The Divine Secrets of Ashley Judd

Ashley Judd is unfailingly charming, gracious and polite. OK, almost.

On a bright spring day in Los Angeles, she emerges from the flower-filled depths of the Hotel Bel-Air’s courtyard in pink pants and a flannel peasant top, her finely featured face free of makeup, her dark auburn bob pulled back with drugstore-issue bobby pins. Her wedding ring, with its antique cushion-cut diamond the size of a lima bean, sparkles as she stretches out her hand in greeting. She introduces her entourage: Shug and Buttermilk, two cashmere-cuddly cockapoos who bounce playfully by her feet. She orders lunch from room service and offers to split a cheeseburger with her guest.

She is the epitome of Southern kindness. Except for this thing with the waiter.

As he arrives with the food, Judd teases him. Oh, I pity you, she says warmly as he sets up a table. You have to bring me my coffee in the mourning. She smiles. He does not. Well, he stammers, when you refuse to sign the bill, it causes problems for me. Now she stammers, saying she doesn’t see why she should have to sign she will pay when she checks out and that she will discuss the matter with management. So awkward a moment, and yet so welcome. Smart, beautiful, pleasant Ashley Judd is sometimes difficult. In other words, Judd is one of us.

And that may make her perfectly suited to play the sublimely flawed Vivi Walker in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a movie adaptation (opening June 7) of Rebecca Well’s novel. Sandra Bullock, Ellen Burstyn and Maggie Smith costar in the film, which also has bits of Well’s prequel, Little Altars Everywhere, mixed in. Vivi, who is played as an older woman by Burstyn, is a Louisiana belle whose painful childhood twists her into something of a marvelous monster a room-filling socialite who pops pills and at one point beats her children. She is eventually rescued by supportive friends.

The concept of having strong female friends drew Judd, 34, to the book. She herself blossoms in the presence of her posse, a group of girls she knows from her days in Los Angeles, where she first worked as a waitress at the trendy Ivy restaurant. The night before this interview, in fact, she treated her buddies to a four-hour dinner at the posh Patina restaurant. We talked quite a lot about what it means to love your friends, she says. In fact, it was a friend, one who shares Judd’s passion for books Judd is currently obsessed with Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand who recommended she read Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood back in 1998. When Warner Bros. bought the property, they knew Ashley was interested, says Callie Khouri, who wrote and directed the movie (and who won an Academy award for writing 1991’s Thelma & Louise). Once we cast Ellen Burstyn, it became even more important that we get Ashley because they looked alike.

To coordinate their work, Judd and Burstyn met before filming started in Wilmington, North Carolina. We talked about ourselves and Vivi a little bit, Judd says. We looked at each other, looked at each other’s hands. It was the kind of thing where I was a little tearful most of the time because she’s just phenomenal.

Judd shed tears of another kind when she married Championship Auto Racing Team star Dario Franchitti, 29, on December 12 at Skibo Castle in his native Scotland with her famous sister, the country star Wynonna, at her side. Although the ceremony was private, Judd says she was miffed that it wasn’t the secret nuptial she had hoped for. The media found out about the wedding a few days before it occurred. The couple have had no better luck in maintaining a low profile on their tour bus, which is where they live when Franchitti is racing. Fans, she says, often knock at their door. The loss of privacy at times feels epic, she says, invasive to the point of being confusing and disorienting.

The couple retreat by heading to their 1,000-acre farm in Franklin, Tennessee, where their neighbors include Wynonna and family matriarch Naomi. The rural setting suits Ashley, says her mother: Instead of a red carpet, she would rather be barefoot walking down the garden path to her front gate. Her cast and crew are really Dario and her dogs and her cats and her rabbit that live inside, and then the sheep and llamas and cows out at the barn.

She’s down-home but headstrong, Naomi says. We call her ‘the giraffe’ because she’s always sticking her neck out. Judd stubbornly pursued acting despite the doubts of her first teacher, Robert Carnegie. She came to Carnegie after graduating from the University of Kentucky as a French major in 1990. She was just like a simple little backwoods girl, he says. She was one of the last folks you’d notice in the class. Through hard work and determination, she built herself up into something fantastic. She was not that way at all when she started. Carnegie tosses aside notions that Judd got breaks because of her family. There’s nobody I Hollywood saying, ‘Oh, you’re related to a country-western act.’ That’s not going to open a single door.

After minor TV roles (she played Ens. Robin Lefler in two 1991 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Swoosie Kurtz’ daughter on NBC’s Sisters), Judd struck gold with 1993’s Ruby in Paradise, an independent film in which she starred as a young Southern woman starting over. Considered her breakthrough performance, Ruby was her ticket up, and she followed it with A Time to Kill and the successful thrillers Kiss the Girls and Double Jeopardy. This summer, she films Blackout, directed by Philip Kaufman (Quills), in which she will portray a San Francisco homicide detective. Apparently, I’m not immune to every actor’s desire to play a cop.

She now has her claws in what could be her biggest movie role: Catwoman. Catwoman is a very ambiguous character, says Judd. She’s been a cat burglar on the part of the government, and she’s been independently villainous. I love the dialogue between the two sides, the struggle. A new draft of the script is being written, says Warner Bros.

For now, Judd struggles with preparing her mother to see the emotionally drenching Ya-Ya, especially the scene in which Judd’s character strikes her kids with a belt. My mother’s going to absolutely melt, she says. Khouri credits Judd with easing the apprehensive young actors who play her kids during the scene. Whenever her back was to the camera, she was telling them everything was OK. She was just incredibly reassuring and careful and loving. The scene was filmed in pouring rain, and Judd fell often as she ran around the wet yard. It was crazy how beautifully she could fall, says Khouri. She would never complain. And she never came back the next day with bruises. She was just happy as a little clam.

Smart, beautiful and able to take a pounding. Maybe Ashley Judd isn’t one of us after all.

TV Guide

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