The McQueen of women-in-jeopardy films: Actor Ashley Judd brings a confident physicality to taut suspense movies
Ashley Judd has the face that launched a thousand conventional women-in-jeopardy movies - not just her own, which usually depend on Judd's push and drive for their ratcheting momentum, but the rip-offs on TV, often on the Lifetime Channel.

The genre as we now know it belongs to her; she and her writers and directors propelled it in liberating directions. A Judd suspense film like Double Jeopardy (1999), in which a foul husband sets up his wife for a fake murder, doesn't just reverse the moral and sexual dynamics of hard-shelled Hollywood melodramas about a femme fatale and a male sucker (Double Indemnity is the towering prototype). It also makes the duped character virtuous and tough enough to achieve a healthy payback and emerge without scars.

At age 35, Judd has come a long way from Ruby in Paradise (1993), her breakthrough role as a Tennessee girl gaining self-knowledge through trial and error in a West Florida town. She's transformed herself into a mainstream action heroine and a jack of all performing trades, recently switching off between movies and the Broadway stage, where her presence as Maggie the Cat, despite grudging reviews, turned a revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof into a hit.

In her latest movie, Twisted, which is now playing in theaters but got lost amid the walk-up to the Oscars and the opening of The Passion of the Christ, she plays a San Francisco cop newly elevated to the homicide division. She sports a short-and-spiky-haired 'do - something she developed with her director, Philip Kaufman, for what he calls that "pop-out-of-bed" look. Even for an actress who's no shrinking violent, she's more aggressive than usual, with a temper that flares up in an instant and wreaks havoc in seconds. And she has an upfront sexuality that topples male expectations, whether those of her guardian and police mentor (Samuel L. Jackson) or her homicide division partner (Andy Garcia).

Before working with Judd on this movie, Kaufman suggested she watch "a lot of Steve McQueen films." After all, the prototype for modern San Francisco movie cops was not Eastwood's Dirty Harry but McQueen's Bullitt. "Even the car she drives," Kaufman says, on the phone from San Francisco, "is either Steve McQueen's car or a duplicate of the Mustang he drives in Bullitt."

More important, "McQueen had an energy and efficiency in his movements - just in the way he would pick up his frozen dinners and take the paper out of the news rack. And Ashley does, too: She has this confident physicality."

When I interviewed Judd by phone two Fridays before the movie's opening last month, she was McQueenesque - driving herself through Manhattan gridlock to have a pre-show dinner with director Anthony Page, who guided her through Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Four days after our talk, she tore some ligaments and sprained her foot on-stage; she tried to soldier on, but had to leave the play on Feb. 22, three weeks before the end of her scheduled run.

'Unapologetic' allure

Reassuring me that her cell phone was attached to a headset, Judd shrugged off my surprise that she would agree to be interviewed while driving to dinner and a demanding performance; after all, she's been married to race-car driver Dario Franchitti since 2001. Between bouts of outrage at backed-up intersections, she displayed the smarts that earned her Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Kentucky.

She took the lead in Twisted , Judd says, because "Sara Thorp's script presented me with a somewhat unprecedented character." She becomes "her own best suspect" because she's had a series of one-night-stands with men who end up dead. "In terms of gender stereotypes," continues Judd, "she's as 'male' as she is 'female,' and she's unapologetic about it."

That mix is what attracted her. Old Hollywood would have advertised Twisted with the slogan "Ashley Judd as you've never seen her before!" Of course, audiences would have known in those days that they'd get Judd as they had seen her before, but with some delectable new twists.

Male and female audiences alike enjoy seeing Judd race through movies like Kiss the Girls (1997) and High Crimes (2002), getting physical while parading her characters' expertise in medicine and law, respectively. She's not a superwoman but she is a take-charge woman, with all her faculties keenly tuned. And she has an innate classiness that transcends social class. A childhood that encompassed 12 schools in 13 years in California and Kentucky, with patches of poverty along the way, has helped make Judd gritty and sure and real on screen. Viewers respond to the hardscrabble texture beneath the doll-like features - doll-like, that is, except for the way her grin and twinkle can expand them into mischief or wiliness.

As she talks, Judd doesn't just display a knack for summation, but also an instinct for the elegant phrase. Asked how she kept her footing in Twisted's psychological maelstrom, Judd says "I just opened myself up to each scene and took on the mantle of imaginary circumstance."

The difference between her character in Twisted and the male characters in The Big Clock or No Way Out is that the guys in those movies know whether they're innocent. In Twisted, Judd does not. Her character's having a series of puzzling blackouts, and she's beginning to worry that homicide is in her blood: Her father was a serial killer who murdered her mother before killing himself. Of course, to handle all this Judd didn't just "take on the mantle of imaginary circumstance." She also stepped up her yoga practice, learned to wield a lethal Japanese hand weapon called the yawara, and hung out with a real-life female San Francisco homicide investigator. And after shooting stopped, she stayed in bed for a month.

"There's no question," Judd says, "that I got this script because I made Kiss the Girls and Double Jeopardy with [Paramount chief] Sherry Lansing. And it started as this very Hollywood afternoon. I was at the Laguna Seca racetrack in Carmel, Calif., with my husband when I got the call from my agent about a hot script that I had until the end of lunch to finish." She had been married for two years, and was enjoying being a newlywed, but something about the script's "sexy cop-stuff attitude" got to her.

And then she thought of doing it with director Kaufman, best known for The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. "He was my first choice of director, because I never thought of it as a thriller, but as a psychological mystery - something with more subtle tensions. I know marketing it as a thriller is a way to bring people into the theater; I hope when people come they'll enjoy what I hope is a more delicate taste and aroma."

Bergman, Hitchcock

One element that makes Twisted's outre plotting click is that it's set in San Francisco, a city where at certain social strata everyone knows everyone. It makes sense in that City by the Bay that Judd's character would share a past with a criminal-defense lawyer who, like all her other men, turns up dead. And Judd loves San Francisco - she and her mother, Naomi, and sister, Wynonna, lived in Marin County for two years. (At one point, Naomi worked as a production secretary and extra on More American Graffiti.)

During the production of Twisted, Ashley rented a house in Marin. Even there it came home to her how different the San Francisco Bay Area was from the suburban sprawl of other western cities like Los Angeles. "We were walking down a street and this kid zoomed by on those razor-skateboard thingies; he had so much attitude, he seemed like such a punk in the making, that I turned to my husband and said 'it's got to be Sean Penn's kid.' And sure enough, we walked into this restaurant and there was Sean and Robin [Wright Penn] and their little girl and this boy zooming in to meet them, with all that attitude going on at age 9. We just fell out laughing."

Kaufman was especially drawn to working with Judd after watching her in the little-known Normal Life (1996), where she played "a contemporary Bonnie and Clyde character - I could see Ashley wasn't afraid of going off the deep end." Judd says Kaufman encouraged her to look at films like Gaslight (1944), where Ingrid Bergman is unknowingly driven crazy by her husband (Charles Boyer). "We looked at a lot of things," Kaufman concurs, "including all those Hitchcock movies with one-word titles - you know, Vertigo, Spellbound. And she's a fast read: She gets things right away."

Judd gives Kaufman credit for fleshing out the story's emotional vectors with Jackson, Garcia and Mark Pellegrino as Judd's ex-partner and ex-boyfriend. But Kaufman says it was Judd's energy that made it possible to portray a range of relationships within a plot-driven drama - between woman and father figure (Jackson), woman and healthy partner (Garcia), and woman and unhealthy partner (Pellegrino). Judd makes a point of saying that from the beginning of her career she has studied the Sanford Meisner acting regimen at the Playhouse West in Los Angeles. Meisner taught a more "objective" form of Method acting than Lee Strasberg; with characteristic brusqueness Judd objects when I call it Method acting at all.

"Ashley and Mark had been in acting school together in L.A.," Kaufman recalls, "and when I saw the two of them together, they were hot. You could see they knew how to tango together, even with a gun, a pair of scissors and a yawara. She lets go with a little laugh and says, 'We gonna rumble?' - and a moment later, she summons a look of absolute terror. It was fun to watch them work out that dance."

The 'kick-ass' factor

Judd is great at real dance, too. The high point of Frida (2002) is her sizzling tango with Salma Hayek's Frida Kahlo, which makes Judd metaphorical again even as she's cursing out a Greyhound bus that's blocking her turn. "It was fantastic to have the opportunity to play a character like [photographer] Tina Modotti for five days and discover so many dips and turns and flourishes."

Indeed, Judd approaches even more commercial enterprises in a spirit of adventure, so is able to speak about them frankly. She brings up the tepid 2001 romantic comedy Someone Like You, and says, "It might have ended up more generic than we thought - the studio got excited that they had three stars [Judd, Hugh Jackman, Greg Kinnear], so they thought they could turn it into a commercial opportunity. It might have been less quirky than it started out to be, but it was still a chance to learn."

Judd is so sharp and quick-witted that as soon as I broach the delicate subject of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof co-star Ned Beatty's graceless remarks to The New York Times that she and male lead Jason Patric lacked sufficient stage training, I hear her say to an attendant "Can you park this for me? I'm acting at the theater right over there and I get out at 11:30." And the phone goes dead.

"Well," as Kaufman says, "When it comes to Ashley in Twisted, the word kick-ass comes to mind. And I go back to McQueen. People identified with him as an energetic character in detective movies, but even when he did cowboy movies he didn't do the worn, worn-out bit - I think people yearn now for his kind of vitality."

I mention that McQueen was also the last of the genuine juvenile-delinquent movie stars. "Ashley is a Phi Beta Kappa," says Kaufman, "but she's a Judd, too - people instinctively connect her to Tennessee or Kentucky and a knock-around country life and poverty. That's part of her makeup. We're used to giving recognition to actors who do extreme things with weight gain and makeup, but Ashley's characters strike a note with average women and their aspirations. She fights the fight for women who break through glass ceilings. And that's a heroic thing, not just in the homicide division or in the military."

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