Published in US, May 1997
Judy Davis doesn’t suffer fools gladly. You can see it in every one of the 41-year-old actress’s impassioned performances--most recently as the White House chief of staff in Absolute Power and as Jack Nicholson’s put-upon wife in Blood & Wine. So, does that headstrong intensity reflect Davis’ real-life personality? “Yes, and I get paid for it!” she says with a throaty laugh. “All that therapy, and they pay me.” Davis has had a run of piquant supporting parts in recent years, in such disparate fare as Barton Fink, Naked Lunch, The Ref, and, most memorably, Husbands & Wives (which garnered her a 1992 Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress). In all of these, Davis played an American so convincingly that it’s hard to remember that she is, in fact, Australian. Her latest film, the black comedy Children of the Revolution, should help correct that. Playing a fiery (and fictional) Australian Communist who has a son by Stalin, Davis shares the screen with fellow countrymen Geoffrey Rush (Shine) and Sam Neill (Davis’ co-star in her 1979 breakthrough, My Brilliant Career).
It must be nice to get back to your roots again.
It was exciting for me to play a character from a certain moment in Australian history. When I was a child in convent school in the 60s, the fear of communism was very real.
Tell me about dropping out of convent school.
That’s not true.
It’s in all your bios. Where’d they get it?
From their stupid, infantile minds! [Cracks up] What kind of person makes these things up? Some idiot the CIA wouldn’t employ! No, I finished convent school, in fact. Then I sang with a band for four months to earn some money. Then I went to drama school in Sydney for three years. You see, it’s not really that interesting or exotic.
Your performance in ‘Husbands & Wives’ was so neurotic and hilarious.
Well, great writing is a gift. You just ride it, like a roller coaster. But I think having a son [Jack, 9, with her actor husband Colin Friels] helped enormously. This is going to sound horribly mawkish, but when he was little, I used to try to make him laugh while he was in his cot. And it took an enormous amount to get him going. No cootchie-coo with this kid--he wanted Charlie Chaplin! So, I kind of trained on him.
What was your take on the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow debacle, which happened right after you worked with them?
I wondered if there was a bit of anti-Semitism in it at all. You know, the little Jewish guy who desecrates a beautiful white Protestant princess, which is what Mia really represents, I think. [Editors’ note: Farrow is Irish Catholic.] American culture, you know, is not pure as the driven snow. You’ve got 13-year-old girls on the covers of magazine. Woody clearly broke some important taboos for white American society, but I don’t think they were the ones everybody was talking about.
I have to ask about your signature dark brown lipstick.
Well, in Children of the Revolution it’s red, and pink frosted for the ‘60s scenes. And in Naked Lunch, it was red [‘50s] lipstick.
Let’s just say your signature intense lips, then.
[Dryly] If someone’s going to make assessments like that, they need to actually have seen everything somebody’s done. Then they can say something informed. I don’t have them in Absolute Power, and, oh, that thing with Nicholson--I can’t think of what it was called--I didn’t have them there, either.
‘Blood and Wine.’ How was it to--
Oh, there’s nothing I can say about that film. It was just something I had to get through. I agreed to do one thing, and then the script I wound up getting was something else.
You have a reputation for being outspoken: for instance, when you let it be known you didn’t like working with the director of ‘A Passage to India.’
The only reason I ever made a comment about David Lean was because every journalist I spoke to had been told there was a juicy topic there. I think that if women don’t have long eyelashes and blond hair, there’s a tendency to want to fit them into some sort of box. Journalists use words like outspoken to define you as a commodity that can be understood in the most simplistic way.
Does that bother you personally?
I cared about it when I was younger, but I don't now. If people want to have preconceptions based on that sort of information, there’s nothing one can do. And it’s all a bit trivial at the end of the day, isn’t it?
