Drive, She Said
By: Stew Hardesty

Since childhood, Ashley Judd has had a simple plan for surviving heartbreak and finding success: Keep moving..

When she runs. It ripples powerfully just below the surface, like a fast-moving river flowing over a boulder. the muscles flex and elongate around the shifting margins of the adorable little dimples on the side of each cheek. In repose, though, they form two mathematically perfect, symmetrical hemispheres, with a curve and cleft that seem to belong to another world altogether, like those exquisite melons that sell for $100 each in Japanese department stores, meant not to be consumed but to be displayed reverently as works of art. We're talking, naturally, about Ashley Judd's backside, that astonishing tribute to the power of the StairMaster. The remarkable thing is that you can actually see this through the sweat pants she wore in jail in Double Jeopardy.

A work of art is what Judd's body is. Like art, it's spiritually uplifting. "You feel pretty sassy when you've got a great bum," she says--and lie and masterpiece, it represents the culmination of years of discipline and dedication. Not in a studio, or course, but in the gym, the pool, on the running track, the hiking trail, the climbing wall and the lake on her farm near Nashville, Tennessee, where she warms up on summer mornings by rowing a series of 500-meter sprints. doing this to get in shape for a movie is akin to preparing for a spelling bee by memorizing the entire dictionary. The effect is apparent if you compare a movie she made in 1997 -- Kiss the Girls, a thriller costarring Morgan Freeman -- with Double Jeopardy, released in 1999. In the intervening years she turned 30 (she's 32 now), and along the way the last little cushions of flesh melted off her jaw line, her thighs firmed to the consistency of frozen turkey drumsticks and she developed lats the bunch and flex across her back like an Olympic swimmer's (Check out that lovemaking scene aboard the sailboat in Double Jeopardy). Which is ironic, because her character in the earlier movie was a surgeon whose hobby was kickboxing, while in Double Jeopardy she played a well-to-do wife and mother with a passion for the comparatively undemanding sport of sailing. But, here it's Hollywood, where the dreariest subway token booth may turn out to have Sandra Bullock inside it, and if you cant bounce a quarter off your stomach, you don't belong anyhow.

Of course, Judd had to come a long way to get there, considering that she grew up in Kentucky and Tennessee, neither state known for girls who can kick you in the ear. Judd is said to be partial to Kentucky whiskey -- a rare single barrel bourbon named Blanton's -- and can cook up sausage and grits for guests even if she appears to subsist largely on herbal tea and vitamin C pills. The country-music milieu in which she grew up wasn't especially congenial to the purification of mind and body, but once she determined what kind of physique she wanted, she pursued it with a single-minded passion that left even hardened trainers gasping.

"The girl had such tenacity, it was frightening. Phenomenal," says David Lea, the British fight choreographer who prepared her for her part in Kiss the Girls and subsequently moved to Tennessee for three months to shape up her sister, 35-year-old Wynonna. "we had 10 days to get Ashley ready for her first scene," says Lea. "She would kick it, kick it, punch it, punch it, and she wouldn't stop. You can see in the movie how toned her arms and shoulders and stomach were. And her thighs! She was like a goldfish at first, then she became a piranha."

Lea, whose current project is getting Jennifer Love Hewitt ready for her role as a con artist in Heartbreakers ("She's got a kick that would knock a donkey out," he says admiringly), is a Method-school trainer, he believes that successful screen kicks come from inside the actor. He first strips them of their external defenses: "If their thighs are a little bit too heavy and they wear black clothes or baggy clothes, I want to take that away from them. I say 'Stop wrapping a pullover or sweatshirt around your ass when you work out with me. I want everything exposed.'" Then he attacks their psyches: "I tell them 'You, not the double, are going to do the fight on-camera.' I spar with them, put the gloves on, and the get into the real place. I say 'I'm going to make you look like you've been fighting all your like. You're not going to act this punch or kick, you're going to do it for real. When you punch and kick that guy, you're going to hit him. He's a stunt guy and he should be able to take it.'"

Judd, of course, showed her famous tenacity early on, when she declined to take the easy route to superstardom by joining her mother and sister in their Grammy-winning country-music act, the Judds. Ashley was actually born in Los Angeles, but the family moved back to their native Kentucky when she was 6, a couple of years after her parents split up. for most of the next decade, Ashley, Wynonna, and mom Naomi lived the kind of life that produces a lot more country singers than young actresses, in trailer parks and rented houses in Kentucky, Tennessee and occasionally, California. Ashley's story is never complete with out a mention of the number of schools she attended in 13 years: 12.

She was 15 when her world turned, you might say, right-side-up: Naomi and Wynonna recorded their hit single "Had a Dream," and for the teenager it meant, well, a job cleaning their tour bus for $10 a day and access to all of Naomi's castoff cosmetics and costumes. Little Ashley loved dressing up from an early age; while the other girls went trick or treating costumed as witches or fairies, she would put on a cocktail dress and hells. Although she can sing, the idea of joining her family on the stage never came up. Country music, with its tropes of heartbreak and longing, its rhinestone - spangled self absorption, is fundamentally alien to Judd's nature, which is practical, restrained and self-reliant. Instead, she studied French, physical therapy, women's history and acting at the University of Kentucky, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and promptly moved to Los Angeles, where she broke into TV on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Since her first big-screen role, in Ruby in Paradise, a surprise hit at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, she has cultivated a specialty playing women you wish you hadn't messed with, and she runs her life on the same principle. Of all the reasons not to eat meat, she offers on of the most original: "I believe you eat the animal's fear," she says, referring to the fight-or-flight hormones the animal secretes as it is being led to slaughter. Even that secondhand experience of fear is too distasteful for the woman who had to be talked out of jumping off a cliff into a waterfall for the escape scene in Kiss the Girls. with the help of therapy, she fought her way out of a deep depression that set in after her first string of successful movies in the mid-90's. "I understand very well what happened when I was growing up." she told an interviewer last year. "The good, the bad, the comfortable, and the unfortunate, and i got over it."

She gets over it-- and on with it. "If there is something I want," she once said, "I will go after if/" When Jodie Foster, originally slated to play the framed wife on the run in Double Jeopardy, got pregnant instead, the only person in Hollywood happier that foster was Judd, who would have kick boxed her way through a phalanx of producers to get the part.

"She had her rep call my office every two week to say 'I know you’re meeting with

Jodie Foster, but Ashley would still love to do this role,' " producer Leonard Goldberg recalls. he may wish that he had kept Foster anyway; at least she wouldn't have driven the crew crazy by insisting on doing her own stunts.

Judd-- whose latest movie, Where the Heart Is, opens April 28 -- is of Hollywood, but not in it. When her Malibu house burned down in 1993, she moved back to Tennessee, top an 1819 farmhouse close to her mother and sister. She has dated actors and singers (Matthew McConaughey, Michael Bolton) but is currently involved with Dario Franchitti, a Scottish race car driver. For relaxation, she passes up St. Bart's for weeklong hiking treks in the Sierras. One recent romp cost her several toenails, but they'll always grow back. She goes through life on her own terms, with the faintly mocking, self-possesed smile of someone who drinks plenty of water, sleeps nine hours a night and wakes up ready for action.

US Weekly - 2000

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