Biography: Judy Davis

Judy Davis (born 23 April 1955) is an Australian actress best known for her roles in Husbands and Wives, A Passage to India and in the TV mini series Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows.

Davis first came to attention for her role as the fiery Sybylla Melvyn in the 1979 film My Brilliant Career. She has won many acting awards, most notably a Golden Globe Award, two Emmy Awards, one BAFTA and five AFI Awards. She has also been nominated twice for an Academy Award.

Personal life

Davis was born in Perth and had a strict Catholic upbringing.^[1] She was educated at Loreto Convent and the Western Australian Institute of Technology, and graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 1977. She has been married to actor and fellow NIDA graduate Colin Friels (who was also in the film Hightide with her) since 1984. They have two children, Jack and Charlotte. They currently reside in Sydney.

Career

First coming to prominence for her role as Sybylla Melvyn in the coming-of-age saga My Brilliant Career (1979), for which she won BAFTA Awards for Best Actress and Best Newcomer, she also played the lead in such Australian New Wave classics as Winter of Our Dreams (1981) (as the waif-like heroin addict) and Heatwave (1982) (as the radical tenant organizer).

Her first foray into international film came in 1981 when she played the younger version of Ingrid Bergman's Golda Meir in the television docudrama A Woman Called Golda.

In 1984 she was cast as Adela Quested in David Lean's final film A Passage to India, an adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel of the same name: she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. She returned to Australian cinema for her next two films, Kangaroo, in which she displayed a fine affinity for accents as a German-born writer's wife, and Hightide, as a foot-loose mother who attempts to reunite with her teenage daughter who is being raised by the paternal grandmother. She earned Australian Film Institute Awards for both roles, and a National Society of Film Critics award for Hightide's brief American theatrical run. In 1990 she played a cameo in Woody Allen's Alice.

In 1991 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 adaptation of the hallucinogenic novel Naked Lunch. She won an Independent Spirit Award for her lively work as mannish authoress George Sand in Impromptu and returned to E.M. Forster territory in Where Angels Fear to Tread. She portrayed real-life World War II heroine Mary Lindell in the CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation One Against the Wind. In 1992 she played a major role in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives as one half of a divorcing couple. For this performance she earned both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actress.

Other roles have included the mysterious, schizophrenic mother of a teenager in boarding school in On My Own (1993), the lifelong Australian Communist Party member reacting to the downfall of the Soviet Union in Children of the Revolution (1996), two more Allen films, Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Celebrity (1998), a high-strung White House Chief of Staff in Absolute Power (1997), a touching performance as a supportive mother in Swimming Upstream (2003) and colorful supporting roles in two 2006 films, The Break-Up and Marie-Antoinette.

She co-starred with actor Kevin Spacey in the 1994 comedy film The Ref as they portrayed a married couple whose relationship is on the rocks, with actor-comedian Denis Leary playing their ersatz marriage counselor.

Much of her recent work has been on television, where she has scooped up an impressive collection of Emmy Award nominations. She won her first Emmy for portraying the woman who gently coaxes rigid militarywoman Glenn Close out of the closet in Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story and she picked up subsequent nominations for her repressed Australian outback mother in The Echo of Thunder (1998), her portrayal of Lillian Hellman in Dash and Lilly (1999), her frigid society matron in A Cooler Climate (1999) and her interpretation of Nancy Reagan in the controversial biopic The Reagans (2003).

She earned a second Emmy for her portrayal of Judy Garland in the 2001 television biopic Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. In July 2006 she received her ninth Emmy nomination for her performance in the TV film A Little Thing Called Murder. Her tenth nomination came in 2007 for The Starter Wife, Davis went on to win the Emmy, but was not present at the awards ceremony that year.

In August 2007 she appeared opposite Sam Waterston in an episode of ABC's anthology series Masters of Science Fiction, directed by Mark Rydell.

Her stage work has been limited, and mostly confined to Australia. In the earliest stages of her career she played Juliet opposite Mel Gibson's Romeo, she also played both Cordelia and the Fool in a 1984 staging of King Lear and in 1986 the title role in Hedda Gabler.

In 2004 she starred in and co-directed Victory, as a Puritan woman determined to locate her husband's dismembered corpse. She created the role of The Actress in Terry Johnson's Insignificance at the Royal Court in London and appeared in a brief 1989 Los Angeles production of Tom Stoppard's Hapgood.

Offscreen, Davis protested against Prime Minister John Howard's decision to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Filmography

Film

Television

Other awards

• 1994 Film Critics Circle of Australia Award Special Achievement Award ("* For her outstanding body of Australian and international work and for her considerable contribution to the profession of screen acting.")

Nominations

• 1982 Olivier Award Actress of the Year in a New Play (Insignificance)
• 2004 Helpmann Award Best Actress in a Play (Victory)

References

1. ^ http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00B1FFC3F5F12728DDDAB0A94DA405B8084F1D3
2. ^ ^{a b} "6th Annual SAG Awards Nominees". Screen Actors Guild Awards. Archived from the original on January 23, 2010. http://www.webcitation.org/5n0Wb20oX. Retrieved January 23, 2010. 
3. ^ "The Starter Wife - Character Profiles & Bios - Judy Davis as Joan McAllister". USANetwork.com. NBC Universal. Archived from the original on January 23, 2010. http://www.webcitation.org/5n0Y2V1PK. Retrieved January 23, 2010. 

External links

• Judy Davis at the Internet Movie Database
• Judy Davis at the TCM Movie Database

Judy Davis main page.