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| Birth Name(s) : Judy Davis |
Date of Birth: April 23, 1955 |
| Status:
Married
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Partner:
Colin Friels |
| Profession:
Actor |
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Full Judy Davis Biography
Judy Davis was born in Perth, Western Australia, on 23rd April 1955. Raised in a Catholic household, where films and television were frowned upon, she attended covent school - a formative experience which made a powerful impact, but left her questioning the religious teachings, leading eventually to her lapse from the faith.
At eighteen she travelled across Asia, contributing lead vocals to a friend's band, before making the decision to pursue a career as an actress. Returning to Sydney, she was accepted into the prestigious National Institute Of Dramatic Art (NIDA), where Mel Gibson was a classmate, later playing Romeo to her Juliet in a college production.
Judy graduated from NIDA in 1977 and immediately found herself in demand. Whilst still a student, she had been cast in a film ("Clean Straw For Nothing") to be directed by the then unknown Gillian Armstrong. Although that project never came to realisation, the match with Armstrong was a proven a success when Judy took on the role of Sybylla Melvyn in the director's adaptation of Miles Franklin's semi- autobiographical novel, "My Brilliant Career". The film was an international hit, garnering accolades and applause worldwide, whilst being credited, closer to home, with kick-starting a New Wave of Australian film-making.
Judy was launched onto the global stage, picking up two BATFA awards, for best actress and best newcomer, amongst myriad other trophies. However, despite her unquestionable acting ability, she was not about to play the malleable starlet. Refusing to compromise her opinions or principles for the sake of self-promotion, she frequently criticised or dismissed her own films in interviews ("My Brilliant Career" being the most prolific in the firing line) and resisted Hollywood's attempts to seduce her.
Instead, she commuted between London and Sydney, continuing to work in the theatre, whilst lending her skills to a number of modest cinematic efforts. These films, whilst well-intentioned and sometimes intriguing, tended not to fulfill the promise suggested by Judy's involvement with them - her performance, more often than not, the film's only remarkable feature. However, within this varied collection of roles (as a bleached-blonde hooker in "Winter Of Our Dreams", an anti-nuclear terrorist in "Who Dares Wins"/"The Final Option", or an evironmentalist caught in a murder-mystery in "Heatwave") she, at the very least, sealed her reputation as one of the most exciting young actresses in the world - a well-worn piece of praise given further credibility following the phenomenal performance she gave as Adela Quested in David Lean's "A Passage To India", which resulted in her recieving an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in 1984.
There are those who suggest that Judy's career has not been quite as brilliant as it might have, had she been more inclined towards networking and engaging with industry politics, but one equally wonders if her tremendous inventiveness and the intelligence, integrity and strength she projects aren't her worst enemies when there is so little evidence that anybody knows what to do with an actress displaying such qualities? Nevertheless, the high standards Judy sets and her status as one of the world's finest actresses are re-affirmed with critical praise and prestigious awards every time she appears on our screens and with the prospect of her branching out into directing and, as she has also suggested, writing, the future promises that she will continue to inspire and delight for many years to come. |
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Additional Judy Davis Biography
Judy Davis (born 23 April 1955) is an Academy Award-nominated and three-time Emmy Award-winning Australian actress.
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.
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, an adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. 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.
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.
Davis' unwillingness to move to Hollywood has probably limited her career in some respects, but she is known in the industry as an "actor's actor". Even in her early acting years, Davis rarely appeared in conventional action films—she works best with sophisticated scripts aimed at mature audiences, playing against intelligent leading men such as Peter Weller, Sam Neill, Richard Dreyfuss, Geoffrey Rush, Woody Allen, and Lewis Collins. |
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Judy Davis Quote(s)
| When I first started acting, and we would all sit down and talk about Shakespeare and how great it was, I thought well, I suppose it is. It is if you get lo play Macbeth or Hamlet. But who wants to play bloody Lady Macbeth or Ophelia? And it struck me that most women seem to be required to pit themselves against men in dramatic situations, and the men got to pit themselves against ideas or God. |
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