cancellation in a 2016 interview. "I still haven't gotten over it. I really wanted it to work. It was on Tuesday nights opposite House, which wasn't ideal. But we were the best new show that fall. Then, in January, we were opposite American Idol. They said, 'The ratings are going to suffer, so we should take you off the air for the entire run of Idol, and bring it back in May. I put a lot of time and effort into getting it on another network, too, but it didn't work". Her performance in the series earned her the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama, in addition to nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series. She was awarded the 2006 Women in Film Lucy Award.
Davis was the only American actor to be cast in the Australian-produced film Accidents Happen, portraying a foul-mouthed and strict mother. She stated that it was the most fun she had ever had on a film set, and felt a deep friendship and connection to both of the actors who played her sons. Written by Brian Carbee and based on his own childhood and adolescence, the film received a limited theatrical release and mixed reviews from critics. Variety found it to be "led by a valiant Geena Davis", despite a "script that mistakes abuse for wit".