Judy Davis
Judith Davis is an Australian actress. In a career spanning over four decades of both screen and stage, she has been commended for her versatility and regarded as one of the finest actresses of her generation. Frequent collaborator Woody Allen described her as "one of the most exciting actresses in the world". She is the most rewarded recipient of the AACTA Award with nine wins and has received numerous other accolades, including three Primetime Emmy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards and an Laurence Olivier Award.
After graduating from the National Institute of Dramatic Art, she began her career on the stage and had her film debut in 1977. She rose to international attention with her leading role in the period drama film My Brilliant Career, winning two BAFTA Awards. This led to starring roles in Hollywood projects, receiving her first Emmy nomination for the docudrama A Woman Called Golda. She received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress for starring in the historical film A Passage to India and Best Supporting Actress for Allen's comedy-drama Husbands and Wives.
Davis won three Primetime Emmy Awards for starring in the television film Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story, and the miniseries Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows and The Starter Wife. Her subsequent films include Children of the Revolution, Celebrity, Marie Antoinette, The Eye of the Storm, To Rome with Love, The Dressmaker, and Nitram.
Early life
Davis was born in Perth, Western Australia, in the suburb of Floreat Park and had a strict Catholic upbringing. She was educated at Loreto Convent and the Western Australian Institute of Technology and graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney, Australia in 1977.Career
Screen
1970s
After making her feature film debut in the buddy comedy High Rolling, Davis first came to prominence for her role as Sybylla Melvyn in the coming-of-age saga My Brilliant Career, for which she won BAFTA Awards for Best Actress and Best Newcomer. Davis was particularly praised for her performance; Janet Maslin of The New York Times admired her for bringing "an unconventional vigor to every scene she's in, even in a film that's as consistently animated as this one", while Luke Buckmaster, writing for The Guardian in 2014, commented that Davis gave "a rousing performance as bull-headed protagonist Sybylla Melvyn. The term "once in a lifetime" tends to be slapped around like a bumper sticker, but this meaty role lives up to the accolade."1980s
Her success continued with lead roles in the Australian New Wave films Winter of Our Dreams, as a waif-like heroin addict; the drama Heatwave, as a radical Sydney tenant organizer; and the thriller Hoodwink, as a sexually repressed clergyman's wife. Of her performance in Winter of Our Dreams, Roger Ebert wrote that: "Davis brought a kind of wiry, feisty intelligence to My Brilliant Career, playing an Australian farm woman who rather felt she would do things her own way. She's wonderful again this time, in a completely different role as an insecure, distrustful, skinny street waif. performs her movement magnificently.Her international film career began when she played the younger version of Ingrid Bergman's Golda Meir in the television docudrama A Woman Called Golda, for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Miniseries or a Movie nomination. She then played a terrorist based on Vanessa Redgrave in the British film Who Dares Wins.
She was cast as Adela Quested in David Lean's final film A Passage to India, an adaptation of E. M. Forster's novel, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Variety praised Davis for having "the rare gift of being able to look very plain at one moment and uncommonly beautiful at another. Likewise, The Washington Post wrote, "With makeup the color of smudged ivory, her pallor enhanced by the off-white linens she wears, Davis is daringly unattractive for a leading lady; that plainness is emphasized in the book. Davis' neuroticism, her way of twitching and thrusting her jaw and looking up hungrily beneath the brim of her straw hat, brings to life the ravenous sexuality beneath Miss Quested's decorous exterior."
She returned to Australian cinema for her next two films, Kangaroo, as a German-born writer's wife, and High Tide, as a foot-loose mother attempting to reunite with her teenage daughter who is being raised by the paternal grandmother. Her performance in the latter won her glowing praise. Pauline Kael called Davis "a genius at moods" and wrote, "As one of three backup singers for a touring Elvis imitator, Judy Davis is contemptuous of the cruddy act, contemptuous of herself. The film's emotional suggestiveness makes it almost a primal woman's picture: Judy Davis has been compared with Jeanne Moreau, and that's apt, but she's Moreau without the cultural swank, the high-fashion gloss. She speaks to us more directly." She won additional Australian Film Institute Awards for both roles, and a National Society of Film Critics award for High Tides brief American theatrical run.
Her final film of the decade, the Australian thriller Georgia, saw her play dual roles, a mother, Georgia, and her daughter Nina. For her performance, Davis earned another Australian Film Institute nomination for Best Actress.
1990s
Davis had a cameo in Woody Allen's Alice, her first appearance in an Allen-directed film. The following year, she was featured in Joel Coen's Barton Fink, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, an adaptation of the hallucinogenic novel of the same name.She returned to E. M. Forster territory in Where Angels Fear to Tread and won an Independent Spirit Award for her work as mannish woman author George Sand in Impromptu, a romantic period drama with Hugh Grant as her consumptive lover, Frédéric Chopin. Davis was especially lauded for her performance as Sand, and Hal Hinson of The Washington Post wrote, "Judy Davis makes her entrances as if she were straddling a cyclone. She doesn't just walk in, she blows in on a torrent of extravagant self-assurance and wild temperament. Sand, who's the locus of this blissfully high-spirited romp about the circle of writers and musicians in 1830s Paris, never does anything halfway; her life is an experiment in full-throttle, passionate immersion, and that's why Davis is the ideal actress for the part. She's the most atmospheric of actors, perhaps the only one around capable of streaking the screen with lightning."
She earned an Emmy nomination and her first Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film for her portrayal of a real-life Second World War heroine Mary Lindell in the CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation One Against the Wind. Adrian Turner of Radio Times noted of her, "Judy Davis, one of the greatest and least "starry" actresses around, plays Lindell and shows the same sensitivity that she brought to her role in A Passage to India."
Cast in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, Davis performed the major role of Sally Simmons, one half of a divorcing couple. Husbands and Wives was well received, and Davis's performance drew high praise. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "Sally must be one of the most endearingly impossible characters Mr. Allen has ever written, and Ms. Davis nearly purloins the film" and Todd McCarthy of Variety thought Davis had revealed "a whole new side to her personality that has never surfaced onscreen before." For this performance, she earned both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress.
She next co-starred with Kevin Spacey in the comedy film The Ref, portraying a married couple whose relationship is on the rocks, with Denis Leary playing a thief who counsels their marriage. Roger Ebert called Davis "naturally verbal" and praised her for being able to "develop a manic counterpoint" in her arguments with Spacey "that elevates them to a sort of art form." Similarly, Rolling Stone magazine's Peter Travers found Davis "combustibly funny, finding nuance even in nonsense." Considered "one of the fiercest film actors around", Davis's other roles have included the mysterious, schizophrenic mother of a teenager in boarding school in On My Own, the lifelong Australian Communist Party member reacting to the downfall of the Soviet Union in Children of the Revolution, two more Allen films, Deconstructing Harry and Celebrity and a highly-strung White House chief of staff in Absolute Power. After appearing in Celebrity, The Guardian newspaper wrote that Davis "in recent years has succeeded Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow as Allen's misfit muse."
Much of her work in the late 90s was for television, gaining a collection of Emmy Award nominations. She won her first Emmy for portraying the woman who gently coaxes a rigid military woman, Glenn Close, out of the closet in Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story, with subsequent nominations for her repressed Australian outback mother in The Echo of Thunder, her portrayal of Lillian Hellman in Dash and Lilly and her frigid society matron in A Cooler Climate.
2000s
Davis earned a second Emmy for her portrayal of Judy Garland in the television biographical film Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. In 2003, she earned another Emmy nomination for her interpretation of Nancy Reagan in the controversial biopic The Reagans. In 2004 she co-starred with Richard Dreyfuss in Coast to Coast. In July 2006, she received her ninth Emmy nomination for her performance in the television film A Little Thing Called Murder. Her tenth nomination came in 2007 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in the U.S. miniseries The Starter Wife for which she was awarded the Emmy. In August 2007, she appeared opposite Sam Waterston in an episode of ABC's anthology series Masters of Science Fiction. She appeared on the TV mini-series Diamonds from 2008 to 2009.In film, she continued to earn good notices for her supporting roles in Swimming Upstream, as a working-class mother, and in the films The Break-Up and Marie-Antoinette.