JUDY DAVIS
Name: Judy Davis
Born: 23 April 1955 Perth, Western Australia, Australia
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 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.
Name: Judy Davis
Born: 23 April 1955 Perth, Western Australia, Australia
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 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.