Touch of Minx

It takes only a second for Ashley Judd's driver to park in front of Sylvia's, a landmark soul-food restaurant in Harlem, on this Sunday afternoon in January. But that is more than enough time for Judd to suss out the situation, top to bottom. "I knew the sisters would be dressed for church," she says, patting her flared coat and cloche hat with satisfaction. She cocks a groomed eyebrow toward the sign above the door. "Hmm, 'Queen of Soul Food,'" she reads. "Let's just see if she puts sugar in her corn bread-then we'll find out if she's a queen or a wannabe." (Judd is antisugar.) "If it's supposed to have sugar in it," she says dryly, "we call it cake."

A crowd is milling uncertainly in the foyer, but Judd pays them no mind. Inside a minute, she zeroes in on the maître d', is seated, peruses the menu, finds what she wants, suggests your order ("You should try the ribs"), and requests an iced tea-"unsweetened, please," she says firmly. Oh, and she even trills a few bars of "This Little Light of Mine" with the singer-big hair, bigger voice, bright green dress, microphone-who is working the room. Judd has a clear, strong voice.

Welcome to life with Ashley Judd, a woman who knows all her reasons. She can tell you, in lively detail, with charming digressions, why she has made each of her 13 movies-from her earliest, the well-received 1993 indie Ruby in Paradise; through her luminous supporting role as a bank-robber's wife, in 1995's Heat, and her recent breakthrough hit, last fall's $116 million-grossing thriller Double Jeopardy; to her latest, the southern-fried dramedy Where the Heart Is, opposite Natalie Portman. In fact, Judd, 32, can tell you how and why she arrived at pretty much everything she's ever thought or done.

She'll tell you, for example, how she found the church she attends when she visits Manhattan: in the yellow pages. Then she'll tell you it's Missionary Baptist, her maternal grandmother's church. Wherever she goes around the country, she finds them open and friendly. Still, she feels "overly associated with religion-slash-spirituality" compared with other actresses. She says that Cindy Crawford always wears a beautiful cross, and that Elizabeth Hurley's been wearing the same diamond cross for years now, "no matter what Versace hoo-ha dress." And people never ask them about it. Judd theorizes that it could be because she is southern (she's an eighth-generation Kentuckian). Also, there's a strong God connection in country music, and she might be-because of her famous singing relatives, sister Wynonna and mother Naomi-lumped into that milieu as well. In other words, if you don't want the full answer, don't bother Judd with the question.

You order the ribs. She, on the other hand, asks for grits, biscuits with honey, and potato salad. She's been a vegetarian for three years. "A friend of mine told me that you eat the animal's fear. Which, if you think about hormones, and adrenaline, and the panic of the flight-or-fight response, is quite true," she says. She goes on for a while about the importance of eating low on the food chain, about a philosophy-of-agriculture course she took for her anthropology minor at the University of Kentucky, and about the tonnage of manure per year produced by McDonald's beef cattle, eventually ending up at a chicken she once bought but didn't eat ("What a waste of life"). "And then of course, the education is continuing," she says-which, though you've known her for only half an hour, strikes you as a very Ashley Judd thing to say. Tomorrow, she's going home to her farm in Tennessee after having been away for two and a half weeks (not two weeks, not three weeks-two and a half weeks), and she knows exactly what she's going to make for dinner.

Ashley Judd is a relentless self-improver, a looker-on-the-bright-side, a glass-half-fuller. When she tells you that she didn't get into one college of choice, she immediately adds, "and it was one of the great things that happened to me, because I wasn't ready. I didn't have my personal roots yet." She says that a high-speed crash that her boyfriend of one year, Scottish race car driver Dario Franchitti, endured in February, in which he broke his pelvis and left hip, could have been a lot worse, and his physiotherapy is a welcome excuse for her to swim more. The most valuable lesson she ever learned in school was "to do my least favorite work first, when you have the most energy and enthusiasm, and save your favorite stuff as a reward."

"Ashley is all over the place, drinking up life, reading voraciously," says Matt Williams, who directed her in Where the Heart Is. "She can talk about Tennessee walking horses and Paris fashions in the same breath. She has insatiable curiosity; she's like a grad student about everything."
At Sylvia's, when Judd's banana pudding arrives, she declares it "pretty good." But she can't resist offering a better recipe, her sister Wynonna's. (Line the bottom of the dish with vanilla wafers. Put a slice of banana on each. Add Dream Whip-"you know, packaged Dream Whip? Which gives it this added vanilla punch." Continue adding layers. "Three days later, so brilliant.")

She knows the difference between endowed and imbued. She remembers racing to be the first to slap her grade-school math quizzes on the teacher's desk, and a particular vocabulary test that blew her mind because it had both eccentric and authentic on it, and she thought they were both such intense words. She'll always choose a great director over a good script, "because they can bring more to it. A lot of actors say the script, and I think that's an unexamined choice of the ego. Where you think that you're going to be great saying those words, no matter how poorly the movie is shot. I just don't think that holds much water." She has an opinion about which edition of The Great Gatsby is the best. She remembers the word that won her a game of Dictionary last spring against her favorite ex-professors (she was teaching a week-long acting class at her alma mater): ostitus. "I said, 'A swelling of the oracular muscles; a precursor to blindness.' So simple, and they all voted for it, every one of 'em. That 'D' in geometry I once got- healed!" Her idea of a great vacation is going to the Ashram, a no-frills hiking retreat in California.

"Last night I did something that I'm really not sure I've ever done before in my life," Judd says. "I-what's the word? Gelled? Chilled? No, vegged!-I vegged in front of the TV. I channel-surfed and everything. And I totally understand now what a balm that can be." Even if you don't quite believe that was the first time in Judd's 32 years that she ever channel-surfed, it's certainly interesting that she wants you to believe it.

Even Judd's nightly dreams are ambitious. "My dreams are overtly cinematic," she says. "There are close-ups, they're edited. They have irony, satire, puns." She once dreamed she was making the sequel to Heat-in fact, she dreamed out two stages of the plot. "It must not have been very good, because it faded quickly," she says. "Here's a good one: I dreamed that I was at my Mamaw and Papaw's house [her paternal grandparents], in their wonderful, tiny little bathroom. Mamaw, when she had to go to the bathroom, she called it 'going to see Miss Agnes.' I was opening the bathroom closet. Both of my grandparents are dead, and I know this in my dream, and I just wanted to look at their towels, because the towels were great-we wrapped up in them as children and did dances. They were floral, in indigo colors, and we thought they were very exotic and expensive.

"Anyway, I open the closet, and there's all the towels," she continues. "And in the back, there's a lovely, sepia-toned eight-by-ten photograph of a man. And for some reason, in the dream, his name is Joseph; we don't have a Joseph in our family, but I was wondering, because it was such an archetypically patriarchal photograph, if maybe it was supposed to be Joe Kennedy. Who is my best friend's grandfather. And as I look at it-it's a profile picture, just gorgeous, very Italian-looking-he turns and starts to speak. He's a talking picture! And he starts to tell me the circumstances around the moment when that picture was taken. Is that not the greatest thing? I mean, I love going to sleep!"

All of Judd's dreams are like this. She remembers every one. She's even disciplined herself, upon waking in the middle of the night, to say a few key words from the dream aloud so she can remember it in the morning.

If you were to distill the many qualities Judd projects onscreen down to one, it would be determination. She's not grimly determined; she just goes for it, full-bore, wall-to-wall, whatever is required. When she cries, she cries with her whole body. When she smiles, her cheeks (formerly cherubic, now getting thinner with each movie) seem to liquefy. And when she is naked, which she has been many times in her oeuvre, she is not oops-what's-that-peeking-out-of-the-sheet naked. She is radiantly, rosily, stand-up-straight, take-a-long-walk naked.

Judd goes after these roles with everything she's got. At her first meeting with Paramount chief Sherry Lansing, concerning the lead in the 1997 thriller Kiss the Girls (she played a doctor who escapes from a serial killer, then returns to rescue his other captives), "She said to me, 'I know I can do this. Who do I have to convince?' " Lansing remembers. "I said, 'Well, the director, Morgan [Freeman, who played a forensic psychologist] and me.' She stood up and said, 'Okay, I will. I'll knock it out of the park.' " Kiss grossed more than $60 million and had a vital shelf life on video. "Often an actress is either strong or vulnerable, but Ashley is an amazing combination of both," Lansing says.

Judd chased director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy) for Double Jeopardy too. "A lot of actors try to be offhand, play it cool," Beresford says. "Ashley made no secret of being desperately keen." During the shoot she was drenched in blood, run through the rain, and dunked into the sound near Vancouver, but "she was always ready to go, to do it again and again," Beresford says. "The main thing Ashley brought to the picture was an enormous quality of likableness. At the first preview screening of Double Jeopardy, I hadn't a clue what we had. Until I stood in the back and watched the audience, and I saw that they loved her. They loved her."No matter how many critics dismissed the film as a female Fugitive or picked apart its titular legal argument, audiences cheered Judd on. Especially female audiences, who got a charge of empowerment every time her character, Libby, met a man, smelled what he wanted from her, and used it to get what she needed. Her motive was also very female: In The Fugitive, Harrison Ford wants to catch his wife's killer and clear his good name; Libby cares only about getting her son back. "I met only one reporter who saw it as a vengeance plot [against the evil husband, who frames Libby]," Judd says. "I think she wanted me to have balls or something."

Ballsy happens to be a word you hear often in regard to Judd. "She's fearless," says director Stephan Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), who made Eye of the Beholder, an inane thriller noir shot before Double Jeopardy but released after. Judd's character, Joanna, is a chameleonlike serial killer with a sad past. "It's a tricky role," Elliott admits. "If you don't feel for her, we're lost, and if you feel too sorry for her, we're lost again." Handfuls of actresses turned it down. "But Ashley said, 'I can do this.' She didn't say how, she just said, 'Trust me.' And whatever Ashley wants, Ashley gets." Elliott laughs. "I gave her more room than I've ever given anyone. And she had the balls to pull it off."

She also "saved my ass" with a key nude scene, Elliott says. "Now that Ashley's becoming a big star, her people have decided she shouldn't take her clothes off anymore." He tried to shoot it with a body double, "but the wig was falling off, we were outside in the rain, it was freezing cold, and it was not working. Ashley saw the pain I was in, and without consulting her agents or anything, said, 'Stuff it, I'll do it,' dumped her gear, walked out, and nailed it. She won me hook, line, and sinker with that."

"Well, it turned out to be more than just a person standing still and having the rain fall on her skin," Judd says matter-of-factly. "There was some acting involved, and at that point, my protectiveness of the role kicked in." In fact, a scene in a train station for which Elliott did use a body double still bothers Judd. It's just a shot of Joanna's feet as she walks away, but the double doesn't do it the way Judd would have: "She kind of walks with her toes turned out. And I'm like, Ech!"

The waitresses at Sylvia's are starting to circle Judd's table like birds. They've figured out that this woman with the wary eyes and ten-speed mouth is the one on the movie posters. Finally, one darts in to say how much she loved Kiss the Girls. "You had it going on, girl!" she enthuses. Then the deluge begins. (Kiss is apparently very big among Sylvia's clientele.) More waitresses pop by and diners lean across the aisle to say hi. Sylvia herself is not here, but Sylvia's daughter Crizette is; she makes Judd promise not to leave until she can take a picture, then runs (literally runs) to the corner store to pick up a disposable flash camera. Judd just smiles and doles out thank-yous like after-dinner mints.

Hollywood loves labels, and after the one-two punch of Kiss the Girls and Double Jeopardy, Judd has been labeled Action Girl, a tough babe whose satiny skin is stuffed with grit. The momentum of Double Jeopardy, for example, carried Eye of the Beholder to number one on a slow opening weekend in January, and got Judd short-listed as Jodie Foster's replacement in the Silence of the Lambs sequel. (Discussing this sends Judd into a long tangent about cannibalism in North America. The role eventually went to Julianne Moore.)

The artistically less-challenging aspects of doing blockbusters notwithstanding, she knows that carrying highly successful action movies has its upside. "I think that anyone in my position would be foolish not to capitalize on a certain momentum," she says carefully. "Little movies that I've looked at, all of a sudden they can be financed. But if I do all smaller-budgeted pictures, perhaps I won't earn as much as I would be capable of earning in a larger-budgeted picture. I think that to continue to strike a balance between types and genres is premium."

Despite Judd's success, she went after her upcoming roles just as assertively as her last, and they are decidedly nonaction. "She came in to meet with me three years ago-not about a specific project, as these meetings usually are, and not at the behest of her agent or lawyer," says Bill Mechanic, Chairman-CEO of Twentieth Century Fox's film division. "This was driven merely by Ashley. She said she was willing to take smaller roles in different kinds of movies to show what she can do. She was so smart, and so focused, I immediately thought, 'How do I take advantage of this and find her some material?' "

Where the Heart Is, opening April 28, is the result. It's a study of chicken-fried heartache, eccentric surrogate families, and cars that always start with a cough and a cloud of smoke. Natalie Portman is its star; she plays a pregnant 17-year-old named Novalee whose boyfriend ditches her at a Wal-Mart in small-town Oklahoma. Judd has a supporting role: Lexie, Novalee's maternity nurse ("Well, she'd probably be an LNP, a licensed nurse practitioner, not a full RN," Judd demurs) and a single mother of four. Judd was on the set in Austin for only three weeks, on and off, last June, but whenever she was there, she was all there. She rented a house with Franchitti (they met at a wedding in L.A.), cooked big meals, took the cast and crew out line-dancing. "She threw her arm around Natalie, metaphorically, and they became girlfriends the first day," says director Williams (who also created the TV show Roseanne).
Portman whiled away the hours in Judd's trailer with Judd, Judd's white cockapoo, Buttermilk, and Judd's cat, Buttercup. "We spent a lot of time coming up with other Butter names for her future pets," Portman says, laughing. "Butterfly, Butterball, Buttercrunch . . . Ashley brings you in. And she sticks with you. A lot of people you work with will tell you they'll keep in touch. Ashley really does it. She's always sending me stuff at school [Portman is in her first year at Harvard], e-mails, bedding catalogs. She says, 'I'll send you this,' and it arrives the next week."

She also turned the cast and crew on to word games such as Botticelli, in which players guess the name of a famous person through fiendishly complicated clues, and Druthers, a high-speed, getting-to-know-you game of either/or. (Here are some of Judd's druthers, which she answers with her typical certitude: Book or movie? "Book." Country or city? "Cuuun-tree." Beginning something or finishing it? "Beginning." Christmas or Halloween? "I adore Halloween, because it inaugurates the season, and people are so creative, and it's a wonderfully innocent and festive time." Okay, Halloween it is.)

Though Judd is onscreen for less than half the running time of Where the Heart Is, she nimbly wraps up the movie and walks away with it. From the moment Lexie swings into Novalee's hospital room and begins eating from her breakfast tray, she carries the movie on her swaying hips as if it were one more of her babies. And the "humdinger of a scene" that inspired her to take the role in the first place is the emotional core of the film.

In it, Lexie has to tell Novalee that a man she invited into her life-for all the wrong, superficial reasons-has sexually abused two of Lexie's children. She shot it over one long June night, 12 takes. Judd memorized the speech the first time through, then just relied on knowing the words backward and forward to get her through the emotion. "Each take was equally convincing," Portman says. "She gave her full effort each time. She's the most amazing actress I've gotten to see up close."

The day after the scene was filmed, the two women went to see Portman's film Anywhere but Here, about a mother (played by Susan Sarandon) who hits the road, dragging her teenage daughter with her. Judd sobbed from beginning to end.

Judd knows all about the road. Her mother, Naomi, a nurse who dreamed of being a singer, moved
the family relentlessly. By the time Wynonna was born, Naomi had already split with her father. Ashley's father, Michael Ciminella, now a freelance sports-broadcasting producer based in Louisville, was gone by the time she was four. (She lived with him from time to time, however, and they converse regularly today.) Ashley, who attended 12 schools in 13 years, is prone to saying things like, "I went to first, second, fifth, eleventh, and twelfth grades in Kentucky." She always laid out her school clothes the night before; every year she would wear her best outfit on the second day, because she knew everybody else wore theirs on the first.

She calls herself the normal one, the sane one, the responsible one in her household. "I was the only person in my house who was a cheerleader and on the student council," she recalls. "I was told I was special, but we didn't always have the resources to support it. I didn't always have a ride to get there, for example."

She was a yearner, she says, for everything, including "central Heat and air. A thermostat. Symbols of middle-class America." (And, though she doesn't say it, of control.) Her mother knew what she wanted. "On Sundays we would ride out to the country and look at farms," Judd says. "Mom would say, 'Wouldn't you like to have a big farm someday, with horses?' and I was like, 'That's really gonna happen.' I was embarrassed by her dream, almost."

Thanks, however, to her well-off paternal grandparents, with whom she spent summers, Ashley also saw the other side of life. She was exposed to Kentucky society, and became friends with girls like Erin Chandler, whose grandfather, Happy Chandler, was a former governor of Kentucky and baseball commissioner.

Ashley was 15 when RCA signed the Judds to their first record deal. Naomi and Wy left her often to hit the road for six weeks at a time, on a bus called Dreamchaser. When Ashley did go with them, she was paid $10 a day to clean the bus. She swears she never felt like Cinderella: "Oh, no. It was in my personal best interest to clean up, because otherwise I would have been trying to peacefully read my book, with a pair of Sister's underpants hanging over my head."

She will admit to having only "fractured nurturing";-mostly from her sister and her grandparents. "My mother had a dirty role as a single parent," Judd says diplomatically. "She had to try to do it both ways, often without a role model, or support. She always did this thing where she'd talk about other people-'so-and-so thinks this'-because she didn't know if her opinion was good enough."

Ashley took refuge in her own brain. In college, she majored in French and minored in four (four!) other subjects: acting, women's studies, anthropology, and art history. (When Double Jeopardy premiered at the Deauville Film Festival, Judd conducted her press conference in French.) She briefly considered joining the Peace Corps, until Erin Chandler told her about Playhouse West, the L.A. branch of Sanford Meisner's renowned acting school. Judd had always been an actress inside-she remembers practicing expressions and speeches in her bedroom mirror-but until Playhouse West, she didn't know how to do it professionally. "Once I knew I had a place where I could go to learn, I was at ease with the idea, but not a moment before," she says. She moved to L.A. in 1990, bought herself a little house in Malibu (it burned in the wildfires of 1993), and lived alone: no boyfriend, no close girlfriends, just two cats, tons of books, and four acting classes a week (most students at Playhouse West take two). She calls it "one of the really shimmering times of my life."

"When she showed up, we had no sense that she was from an important family," says Robert Carnegie, the founding director of Playhouse West and Judd's acting teacher. "She did it all by herself. And she had enormous difficulty learning the work that we do. She was so driven, so intent on doing well, that she worked harder than necessary. It was difficult for her to settle down and trust in herself, trust that she was quite enough. She took an awful lot of criticism from me. There was a joke in her class that they should start a betting pool as to when she'd quit."

Judd never considered it. "I guess I thought that Bob was being hard on me because I was good enough to deserve it," she says. "He taught me a valuable lesson: That it's good to struggle, and to fail. Before that, I didn't understand that you could be special, told you were smart, and also have to work really hard at something."

She studied solidly for two years before going on her first auditions, then began getting work immediately. But even as recently as Kiss the Girls, she wasn't sure she had learned enough. "She told me at the premiere that she was thinking about coming back in between jobs to renew herself," Carnegie says." I told her it would be a dreadful mistake, that what she was doing was right and she shouldn't tamper with it. I had to protect her from overworking herself."

herself to be "tearful. I was so tender that I couldn't really rebound." She diagnosed herself courtesy of a pamphlet in a doctor's waiting room. A doctor later confirmed it: mild anxious depression. "I asked, 'What else do you call it?' and he said, 'Unresolved childhood grief.' I thought, 'Okay,' because that gave me something to do, something to expunge. As Rilke said, you sometimes have to live the question."

She opened a dialogue with her mother about her pain; their reconciliation took some time. "There wasn't any one long jam session where we got it all sorted out," Judd says. "But she was very understanding. I mean, of course there are times when she would have much preferred that I'd forget, maybe even more than forgive. Nobody wants to be nailed to the cross as a bad mother."

Ashley's transition from the nonsinging Judd-the other Judd, the odd Judd out-to her own person is now complete. Her mother and sister show up on all her sets, at her premieres and awards shows. And Ashley sang at the Judds' reunion concert in Phoenix this past New Year's Eve.

Ashley came from their world, and decided she wanted a different one," Stephan Elliott says. "No matter how many people told her to go and sing with her sister-not our Ashley. She went in another direction, and by God she pulled it off."

In early February, Judd is back home in Tennessee, in her own house, on the 1,000-acre farm she shares with sheep and llamas. Wy and her two small children, Elijah and Grace, live down the road; Naomi's house is just past theirs. Judd is chopping a mountain of onions, which is making her cry a little. "I'm determined to make Dario this delicious rice the way that my old Mexican gal used to make for me when I lived in L.A.," she says.

Her career strategy is working out beautifully: This summer she will shoot a romantic comedy called Animal Husbandry (which she's been chasing for years, placing judicious calls to producer Lynda Obst and director Tony Goldwyn) in New York, followed by a legal drama called High Crimes, to be directed by Carl Franklin-both for Fox. "You're going to see a different Ashley Judd: warmer, funnier," Bill Mechanic says. "They're the kind of roles you'd normally see Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan playing. Ashley is on a very fast track."

In the meantime, she's free to help Franchitti recuperate, and to watch the 1,500 daffodil bulbs she planted last fall bloom. It's just the right pair of movies to have come out in 2001, she says, and she'll be home for her birthday in April and for Easter, both of which she loves. "A lot of my wishes are coming true," she says. Even the rice is turning out well. It's not cooked yet," she says, tasting, "but I think it's gonna be pretty good."

By the way, there was sugar in the corn bread at Sylvia's. "But you know what?" Judd asks. "So it's real northern corn bread. Who's to say that's not as legitimate as southern corn bread?" Which is a very Ashley Judd thing to say.

Premiere Magazine - 2000 >> Back