Judy_Davis

Judy Davis

Judy Davis (born 23 April 1955) is an Academy Award-nominated, Screen Actors Guild Award, three-time Emmy Award, two-time BAFTA Award and two-time Golden Globe Award-winning Australian actress.

Biography

Personal life

Davis was born in Perth and had a Catholic upbringing. She was educated at Loreto Convent 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 High Tide with her) since 1984. They have two children, Jack and Charlotte.

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. Although she and Lean reportedly butted heads during the film's production, 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 High Tide, in which she gave what some critics believe is her finest performance 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 High Tide's brief American theatrical run. In 1990 she played a brief cameo in Woody Allen's Alice. A busy 1991 featured acclaimed supporting roles as an ill-fated Southern ghostwriter in Joel Coen's Barton Fink, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and in David Cronenberg's well-received 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. Finally, she earned additional awards and recognition for her performance as 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 an array of critics' awards as well as an Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actress.

Later memorable Davis roles include the mysterious, schizophrenic mother of a teenager in boarding school in the well-made but little-seen 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.

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, among many other awards, 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. In August 2007 she appeared opposite Sam Waterston in an episode of ABC's anthology series Masters of Science Fiction, directed by Mark Rydell. It has also been announced that Davis is to appear in the 2008 mini-series "Diamonds", green lighted by Alchemy Television Group.

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 her 1986 assumption of the title role in Hedda Gabler was widely admired in Australia. In 2004 she starred in and co-directed Victory, as a Puritan woman determined her locate her husband's dismembered corpse. Internationally, she created the role of The Actress in Terry Johnson's Insignificance at the Royal Court in London and appeared in a brief Los Angeles production of Tom Stoppard's Hapgood in 1989.

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

Filmography

Film

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1977	High Rolling	Lynn
1979	My Brilliant Career	Sybylla Melvyn
1981	Hoodwink	Sarah
1981	Winter of Our Dreams	Lou
1982	Who Dares Wins	Frankie Leith
1983	Heatwave	Kate Dean
1984	A Passage to India	Adela Quested
1986	Kangaroo	Harriet Somers
1987	High Tide	Lilli
1988	Georgia	Nina Bailley/Georgia White
1990	Alice	Vicki
1991	Barton Fink	Audrey Taylor
	Impromptu	George Sand
	Where Angels Fear to Tread	Harriet Harriton
	Naked Lunch	Joan Lee/Joan Frost
1992	On My Own	The Mother
1992	Husbands and Wives	Sally
1993	Dark Blood	Buffy	(uncompleted)
1994	The Ref	Caroline Chausser
1994	The New Age	Katherine Witner
1996	Children of the Revolution	Joan Fraser
1997	Deconstructing Harry	Lucy
	Absolute Power	Gloria Russell
	Blood and Wine	Suzanne Gates
1998	Celebrity	Robin Simon
2001	The Man Who Sued God	Anna Redmond
2001	Gaudi Afternoon	Cassandra Reilly	2001 Me & My Shadows Judy Garland
2003	Swimming Upstream	Dora Fingleton
2006	The Break-Up	Marilyn Dean
2006	Marie Antoinette	Comtesse de Noailles

Television

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1980	Water Under the Bridge	Carrie Mazzini
1982	A Woman Called Golda	Golda Myerson/Meir	(syndicated)
1983	The Merry Wives of Windsor	Mistress Ford
1986	Rocket to the Moon	Cleo Singer
1991	One Against the Wind	Mary Lindell
1995	Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story	Dianne
1998	Echo of Thunder	Gladwyn Ritchie
1999	Dash and Lilly	Lillian Hellman
1999	A Cooler Climate	Paula Tanner
2001	Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows	Judy Garland
2003	The Reagans	Nancy Reagan
2004	Coast to Coast	Maxine Pierce
2006	A Little Thing Called Murder	Sante Kimes
2007	The Starter Wife	Joan McAllister
2007	Masters of Science Fiction: "A Clean Escape"	Dr. Deanna Evans