Ashley’ Judd’s Love Trip
Redbook 2007
By Allison Glock
A little less than two years ago, Ashley Judd hit bottom. Overwhelmed by emotional issues, she checked herself into a rehabilitation center. Today, the
honesty and spiritual strength she found in herself are fueling her passion for helping others all over the world.
It’s over 100 degrees outside, and Ashley Judd is headed to her grandmother’s 80th birthday party in rural Kentucky, on the grounds of her grandmother’s old country home — “one of those big, beautiful, roomy houses with a fabulous porch and a mysterious attic and a linen closet with the softest sheets in the world,” she says.
Ashley, 39, actress, southerner, and infectious romantic — among other things — can’t wait to get there. “For me, it’s going to be a pretty powerful walk down memory lane,” she explains as I sit with her outside the photo studio where she’s just finished shooting REDBOOK’s cover. She’s waiting for the car that will take her to meet her date for the evening, her husband of six years, race-car driver Dario Franchitti. “I haven’t been to eastern Kentucky in a few years now,” she says, smiling warmly. “My cousins are there. My aunts and uncles. All of whom I love dearly. I woke up so excited.”
Ashley is all about the tether of home. Sister and daughter, respectively, to country music singers Wynonna and Naomi, Ashley has chosen to remain
near them in Tennessee, eschewing Los Angeles for the humid embrace of personal history. “Consistency and routine are helpful to me,” she says,
twirling her thick auburn hair into loose buns. Especially now, when her life has expanded well beyond acting to include humanitarian work in all corners of the world.
Ashley is currently a global ambassador for YouthAIDS, an organization that funds grassroots programs and fights the spread of AIDS, especially among
children. She’s also a board member of Population Services International (PSI), a nonprofit that seeks to address health problems like malaria and HIV in
developing countries. She recently spent weeks visiting Indian brothels, seeing firsthand the effects of sex trafficking, and has also done work in South
American factories, slums, African refugee camps, and other heartbreaking locations, places that, she says, call to her. Around her neck she wears two
simple silver necklaces — from one hangs a charm of the African continent; the other holds a cross.
For a long while, Ashley’s passion for humanitarian causes took a backseat to her acting career. “I had a sustained distraction in Hollywood,” Judd says. “I was building a career and falling in love with a sweet boy.” She shrugs. “After those things were well established, the social-justice bug came back. And I was really ripe and ready.”
Now Judd acts only when she feels the need. In her past three films, she has played an alcoholic, a depressive, and an attorney entangled in the tragic coil of immigration rights. These aren’t exactly vanity roles.
“I know the movies that I want to do by page one of the script. I used to think, If they change this, maybe. Not anymore. I’d rather go to India.”
Judd laughs nervously. She knows she is opening herself up to derision, that celebrities with causes are often viewed as dilettantes, that putting your passion out there for all to see is a risk, that she’d probably be much safer if she just shut up and made movies. But she can’t.
“For better or worse, I know that I am a leader,” she says. “I really feel that is what I am here to do.” And the more we talk, the more it’s clear: She’s doing
it. Inexhaustibly.
ASHLEY’S JOURNEY
When did you first discover your desire to stand up for others?
I was 19 and at the University of Kentucky. A member of our board of trustees used discriminatory slang when talking about South Africa. That was a
real rally cry for me. I didn’t think a person with those beliefs should be at an institution supported by taxes paid by people of color. Around then, I became
radicalized by U2’s music, with regard to human-rights abuses. I was also interested in what was going on in Honduras and Nicaragua in the ’80s. That’s
when it started.
And it never stopped?
I think I got the “intolerance to injustice” gene. A few years ago, when two different people approached me at the same time for the same cause
[YouthAIDS] it was more than a coincidence. It was clearly a God deal.
Do you believe in signs?
Absolutely. I think you can interpret events that way and can build on that manifestation. Or you can let it go. And I find it far more interesting to do the
former.
Do you believe people are called to do certain work?
I do! This guy I worked with the other day, he started doing ladies’ hair when he was 9. Nine!
I’m guessing you don’t believe acting is your calling.
I think my calling is of a spiritual nature. For example, I gave a talk at the University of Kentucky last fall on social justice, feminism, and spirituality. It was
lengthy, but at the end I wasn’t even winded. Everything was uplifting and energizing.
So that felt like the work you should be doing?
To me, that was being in the river. The flow of life. I have an obsessive, ruminating mind. It is like a committee meeting going on up there. And I am not the chairwoman, let me tell you. [Laughs] When I can focus on a beautiful passage like the prayer of Saint Francis, or the serenity prayer — that gets me back into the river. I see a river as a metaphor for God’s will. You know, rivers are sacred in India.
You just spent several weeks there helping at-risk women and kids. Tell me what you like about India.
Ohhhhh. [Sighs] It is one of those places that requires all the superlatives. It is very extreme. When I am there….Gosh. I am really reluctant to describe it. It is really personal. And I am afraid of subjecting myself to ridicule. [Ashley tears up.] I really believe there is a holy aspect to the work. Only when I look
at photos of my trips do I understand why people worry about me or ask me, “How did you do that with all those kids hanging off of you in the heat in
those suffocating rooms?” But I never feel any of that when I’m there. It is such a love trip to me. I understand Saint Teresa and how she was able to
maintain such passion for so many years. There is something really powerful about being with the poor. It is my church.
What is a day like for you when you are in the field?
The programs are creative and diverse. For both YouthAIDS and PSI, we use peer education. We will go into a brothel and identify a woman who is bright
and dynamic and empower her with education and services and help her bring that information to her peers. We also do that in slums and in factories.
We do radio and television ads. We identify potent local figures and try to persuade them to do public service announcements. Sometimes we just put a
person in a Styrofoam condom suit on a street corner. I visit the programs so I can be more educated when I talk to donors and governments. I also visit
with the vulnerable populations we reach and I just hang out and hear their stories.
That must be very difficult.
It is such a sacred trust. To have people feel safe enough to share their stories with me, a white, Western stranger. I worked with this group that rescued
homeless children from railway platforms. There was this little boy who was 4. How do you even run away when you are 4? But there he was, sitting on
my lap telling me his story. I said, “What do you want to ask me?” and he said, “Who are you?” To him, I was a warm lap, hugging him, telling him the
things that had happened to him were not his fault. I was just someone who cared. That was who I was.
I don’t know how you witness all that grief without weeping the whole time.
It is very difficult, I admit. I jokingly called my last trip the “Feel Your Feelings Tour of India” because I was overwhelmed. I’d get back to my hotel room
and absolutely fall to pieces. But I’d call my friends. I’d write things down to get the feelings out.
What would you write?
“I’m scared.” “I can’t stand it.” For whatever reason I can walk into the brothel and something else takes over. I have a stamina for it. Like, “Where are we
going now?” And then I get back to my room and I process my guts out. My first couple of trips I was so angry all the time. My idea of a good time after a
day in the field was to go kick some ambassador’s ass. But I’ve grown up a little. I will always have an insatiable desire to help the lost children of this
world. Well, duh. It dovetails perfectly with my own rawness. But now I can feel more empowered. I was always really drawn to the problems. But now I
can focus on the solutions. [She smiles mischievously.] I did pull a stunt in Delhi. A prominent man hosted a fund-raiser and against social custom, I
used that time to take up the cause of a girl who’d been rescued from a brothel. Her mother was a former sex worker who’d escaped. Because of this,
she was declared unfit and the girl was returned to her pimp, who was deemed her rightful father. I wasn’t leaving Delhi until this little girl was with her
mother. I grabbed the mic and started talking.
Are you a competitive person?
Controlling. It’s different.
Controlling in the manner of many southern women — of which I am one — where you do it sweetly and without people realizing it?
[Laughs] I used to be the worst. The worst! It’s called being an a- -hole. It is sideways anger. Because women often don’t have a valid channel to express
discontentment.
When did you change?
When I went to treatment for 47 days in February 2006. It was a beautiful, homelike setting, a little yellow clapboard house with porch swings and a
serenity garden, but it was essentially an inpatient medical facility. I went and had the wonderful opportunity to take a long, hard look at things like
codependency, depression, rage, stuff like that. Apparently, I was so angry I vibrated when I walked into a room. People have always been intimidated by
me. And then, of course, I would be angry they were intimidated.
And now?
Now I am much better able to detach. And let people have the dignity of their own experience. And realize it has very little to do with me. Initially, I was
resistant to certain things. But eventually, I realized “my way” was what got me into treatment, and maybe it was time to try it someone else’s way.
That’s the beauty of hitting the bottom: The pain of changing is less than the pain of staying the same.
How did your transformation affect your marriage?
Dario is my…well, we don’t talk about our marriage at all. I think for me to give my view of his view in the press is usurping his intellectual property. As for
other relationships, one girlfriend was afraid I was going to shove my spirituality down her throat. But she let me know her worries and it ended up fine. I
now know it is nobody’s job to make me happy or to change my mood. I have learned how to do that for myself. And that is phenomenally liberating.
Getting help was the single best thing I have ever done. I feel much less defeated. I can start my day over again at any given moment. I can call a friend.
Say a prayer. Go for a walk. That wasn’t always the case.
What else do you do to take care of yourself?
I have an ardent spiritual practice. I now meditate every morning. I have memorized spiritual passages that embody my highest ideals, and I slowly
repeat them to mysef.
You’re starting a clothing line for the discount superstore Goody’s. Has that been a longtime desire?
No. I didn’t even want to do it initially. When I was approached, I said, “The world is full enough of unnecessary objects.” And they said, “What would you
like to do?” They listened. The vision is cruelty-free clothing at affordable prices. I’m setting out with a lot of goals, not the least of which is to prove that
less wealthy Americans give a s- -t about global poverty. I’m sick and tired of people saying they’re only worried about themselves. I believe Americans
care about human- rights issues around the world.
Why Goody’s?
They’re based in Knoxville; I’ll be visiting five stores and be able to sleep in my bed every night. You can’t do that when you have stores in Minnesota!
Goody’s has also agreed to sell products made by survivors of human trafficking. Which is amazing. I intend to manufacture in factories that have the
highest standards. My contract specifies that I will visit all the factories. They’ll have health-care programs, education. A small portion of the fabric will be
organic and colored by nontoxic dyes. And it will be sold at the same price as the other items. It feels terrific. It’s real. Ali Hewson [Bono's wife] is doing
the same thing with her clothing line, Edun. And it’s beautiful. But it’s sold at high-end department stores. I want to bring that consciousness, that retail
choice, to the rural southeastern market.
What do the clothes look like?
I like feminine details. A little cap sleeve. A little ruching. I love a little ruffle. The jeans are really flattering through the thigh. I used to be very self-
conscious about my thighs. I remember being a teenager and buying the thigh-slimming booklet at the grocery checkout. So the clothes are very
considerate of women’s shapes.
Where will the profits go?
We’re giving away $10,000 grants to local schools in the greatest need. And my signing bonus went to help first-generation Appalachians go to college.
This one organization actually starts mentoring the kids in the home in junior high. It is really neat.
When is your next adventure?
I got a real yearning, an ache, the other day to be back in the field. Maybe Eastern Europe. The human trafficking there is especially violent.
Not exactly a sun-kissed vacation in the Caribbean.
[Laughs] I keep going back to this God thing. I just suit up and show up and wait for this sweet thing called love to walk into the room. Invariably it does.
And it keeps me strong.
 Glamour 2006
Ashley’s Secret Life
Breaking her silence for the first time, the star opens up exclusively to Glamour about the 47 days she recently spent in a Texas treatment facility—an
experience she says turned her life around.
Ashley Judd emerges from her Franklin, Tennessee, house with a pot of jasmine tea in one hand and a bowl of boysenberry ice cream in the other. She
invites me to sit down and take in the view: miles of rolling green hills, endless rows of dogwood trees and a garden of bluebells she planted herself.
Later, she takes me on a tour of her home, a circa-1800 farmhouse that has plenty of rooms but manages to feel incredibly cozy at the same time.
Touches of the 38-year-old American Beauty spokeswoman are everywhere: piles of gardening books; paraphernalia from the organization YouthAIDS,
for which Judd serves as global ambassador; and dozens of photos of her husband of nearly five years, race-car driver Dario Franchitti.
This is the Judd the world knows —gorgeous, happy and the picture of Southern hospitality. But there’s another woman behind that flawless smile —one
who’s spent years battling depression, isolating herself from her friends and keeping her anguish hidden from everyone she knew. “I needed help,” says
Judd. “I was in so much pain.”
Growing up in Tennessee, the daughter of country-music star Naomi Judd remembers her childhood as “complete chaos,” the result of constantly being
uprooted from home and school. “When I was in third grade, I didn’t even know who to put on my emergency contact form,” Judd says. To compensate
for the dysfunction, she made herself into a perfect child: talented, charming and not any trouble. And she went on to become a perfect adult, achieving
stardom in 2002’s Frida and 2004’s De-Lovely (for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe). Meanwhile, her older sister, Wynonna, spiraled into
food addictions.
But it was Wynonna’s decision to finally tackle her demons that led Judd to her own life-changing epiphany. During a “family week” visit to Wynonna at
the Shades of Hope Treatment Center in Buffalo Gap, Texas, Judd realized she had issues she’d never dealt with before. Counselors noticed too, and
invited her to stay for treatment. She said yes. Now, says the star of Come Early Morning and this winter’s Bug, “everything about me has changed
except my name.” Read on for Judd’s surprisingly candid words about the decision that changed her life —and all the good things that have followed.
GLAMOUR: You’ve gone through a huge life change. What exactly happened when you went to visit Wynonna?
ASHLEY JUDD: Well, one of the things families are asked to do is allow the person in treatment to talk about their perception of their lives without
interruption. I found I was having traumatic responses to what I was hearing: I would get light-headed and almost pass out. And what I realized is that I
wanted this opportunity for myself.
GLAMOUR: Did you talk to anyone about how you were feeling?
AJ: No, but the counselors must have noticed what I was going through. When they approached me about treatment they said, “No one ever does an
intervention on people like you. You look too good; you’re too smart and together. But you [and Wynonna] come from the same family —so you come
from the same wound.” No one had ever validated my pain before. It was so profound.
GLAMOUR: What, exactly, did they say you needed treatment for?
AJ: Codependence in my relationships; depression; blaming, raging, numbing, denying and minimizing my feelings. But because my addictions were
behavioral, not chemical, I wouldn’t have known to seek treatment. At Shades of Hope, my behaviors were treated like addictions. And those behaviors
were killing me spiritually, the same as someone who is sitting on a corner with a bottle in a brown paper bag.
GLAMOUR: So what were the first few weeks like?
AJ: We were asked to do an incredible amount of written work —hundreds of pages of self-evaluation, some of which we shared in group therapy. I
remember the night I shared my history of depression, like the way I used to use sleep to cope with uncomfortable feelings. When I finished, the
counselors and my peers were looking at me with huge eyes. They said, “We’re really glad you’re here.”
GLAMOUR: What is one of the most surprising things you discovered about yourself in the first few weeks?
AJ: Well, I do this thing on airplanes and in hotels that I never thought was a problem, where I wipe down all the plastic surfaces around me. The first time
I looked at that in treatment and thought I might have to refrain from wiping, I cried for 25 minutes —sobbed from my toenails. I said, “How can you tell me
that’s an addiction? I’m not hurting anybody.” But it’s not about germs —it’s about control.
GLAMOUR: Can you give us a sense of where all this pain comes from? What was your childhood like?
AJ: Complete and total chaos. I lived alternately with my mother, father and grandmother and went to 13 schools in 12 years. Everything was in such a
state of disarray and dysfunction that I became a hypervigilant child, doing the best I could to raise myself under extraordinarily unpredictable and unsafe
circumstances. Now I can look back and say, “Gee, I wasn’t just alone a lot —I was really lonely. I was clinically depressed at the age of eight.”
GLAMOUR: Why did you think that being “perfect” would make you feel better?
AJ: That’s how I got love as a kid. Supposedly my sister was the “messed-up” one and I was the “perfect” one. So I stayed out of trouble, making sure
not to be a bother or a burden or to have needs, and that was damaging. A wonderful pastor I know once told me, “Perfectionism is the highest order of
self-abuse.” So now I try to remind myself that if I engage in perfectionism, I am abusing myself. Period.
GLAMOUR: What is the most profound lesson you learned in treatment?
AJ: That in order to stay healthy, I have to feel all my feelings instead of numbing myself to them —and actually, when I allow myself to do that, they pass
more quickly. I spent my entire life telling everyone I was “OK, damn it.” But when you surrender to the [uncomfortable] feelings, there are gifts on the
other side: Allowing yourself to feel loneliness forces you to reach out. Letting yourself get angry gives you strength, energy and motivation
GLAMOUR: What are some of the specific ways you’ve changed?
AJ: I used to isolate myself; I would go to L.A. and my friends wouldn’t even know I’d come through town. I used to blame others for how I was feeling.
And I now know that no one can make you feel anything. One of my favorite quotes is by Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without
your consent.”
GLAMOUR: How has all this affected your relationship with Dario?
AJ: It’s allowed me to appreciate how much he loves me. All of my relationships have improved as a result of treatment.
GLAMOUR: Tabloids reported you were being treated for an eating disorder…
AJ: I think it was an easy thing [for them] to say: My sister is an overeater and I’m little, so I must be anorexic or bulimic. I’m not, but I did take a look at
my eating—why wouldn’t I? I looked at everything else in my life under a microscope.
GLAMOUR: Have your friends had a tough time adjusting to the new you?
AJ: Interestingly, my friendships have only gotten stronger. Nobody’s been thrown out with the bathwater. Some people expressed fear that I was going
to come out of treatment with a personality whitewash—that what was quirky, original and eccentric about me was going to be drained. So I wrote notes
to people to reassure them.
GLAMOUR: So what are some of the ways your friendships have improved?
AJ: I’ve learned how to give and receive “confrontations.” They encourage you to ask for what you need, and force you to take responsibility for your part
in things. You might say to a friend, “When you unconsciously cover your mouth with your hand while speaking, it seems like you believe your voice
doesn’t matter, and that frustrates me. I would like you to do some work on your self-esteem; I intend to do the same.” Then both parties sit with it for 24
hours and revisit it.
GLAMOUR: Soon after treatment, you traveled to Central America for YouthAIDS with Salma Hayek. How did it go?
AJ: It was a great trip. The president of Guatemala publicly declared he was increasing his HIV/AIDS commitment by over $5 million! But 25 years into
the AIDS epidemic, we’re still so far from a cure. Over the weekend, I watched a video of President Reagan’s health secretary saying that within two
years there might be a vaccine. That was in 1984!
GLAMOUR: You’re starring in two new films: What drew you to them?
AJ: It was a very simple decision to do Come Early Morning [which premiered at Sundance this year]: It was clear the director, Joey Lauren Adams—
who also wrote the script—knew what she was doing. I loved the images she came up with. In one section of the script, she wrote about cypress trees
that grow in the muck of the Arkansas River, struggling to push toward the light. The idea is “Can you find happiness in your life, in spite of your
circumstances?” I committed to doing the film on the spot.
GLAMOUR: And what about Bug, which is coming out in December?
AJ: I loved Bug for different reasons: It’s such a strong piece of material, about a lonely, depressed woman who lives in a crappy motel and hooks up
with a paranoid schizophrenic. My costar, Michael Shannon, starred in the play—the director bought the rights immediately after seeing it—and was
phenomenal to work with.
GLAMOUR: So how are you feeling at this moment in your life?
AJ: It’s so simple, really: I was unhappy and now I’m happy. Now, even when I’m having a rough day, it’s better than my best day before treatment. The
other day I came across a proverb, “It is better to begin in the evening than not at all.” It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past—what matters are
the choices you make right now. God gives you the chance to start over with every breath.
Allure 2005
Rebel Belle
Ashley Judd speaks her mind about her larger-than-life mother and sister, her race car driver husband, and the woman she’s dying to kiss on the mouth
Last May, at a taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Ashley Judd found herself in an unusual position: seated in the audience. The 36 year old actress
wasn’t there to reminisce about her six-month run on Broadway as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, of to promote her latest film, De-Lovely. Instead, she
sat in a row with her mother, Naomi, while older sister Wynonna was in an oversize yellow yellow leather chair next to Oprah. they were in the midst of
the second of several excruciating interviews dealing with some wrenching Judd family issues: Wynonna’s weight problems, her drunk driving arrest,
and most of all the revelation the Wynonna and Ashley have different biological fathers– a fact the now 40 year old Wynonna didn’t learn until she was in
ther 30s.
“It was intense,” says Judd now, still noticeably reticent even in her rememberance of the taping. “Oprah really reached out to Sister not only to help her
shed the weight, but also to excavate the deep and profound reasons she has always carried the weight. Sister told me, ‘I can’t do this second episode
without you.’ I said, ‘Of course,” but I told her it was really against my instincts and mature to be so publice in that way… Mom and Sister have such
energy pouring off then about each other, I on the other hand, hold my space very well, and I keep my own counsel. and that, without a doubt, is what has
preserved me.”
This self-preservation is just one of the traits that makes Ashley Judd a complex person rather than a single dimension caricature in a madcap Nashville
soap opera. Sometimes she’s naive, sometimes knowing. Mostly gracious, yet occasionally cutting. Self-deprecating, then just as demanding of proper
respect as a movie star (I was once her date to a Hollywood Oscar party a few years ago and have never seen a woman work a room like she did that
night). Judd plays up her many-sided personality so much that some could mistake her every hand gesture and eyelash flicker as a calculated drama,
and her fervent love of writers such as Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Flanery O’Connor as pretension. In fact, in her family having intellectual
curiosity and a sense of cool elegance is a way of defining herself. As much as she loved her family, her whole life seems to have been about not being
who they are.
You can’t get much farther away from a childhood in the deep South– or the glittery world of country music– than Scotland. I visit her at the home she
shares with her husband, Scottish racecar driver, Dario Franchitti, and after a brisk walk one evening with her dogs, Buttermilk and Shug, we sit down on
a bench on a windswept meadow behind the house. She has had a rough few days, as far as movie stars’ lives go. There was a bureaucratic snafu
when her pets were shipoped from her farmhouse in Tennessee, and she had to beg and plead with Glaswegian officials to get her animals out of lockup.
she wars not a speck of makeup, and there are bags beneath her tired eyes. Her unwashed hair has been pulled back into a makeshift ponytail with an
old silk orchid stucj haphazardly into it. And yet she is still beautiful, still self-possessed.
Her choice to live in Scotland and Tennessee with Franchitti instead of Los Angeles or New York City is just the latest manifestation of Judd’s varied
impulses. She may have come of age as part of the Judds (introducing her mother and sister– she doesn’t really sing), but she has become a high
fashion fixture, walking the red carpet at premieres and benefits wearing couture by her good friends Giorgio Armani and Valentino. She graduated Phi
Beta Kappa from the University of Kentucky where she studied French, but her campus obsession was (and still is) the Kentucky Wildcats basketball
team.
She smiles as her dogs romp around in the tall. damp grass. “Buttermilk once chewed up one of Dario’s stuffed animals out of jealousy,” she sys. “He’s
never chewed anything before or since. It was Dario’s stuffed bear, Barnaby, that he travels with. It is ian image seared into my memory: Dario sitting
crestfallen on the edge of our bed, stuffing the fuzz back into this gaping wound in Barnaby’s face with his finger.” That’s a sweet story, but even though
he is five years Judd’s junior, Franchitti is still a little old to be carrying stuffed animals around with him, especially on the racing circuit. “Let’s put it this
way,” says Judd, in the hoity-toity tone she uses when she’s half-teasing someone. “When I first came to visit him in that house back there I thought,
What am I going to do? I can’t live here. The place was all cracked champagne glasses and dirty duvets,” she says. “But then I walked into his bedroom
and saw this stuffed bear on the bed and said, ‘Just give me a ring right now.’ This sexy butch creature has a stuffed bear on his pillow? Love love love
it.”
“Did you have to exorcise all the ghosts of girlfriends past from the house before you moved in?” I ask.
Fortunately that was not Dario’s gig,” she says. “He was only 24 when I met him. He didn’t have that history, shall we say, which was nice.” So Judd was
the sexual mentor? “Yes,” she says without blushing. Has he been a good student? That halfway hoity-toity tone of hers gives way to a high school girl’s
giggle. “Ohhh… yes…”
It’s suprising that an actress who has been in the public eye so long would be so open and honest about spousal bedroom activities. But Ashley Judd
wants to tell the truth as often as possible. It’s why she took it upon herself to tell Wynonna the dark family secret about their paternity, a secret that
Ashley had known for a long time and hated keeping from her sister. (Ashley’s father is Michael Ciminella, who married Naomi when she was just a
teenager and pregnant by another man. Ciminella and Naomi divorced when Ashley was a small child.) “Mom’s decision not to tell Wynonna the truth
was all about fear,” Judd says. “I think she thought the world would stop turning on its axis if she told the truth. So I went to Mom and said, “Supposedly
we are a Judeo-Christian family, and we have a lot of faith, and we believe that the truth shall set you free.”
“Wait a minute. There are Jews in your family?” I ask.
Well, yeah, mu Aunt Margaret is a Jew, I love her for it. She live in Pennsylvania. At Thanksgiving after the presidential election, I said, ‘Fuck you people.
I’m going to to visit my liberal Jewish aunt in a blue state. My family went, ‘You’re really going to leave us on Thanksgiving because of the election?’ I
said, ‘You better believe it!”
This outspoken streak is not exactly a new development. “Ashley has always been up to exploring everything,” says Mary Tripp Reed, and economics
instructor who has been best friends with Judd since they were Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sisters at Kentucky . “She’s fearless. She was the first
woman I’d ever seen who just marched into the men’s room because the line for the women’s room was too long. i was astonished then followed her in.”
Judd still has the capacity to astonish those who know her well. Take the pastor at the Evangelical church she attended in college. “This old preacher
once was instructing us on how to fill out our forms for the membership directory at evening service. He went, ‘And don’t do that “Ms.” one. We don’t do
that here.’ I shouted from my pew: “too late, preacher!’ He said, ‘Ashley, is that you?’ People might think I’m a bit nutty on this issue, but words are
powerful. What we say and how we choose to say it is really important.”
Judd doesn’t really think she’s being confrontational when she expresses herself like that; she’s just being true to who she is. Her feminist beliefs,
however, don’t preclude her from being comfortable in her Southern-belle skin. “I may come off as ‘feminine’ as you describe the term,” she says, “but I
have never, ever been coy.” Such no-nonsense talk make Judd an interesting choice to represent American Beauty, a line of products for the Estee
Lauder Companies, for which she’s reportedly receiving 5.5 million over three years. “Estee Lauder was discriminated against because of her sex and
religion,” says Judd, as she scoots around the kitchen in her socks after our walk. She placed a pot of green tea on a tray next to a plate of ginger
cookies and orange sections. “But she was too clever and ingenious. Her legacy so perfectly suits my outlook and beliefs,” she says, mentioning that
American Beauty will furnish seed money for NutritionAid, an offshoot of Judd’s work with YouthAIDS, and organization that fights HIV infection in the
developing world.
Judd, stepping carefully around all the male clutter, heads upstairs to her husband’s media room. He is in a Bahrain for a race, but his many colored
racing helmets line the floor and the mantle above the fireplace. She rifles through her CDs, pulling out the one by k.d. lang. “She was my first same-
gender crush,” Judd says of Lang. “I was 18. I loved her. It was so mixed with admiration and awe. I know we’re going to see her at some point, and I’ve
already told Dario, ‘I’m going to kiss her on the mouth.’ I once made her a clover chain. That’s fairly pitiful, but sincere nonetheless.”
Judd’s brother-in-law Marino, also a racecar driver, arrives to take her to a concert by the Scottish rock band Travis, for an invited audience of 200 at a
nearby estate. “Are you driving?” She asks. The look on Marino’s face signals her that was a dumb question. “Good,” she says. “I can have a drink
then.” She opens the fridge beneath the bar in the media room and pulls out a bottle of beer and a half-eaten Cadbury chocolate bar. She attempts to
open the been with her teeth. Marino tries not to look. Judd just laughs and finds a bottle opener.
Before she leaves, Judd tells me a story, with a mixture of irony and relish, that says everything one needs to konw about her. It’s about Paramount
Studio’s ninetieth anniversary party a few years ago. “We had shot an Annie Leibovitz picture, all the Paramount stars had been assigned number for our
place in the group shot. I carried the number with me to the dinner and thought it was my table assignment. I ended up sitting with my back to the room at
a table next to an exit sign with a bunch of accountants from television syndication. I was trying to be a good sport and be gracious and listen to them talk
about who didn’t clean the coffeemaker in the office,” she remembers, looking at a photo of herself from that night. “All the other stars were an acre and a
half away. Sherry Lansing finally rescued me and put me at the right table where the action was, with Samuel L. Jackson and Liam Neeson and Andy
Garcia and Jessica Lange and Angelica Huston and Tom Cruise and all those guys. I was restored to my proper place in the pantheon.”
This is pure Judd: naive, worldly, polite, grand, haughty, humble. And everything seems to fit, including the fact that she has been returned to her rightful
spot in the celebrity universe with her best actress Golden Globe nomination for De-Lovely. But the role she’ll always play best is her own.
Sports Illustrated 2004
Wild Cats Fan
Sports Illustrated – Kentucky Edition 2004
Ashley Judd
For six months beginning last September, I played the role of Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway, and during curtain calls I was always
entertained by shouts of “Go, Big Blue!” and “Go, Cats!” or seeing signs expressing our shared passion for college basketball. But while I treasured my
time on stage, I deeply lamented the fact that it prevented me from attending my beloved Kentucky Wildcats’ games. That’s why the first thought I had
(after Ouch!) when I injured my left foot during a performance in February was, I can probably catch the rest of the games. Indeed, shortly after I had
surgery, I flew to South Carolina in early March to watch the Cats dominate the Gamecocks 84-65.
People often ask me to try to explain why Kentuckians are so nutty about UK basketball. My guess is that it’s because the> commonwealth is so
diverse, from the mountains of the east, where my family hails; to the central bluegrass, where we have a proud tradition of raising the world’s best
thoroughbreds; to the farmlands of the west. Basketball is one thing that unites us, something for which we all can be proud. An airline pilot once told my
Nana that when he flies over the state, he can tell when UK is playing because the roads are empty.
I loved hearing my Aunt Margaret talk about my grandfather Papaw Judd driving a large group of kids down Route 60 to Memorial Coliseum in Lexington.
At home, Aunt Margaret said, they watched games on TV with the volume turned down so they could listen to Cawood Ledford’s radio broadcasts, and I
dream of them doing so. When my family moved to Tennessee in 1979, I used to wait anxiously on Saturdays for the SEC games to come on. I’d sigh
when I finally saw Rupp Arena, wistfully reckoning that I knew half the people in the gym. That’s a lot of people for a 13-year-old to know, but Iwas
homesick.
One thing I love about going to UK games is that I don’t feel like a movie star, I’m just another passionate fan. In 2002, I hopped on a plane to Gainesville,
Fla., took a cab to the arena and watched the Cats beat the Gators 70-68, feeling as free as I do when I walk the woods surrounding our farm. Later that
year, after my brother-in -law’s car went out in the first 30 minutes of the 12 Hours of Sebring race in Florida, my husband, Dario Franchitti, and I left
earlier than expected. He went home to Tennessee, and I went to St. Louis, where along with the rest of Big Blue Nation, I gleefully watched Tayshaun
Prince score 41 points to beat Tulsa 87-82 in the second round of the NCAAs.
I have had the pleasure of getting to know many UK players and coaches over the years. I get to go backstage, if you will, and enjoy time with the young
men, appreciate their basketball IQs and develop friendships. Tony Delk is still my favorite. He was the MVP of the 1996 Final Four, and watching him
taught me to look past the flash of offense and to value tremendous defense.
After the Cats beat IUPUI 95-64 in the first round of the 2003 NCAA tournament in Nashville, the team came to my house and I cooked for them. The
fellas signed a wall that runs along the staircase to the basement and is adorned with awards given to me by the people of Kentucky, and what they
wrote is almost as dear to me as my grandmother’s pearls. I have had so many wonderful memories over the years, but I’ll leave you with my most
recent. It was March 7 and I was sick with bronchitis, but I made it to Rupp for Senior Day. During the first timeout of the second half, the UK
cheerleaders spell out KENTUCKY, and a person from the crowd is asked to come out to make the Y. That day cheerleader Jason Keogh hoisted me
onto his shoulder and carried me (and the blue-painted cast on my left foot) to midcourt. BeforeI was even introduced, I was given a standing ovation. It
was the most extraordinary feeling.
Back on Broadway, at that very moment, my play was closing without me, but I was getting the best curtain call of my life at Rupp from the people who
mean so much to me……the people of Kentucky.
Ashley Judd
Marie Claire 2004
Guest editor-in-chief Ashley Judd talks about solving the chaos in her life, what she’s doing to save the environment, and the private moment that made
the abortion issue personal.
I CATCH UP WITH ASHLEY JUDD ON HER farm outside of Nashville, TN, where she lives with her husband, race-car driver Dark) Franchitti. Birds
chirp, branches sway, a brook babbles. The setting exudes solitude, and the first thing I ask is how she ever leaves. “You know what? It’s not easy.” she
confides. Her hair in pigtails, Judd is dressed in a white sheath (”It’s actually a nightgown that I never quite got out of.” she confesses). This is where
Judd decompresses — she puts together scrapbooks, takes long walks (trailed by two dogs, three cats, and the occasional wild turkey), and tends to
her sweeping garden. “In two weeks, all you’ll see around here are roses,” she says as she surveys the space. “When we were shooting De-Lovely in
London, I discovered Queen Mary’s rose garden, and I’m telling you what, I’ve gone crazy for roses.” She disappears into the kitchen and returns
brandishing a tray loaded with iced-tea glasses and a selection of Italian cookies piled in mismatched bowls. She leads me to a terrace in the back of the
house overlooking a valley. It’s apparent that she possesses all the graciousness of the mannered South: serving iced tea on a tray, arranging the chairs
in the garden so that I have the best view.
But the fiery side of her personality the woman who marched with demonstrators in a recent pro-choice rally in Washington, DC; who has visited brothels
in Thailand and helped distribute information about STDs to prostitutes also shows through as we discuss the challenges facing American women. When
I glance at her answers to our Gallup Poll (page 82), I see that Ashley is not content to simply respond; she immediately offers solutions.
MC Which of the poll’s issues resonated most with you? Child care? Reproductive rights? Health care?
AJ All of them. Women’s issues are interrelated: Better child care, child safety at home and school well, these things are related to family-friendly work
environments and improved education. If you work on these issues collectively, there will be an exponential effect on women’s and children’s lives. I
know how important it is for a child to feel safe. When I was growing up, my mother’s and sister’s careers were taking off. I went to live with my dad, who
had his own problems. Finally, I ended up living at my grandparents’ house. They provided a counterpoint to all the chaos in my life. For the first time
ever, someone made my breakfast every day and washed my gym clothes on Fridays. They were loving, nurturing people with a strong sense of faith,
and 1 could be myself around them. Without them, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
MC Have Americans become too jaded to tackle women’s issues? Do we take our democracy for granted?
AJ I always think of this: When women got the right to vote in 1920, that legislation passed in Congress by just one vote. One vote changed everything.
We are seeing that in other countries, too South Africa just had its second, massively successful, free and fair election. People voted in droves. In India,
where there’s an extraordinary class system, 56 percent of the population votes; in the U.S. in the 2000 election, only 51 percent did. Americans need to
be reminded of our power as voters and we need to get more people registered vote.
MC Was there anything in the poll that surprised you?
AJ I was frustrated to see a waning interest in the environment. You know, I’m so taken by those “forest management” firms that the Bush administration
has in place. It’s a euphemism for deforestation. [laughs] Seriously, we all have to do our part. I’m actually selling our truck and getting a hybrid car. I’m
excited about it. Hopefully, there will be more press about environmental issues, I and it’ll get people interested again.
MC You’ve gone on record as being a strong proponent of reproductive rights, a topic far down on women’s list of concerns in the poll. Did the findings
worry you?
AJ You know, I have a lot of friends who would not personally choose to have an abortion. But they firmly believe it is a deeply personal, often agonizing
decision that a woman should be able to make — with her partner, her healthcare provider, and maybe her preacher. There are a lot of reasons for
women to be the ones to decide when or when not to have a family. And hand in hand with reproductive rights, obviously, is the need for medically
accurate sex education, family planning, and access to birth control. And if we were truly a civilized country, these things would be available in all
languages, for people of all socioeconomic classes. Then, women wouldn’t have unwanted pregnancies to terminate.
MC Did you grow up with that altitude?
AJ My mother always talks about how she chose not to have an abortion when she was pregnant with Wynonna. But I’m like, Mom, it was illegal at that
time, that’s why you didn’t. My own grandmother tried to push her off a ladder! People don’t think reproductive rights are in danger, but they really, really
are. There’s been a very successful campaign going on to suppress the reality that Roe v. Wade may well he overturned soon. If a democrat is not
elected, these rights will absolutely become more restricted.
MC So are you a feminist?
AJ First of all, I think it’s important to define “feminism.” Feminism means that you support social, political, and economic equality for women. Maybe if it
were described in those terms more often, more people would say they’re” feminists. There are still people who say they’re not feminists because they
don’t wear Birkenstocks or let hair grow under their arms! Yes, I’m a feminist.
MC And you’re also a Christian.
AJ Yes — but if this country ever dissolves the separation between church and state, I’m out of here. I’ve learned a lot of things from the church, though.
I’ve learned things I like and things I don’t like, and certainly I think they are equally defining. The next book I plan 10 read is actually about taking Jesus
back from the right.
MC Do people challenge you on being both a (Christian and a feminist?
AJ Yes. If you define feminism in a narrow way, so that it’s unflattering to men or it becomes incompatible with Christianity … My sister, God love her,
has a way of interpreting scripture so that it’s actually complimentary to women. It’s certainly not my interpretation, but it works for her. And I’m telling you
what, there was never more equality in a household than in hers. She and her husband are a phenomenal team. They are just awesome, with each other
and with their kids. But, if asked, she would say the man is the head of the house.
MC When did your ideas about feminism gel?
AJ In college. I took a women’s-studies class, and it changed my life, opened everything up for me. College taught me to trust that I had a certain innate
intellect, with which I could do a lot.
MC Does your husband share your passion for these issues?
AJ He’s sensitive and caring, and he’s so firm in what his personal beliefs are. The other night he went to see some movie filled with guns and
explosions, and he’s in the theater, and the woman sitting next to him had two children under the age of 5 with her. And Dario just turned to her and said,
“I’m sorry, but you have to leave. You can’t have those children in this movie.” It was great! Out sometimes he’s just very…detached.
MC Are there career-issue conflicts?
AJ Well, he’s a race-car driver, and that sport makes me crazy sometimes. I mean, you’d think they would try to reach out to as many potential fans as
possible, but instead, they’re alienating half of society with their objectification of women. But it’s his job…and it’s his venue…and it’s not my place.
[laughs]
Ashley Judd can be seen in De-Lovely, open in select theaters as of June 25.
My mother talks about how she chose not to have an abortion. Bet I’m like, Mom, it was illegal at that time, that’s why you didn’t. My own grandmother
tried to push her off a ladder!
Harper’s Bazaar 2004
Ashley’s Anything-Goes Style
As Cole Porter’s wife in the biopic De-Lovely, Ashley Judd steals the spotlight in dazzling, Jazz Era-inspired clothes by Giorgio Armani and jewels from
Verdura. Here, the star opens up about her flair for understated elegance.
Ashley Judd has no gimmick. Unlike her contemporaries, she has no fashion trademark no quirky hats à la Cameron, no Angelina-ish tattoos, nor
Hermès bag–accented Gwyneth-like uniforms. So when she hobbles on crutches to the door of her hotel room at Le Parker Meridien in Palm Springs,
there is no clue to prove that this creature in an unassuming cotton floral Marni skirt and white T-shirt (her only accessory: a cell phone with an attached
ear piece) is actually her. She has been in the desert all day shooting an advertising campaign and looks six shades darker than expected–thanks to
residual layers of tan makeup. A blue cast from a foot injury that she incurred on Broadway during her recent run as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is
making this normally graceful woman a bit less, well, graceful. The signature Southern manners, the extensive vocabulary and the sharp wit, however,
will soon expose her as the real deal.
But first things first; she has to rinse off that tan. “If you’d indulge me for just a few more moments while I take a shower, I’d be so grateful,” she says.
When Ashley reappears, it seems clear that for someone who must surely have an impressive wardrobe, she’s determined not to let it define her. To
punctuate this point, she is about to spend this entire interview in a hotel robe with wet hair, picking at a burger from room service. Finally, the fashion
gabfest can begin.
Ashley is not a woman short on opinions or hypotheses, but even she admits that her style, which ranges from couture goddess to down-home country
girl, is hard to explain. “I like skirts and dresses,” she says, then shrugs. “And if something looks like faded old wallpaper from a farmhouse, I’ll buy it.” To
complicate matters further, a quick study of her film roles reveals that she looks equally at ease in state-issued prison blues (Double Jeopardy),
Southern belle pieces (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) and the Jazz Era movie-star gowns that she wears in her latest movie, the Cole Porter
biopic De-Lovely which is in theaters now.
To hear Giorgio Armani talk about his friend Ashley, for whom he designed a real-life wedding dress in 2001, when she married race-car driver Dario
Franchitti, as well as some of the showstopping pieces in her wardrobe as Porter’s wife, Linda Lee, you’d think that Ashley was a throwback to a more
elegant time.
“I went to visit the set in England, and what struck me was that Ashley, in costume, seemed as though she stepped out of that period,” Armani recalls.
(The movie, which portrays the complex and largely platonic marriage of Cole–played by Kevin Kline–and Linda Lee Porter, shows Ashley’s character
age dramatically over the course of close to 40 years, never missing a fashion beat.) “I’m not American, but the impression I get is that Ashley is a
classic American beauty. You might at first think she’s fragile, but there’s nothing fragile about her at all.”
Armani makes no bones about his affinity for the styles of the early decades of the 20th century, when both men and women had a penchant for tailoring
and formality. 30 when the director and writer of De-Lovely, Irwin Winkler and Jay Cocks, respectively, approached Armani about providing wardrobe for
this movie, the latest of more than 100 films to which Armani has contributed costumes (including, notably, American Gigolo and The Untouchables), it
was an easy fit. “There was a natural connection with the story line, the characters,” explains Armani. “The Porters were an amazing couple with strongly
defined personal styles that reflected their eccentric lifestyles.”
Janty Yates, the Oscar-winning costume designer who worked on De-Lovely, mixed vintage Armani pieces with items from more recent collections
(fluid satiny gowns, palazzo pants and dainty lace jackets for Ashley) to create a working paradox: The movie provides a historically spot-on glimpse of
the ex-pat lifestyle of the Jazz Age while still looking relevant today. Thus, watching De-Lovely is a bit like a 20th-century fashion-history lesson with a
couple of modern diversions, somewhat like the experience of talking to Ashley Judd.
With Ashley, who studied French literature at the University of Kentucky, it seems that nearly every conversation has an academic slant. She won’t even
talk about clothes without packing her sentences chockablock with factoids, anecdotes, feminist gravitas, and lots and lots of opinions–from the
symbolism of the color green (it’s surprisingly complex) to the pioneer spirit of American fashion.
“I like American style. I love our contribution to sportswear–not the Sansabelt trouser, of course,” she says of the ’70s-era, elastic-waist pants. “I think
about where our country came from, people crossing the continent in covered wagons. Things had to be practical.” Of her own style, Ashley is less
committal. “I’m curvy, so I don’t always feel totally comfortable in pants,” she says, and later, “I love color.”
Tracing her style influences, Ashley cites such disparate sources as ’20s icon Louise Brooks in the film Pandora’s Box (”She was such a little hussy …
she has that bob, and she’s sitting on the chaise. So incendiary.”) and her mother, country singer Naomi Judd (who used to favor “thrift-store chic and a
lot of ’40s shapes”). But by her teens, Ashley had sought out her own inspiration: “I was into fashion in junior high and high school. I would buy European
magazines, and I loved cutting out pictures for my wall. I remember this Yves Saint Laurent dress … it was black, and it had little bows on each shoulder
and a little diaphanous thing that flowed behind it like a cape. It was a slim silhouette, a column dress, and it captivated me. I described it to someone who
said it was a very important dress; I would love to find it.”
Thanks to some of her stunning red-carpet turns, often in Armani, it’s likely there’s now a picture of Ashley on a teenager’s wall in a place like Franklin,
Tennessee, one of the many towns in which she lived growing up. That these wall-sanctified fantasies have become her reality is a plot twist that isn’t
lost on her.
“I was with Mr. Armani in the bathroom of his New York City apartment when he was pinning fabric on me for my wedding dress,” she says. “He had on
his beautiful navy cashmere T-shirt with all of these straight pins in it. He was talking about color and tone, and I was looking in the mirror watching him
work. It was a great moment.”
To preserve the fruit of these “moments,” Ashley recently had a cedar-lined closet built in her home outside of Nashville that protects her growing
collection of costumes, as well as gowns from Armani and another fabulous fashion friend, Valentino. “I don’t want to be a pack rat, but some of the
clothes are worth being archived,” she says.
Swishy is how Ashley describes the feeling of putting on a Valentino. “In a Valentino, you definitely feel elite. The pieces are beautiful and very feminine,”
she says. “Valentino lends you some of his signature. Armani is a bit more about you being relaxed and being who you are. I think the word to describe
Mr. Armani’s clothes is effortless. It’s easy to forget how incredible an Armani looks because it is so comfortable.
“You know the wedding dress Armani made for the film? I stomped around in that for days. It was like wearing a T-shirt,” she explains. “When I laid down
on the grass [between takes], my costumer had to draw the line!”
Not to minimize Mr. Armani’s talent, but Ashley’s comfort level in a silk satin, bias-cut wedding gown with a draping train might say more about her own
comportment than the cut of the dress. It’s hard, after all, to imagine any other modern actress spread out on the lawn in that gown with a hefty jeweled
necklace and several museum-quality diamond bracelets with that amount of unabashed ease.
Most of the jewelry Ashley wears in the film is from Verdura, based on period designs by Fulco di Verdura, whose career (first designing jewelry for
Chanel and then later for his own line) was largely launched by Linda Lee Porter. Linda Lee, in fact, presented her husband with a jeweled Verdura
cigarette case on the opening nights of 16 of his musicals. When selecting jewelry for De-Lovely, costume designer Yates consulted with Ward
Landrigan, Verdura’s current president, who couldn’t help but notice how the house’s jewels and the film’s leading lady enhanced one another. “[Ashley]
has sass, which may be why she wears the jewelry so well,” he says. “There are people who let the jewelry wear them because they’re afraid to draw
too much attention their way. That’s not one of Ashley’s problems.”
Offscreen, the actress’s current jewelry obsession is “black South Sea pearls. I saw Maria Shriver wearing a couple of strands with a T-shirt and jeans,
and she looked so chic,” she explains. “I spontaneously bought some in New York last fall.”
The pearls and the swishy dresses, her tendency to interrupt thoughts with phrases like deary me and what a dish, and the call-it-as-you-see-it honesty
leave little wonder why people describe Ashley as a throwback, in a Katharine Hepburn sort of way. There is also the actresses’ shared obsession with
gardening.
“My mother-in-law told me that she saw a special on Miss Hepburn, and she was packing up to go to her summer home,” Ashley says. “In her station
wagon, she had all of her staff, along with all of her plants! My mother-in-law said, ‘She had all of her plants with her! She reminded me so much of you.’”
Still, it might be Ashley’s politics and her thinking-woman’s reputation that merit the comparison most.
“Katharine Hepburn is definitely one of my fashion icons. But I like where her mother [a former president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association
and an early supporter of Planned Parenthood] comes from, too,” Ashley says. “She was a real educator of women, no nonsense about that stuff.”
Ashley herself is not shy about her pro-woman views on such matters, appearing on The Tonight Show, for example, in a T-shirt that says THIS IS
WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE.
So maybe that’s as close as you can get to a definition of Ashley Judd’s style: It’s not so much of a throwback as it is a prototype. She’s a feminine
neofeminist–equally smashing in dressed-down denim or a sexy halter gown with ruffles. And to those backward-thinking relics of the world who still
believe that a woman can’t be seriously minded and also concern herself with something as frivolous as fashion, Ashley has an earful.
“Everybody has the right to believe what they want to believe,” she says. “And if in their struggle for equality and eradicating the miseries that plague this
world, they think that a dress is not only superficial but also dangerous, that’s their prerogative. I don’t look at it that way. I think you get to be who you
want to be, achieve the things that you’re capable of achieving, and be a woman … in whatever way that means to you. It’s your ability to choose that’s
radical.”
InStyle 2003
White-Hot
Ashley Judd had two sizzling new movie roles and just nabbed a highly sought-after Broadway lead. But what makes this actress purr is a fast-driving
husband, her menagerie of animals, a good book and the occasional “hard-core” game of pictionary.
“Once, twice, three times a laaady,” Ashley Judd warbles along with a lounge-band rendition of the Lionel Ritchie ballad. The actress had just finished a
champagne cocktail at London’s posh and resolutely unhip Lanesborough hotel when, heading for the door, she catches sight of some elderly Brits
swaying to the late seventies prom tune. “How cute!” she declares, then murmurs, “I’m such an old lady for choosing this place.”
It’s after 10 on a Saturday night, and the wrought-iron gates of Hyde Park will be closing soon. The few stragglers inside are walking briskly through the
dark. But when Judd enters the park, she takes her time, enjoying a leisurely stroll toward her rented Knightsbridge flat. “I don’t know if there are weirdos
in this park,” she says — though she doesn’t sound especially concerned. Three-times-a-lady like in a Celine floral-print silk chiffon blouse and jeans,
Judd slips off her rhinestone-encrusted Oscar de la Renta sandals to fell the cool grass under her bare feet. “It’s so ridiculous that walking through a park
at night is considered dangerous,” she says. “To me it’s an elixir.”
Judd, 35, has been in London for three months–”How does ‘too long’ sound?” she says wearily — filming De-Lovely, in which she stars opposite Kevin
Kline and Linda Porter, the wife and muse of songwriting legend Cole Porter. The long hours of filming (last night went until 4 am) and the distance from
her race-car-driver husband, Dario Franchitti, have started to wear on her. And because of England’s strict pet-import laws, she’s also missing her five
cats and two dogs.
“Their rules about animals are diabolical,” she says. “To spend months without a pet–never again. I don’t care what the movie is.” The pets apparently
aren’t thrilled either. “Squeaker, one of our cats, is having accidents all over the house because he’s so angry I’m gone,” she says. “Dario told me
Squeaker took a whiz in his office the other day–while still holding eye contact!”
There’s another, more immediate, reason Judd’s mind has been on home. Franchitti has been recuperating from an injury he sustained in a motorcycle
accident in his native Scotland, and Judd has been getting periodic updates about his status on her cell phone. “He’s annoyed,” she reports, with a smile
of relief. “That’s a food sign.” Despite the accident, she said she tries not to worry too much about her husband’s safety. “I think that fear is a choice,” she
says, sounding like one of the indomitable heroines she has played in such films ad Kiss the Girls, Double Jeopardy and High Crimes. “I mean, I could
be wound up about it every time he races, or I could not. And I’m not.”
Judd and Franchitti met in May 1999 at a wedding reception. A friend had told her that a cute race car driver would be there. “I said, ‘Look, my four
available sports brain cells, are dedicated to Kentucky basketball.’” The actress obviously managed to expand her sports-fan capabilities, however, as
she and Franchitti wed in December 2001. (The friends at whose wedding they met have since divorced. “We sucked up all the love in the room,
apparently,” Judd says.)
The two, who have homes in Tennessee and Scotland, share a love for the bucolic life: hiking, and taking care of the dogs, cats, doves and countless
chickens. “We have what’s most important,” Judd says. “We’re very comfortable together in the quiet moments.” Now, whenever she finds herself
missing Franchitti and pinning for their sprawling farm in the hills outside Nashville, Judd makes a beeline for one of London’s green spaces. “If I have an
hour to spare, I’ll hit the pavement to get to the grass as fast as possible,” she says. “It has assuaged the homesickness for me.”
The life of a movie star is often incompatible with Judd’s homebody tendencies. Before London she had spent several months in San Francisco shooting
a thriller tentatively titled Blackout, in which she plays a cop who may or may not be bumping off her ex-boyfriends. After De-Lovely wraps, she’s taking
a few weeks off before heading to Broadway to star with Jason Patric in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The play, which opens in previews
in October, will keep her away from home at least six more months. “It’s a bit of a point of pride to do a play for that ling,” she says. “It’s just Hollywood
fluff if you do it for less than six months.”
The part of the turbulent, sexually frustrated Southern belle Maggie “the Cat” Pollitt is one of theater’s most coveted roles, previously tackled by Elizabeth
Taylor, Natalie Wood and Jessica Lange. “A lot of Hollywood names wanted to play this role–and I mean big names,” says Cat’s producer, Bill
Kenwright. “You have to have someone as Maggie who can eat up the stage. Ashley’s extraordinarily right for it, with her beauty, her background and her
vulnerability.”
Before the play came along Judd had been planning to star in the movie Catwoman, which would have been her first shot at a big-budget comic-book
franchise. But the film schedule collided with the play –”It was a catfight,” she quips–so she dropped out of the production and was replaced by Halle
Berry. “Obviously that movie would have been incredibly lucrative,” Judd says. “But you know what? I’m the only person in my generation who will get to
play Maggie. I cannot anticipate the ways doing this play will change me.” She shrugs. “You know what’s going to come of Catwoman: Hopefully it’s a big
hit, it makes a lot of money, inspires some little girls, and there are some T-shirts.”
For Judd, the only real downside of a six-month run on Broadway is that it means six months in New York, where she lived two years ago while filming
the romantic comedy Someone Like You. “It was really hard,” she says. “I don’t want to slag New York. It’s a very special place. You can get Indian food
at 3 in the morning. But I personally don’t want Indian food at 3 in the morning. I want to go for a walk in my nightgown! I’m just not an urban person,
neither is Dario.”
If Judd craves a calm place to put down roots, it may be because she never had one growing up. After her parents divorced when she was 4, she spent
her childhood moving between California, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In 13 years she attended 12 schools. When she was 15, her mother Naomi, a
registered nurse who struggled to keep the family afloat, and older sister Wynonna achieved sudden country-music stardom as the Judds. “I found
peace and stability at an earlier age than my mom,” she says.
Between her nomadic childhood and the globe-trotting life of an actor, Judd has learned how to create islands of serenity. when she travels, she takes
her favorite stuffed animal and a photo of Franchitti. And she always carries along tons of books. “My suitcase weighs so much,” she says, “but the
make me feel at home.” For Judd, who studied French at the University of Kentucky, books are a portable refuge. She keeps a journal devoted to
whatever she has been reading — recently Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and
Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. This bookish bent carries over into the way she speaks: crisply and precisely, with an impressive use of language
(though she’s been known to utter the occasional “Duuude!”). “Kevin Kline is bit of a word hobbyist, am I,” Judd says. “We’ve been going around the set
saying, ‘You’re the only other person I’ve ever met who knows how to pronounce “forte”!’”
It’s almost midnight by the time Judd finally reaches her apartment, tucked away on a quiet and stately side street. Mimi, a friend visiting from L.A.,
emerges from the kitchen, and the two settle down for a late snack. On the mantel Judd had propped a photo of Franchitti wearing a racing helmet. On a
side table is a picture of her oldest dog Buttermilk. Beside the TV are games: Cranium, Pictionary, Articulate!, Scattergories. “Ashley is a huge game
player,” Mimi explains. “When she hosts a game night, there’s a whole art to it.” Judd nods, adding, “I’m hard core.”
It’s getting a little late to break out the board games, though, and Judd excuses herself, reappearing in a demure, blue – and – white – checked nightgown
and stifling yawns. Nine hours of sleep are–along with yoga and a mostly vegetarian diet — the cornerstone of her healthy lifestyle, and after last night’s
marathon shoot, she needs them. On Monday she’s off to Luxembourg for more filming, then on to New York to find an apartment, and then returning to
Tennessee with Franchitti.
But tomorrow Judd will enjoy a rare day off, which means, not surprisingly, that she’s heading outside London to visit a friend’s garden. “Some nice
grass, a good breeze and some pretty flowers,” she says. “That’s what I’m all about.” This girl may be out of the country, but the country will always be in
the girl.
New York Magazine 2003
Ashley’s Next Act
Fresh from filming De-Lovely, the story of Cole Porter, Ashley Judd is coming to New York to star on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “All I know,”
she says, “is that something wonderful is going to happen.”
Ashley Judd looks just like a movie star should, even when everything’s falling down around her. There she is, glimmering in a corner amid the debris
and dust, eating almonds and drinking nettle tea. We have arranged to meet in a small Notting Hill Gate restaurant—she has been in London shooting a
film about the life of Cole Porter—and when I arrive, I find that the restaurant’s ceiling has caved in. She is wearing a turquoise silk shift over white pants
and a pale-pink camisole, and she has a white rose pinned in her hair, not one strand of which is out of place. She is so pretty, so dewy, that without
makeup she looks about 8 years old. She is actually 35 years old, with 26 film roles under her belt, having played Marilyn Monroe and held her own
opposite Morgan Freeman in three movies. This September, she will be appearing on Broadway as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
“I’m the most excited about doing this play that I have been about anything,” says Judd. “It’s the greatest part in American theater for someone of my age
range. I told Anthony Page, the director, that if I get any more excited, I’m going to hurt myself.” Getting the part is particularly meaningful for Judd
because she turned it down when Page offered it to her for his London production four years ago. “Dario and I had just met,” Judd explains. “And I
thought, That’s a nice way to handicap a relationship.”
Dario is the race-car driver Dario Franchitti; he and Judd had a somewhat secret engagement and married in December 2001. Now, she says, “I’m tired
of movies. I’ve dubbed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ‘the actor’s revenge’ because there’s no cameramen, no lights, no breaking in the middle of the scene
because it’s time for lunch.”
Weary of the movies as she may be, she certainly is good in every film she does. She is tiny and feminine, yet never flimsy as a performer. She often
plays strong women—in those Morgan Freeman movies, for example, like Kiss the Girls—but even when she is playing a woman undone, you never
see her completely dissolve. One of her most memorable performances was as the young Vivi in the otherwise unmemorable Divine Secrets of the Ya
-Ya Sisterhood. “I walked away from that movie saying I might be able to do different, but I can’t do better,” she says of playing a young mother who
suffers a messy mental breakdown and loudly and painfully rejects her daughter. It was startling to watch the character, someone so perfectly
composed, unravel, and Judd did not hit a false note.
In the movie De-Lovely, she stars as Linda, the glamorous wife of Kevin Kline’s Cole Porter, who married the lyricist and composer after fleeing an
abusive Social Register marriage. Despite Porter’s many gay affairs, the marriage was a great success. Like Judd, Linda Lee Thomas Porter was from
the South, and for all her sophistication, intelligence, and style (she was one of the first people to have a minimalist all-white drawing room, in Paris in
1919, which Judd can describe every detail of, down to the kind of pencils), she never lost her identity. Judd is similar—at once erudite and homespun;
stylish and earthy; glamorous but not done up.
An avid gardener, she is “studying roses” at the moment, and when she went to visit a famous English rose garden recently, she was spellbound: “I just
left my shoes in one place, my tote bag in another, scarf here, hat somewhere else, and I was just peeing in the garden, not even bothering to go to the
loo.”
City life “is always a kind of ‘Whoa, Bessie’ experience” for her and Franchitti, she says. “My husband and I are not particularly urban people.” The couple
divide their time, when not working, between their farm in Tennessee and their house and garden in the Scottish countryside. Do they want children?
“God to know, us to find out,” she says. “Never lusted after them.”
Whatever happens, Judd is rooted firmly in her family. Her sister and mother are Wynonna and Naomi Judd, the country singer-songwriters. “We are
close,” says Judd, “though growing up with women means that I never shut the door when I go to the bathroom, even, sometimes, in restaurants.”
(Possibly this explains the garden-peeing.) As for the pressures of growing up with a mother and sister famous for being a team, she says, “My sister is
the mirror to my soul. I’m not motivated by bettering Jennifer Lopez, or catching up with Julianne Moore. But when I hear how powerfully my sister sings
and how true she is, I know that I have a responsibility to my gift, to find out how deep my depth is.”
Judd will be doing just that when she comes to Broadway. “All I know is that doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is going to change me. How can I do Tennessee
Williams for six months and remain unchanged? Something wonderful is going to happen.
“Plus,” she says, “I’m coming to New York at the best time of year. I’m excited about it being autumn. I’m excited about the Yankees. And after being in
London for three months, I’m excited about doing something so American. I saw some New York construction workers the other day, and I wanted to
kiss them.”
Tribute 2002
No Secret to Her Success
When Ashley Judd burst on the scene at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival in 1993 with her role in Ruby in Paradise, everyone thought her trip to
stardom was going to be a short one.
But she seemed determined to carve out a career very separate from those of the famous singing Judd’s — her mother, Naomi, and sister Wynonna —
and had gotten off to a great start with a sensitive performance in a Sundance Grand Jury Prizewinner.
She followed it with major roles in Heat, A Time to Kill, Kiss the Girls and Double Jeopardy. All that hard work has paid off, with Judd, now 34, being
pursued for her part in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and being chosen as the lead in Catwoman (for which she is rumored to have earned
a $10 million payday).
Judd’s steady, serious approach to acting seems to be part of her practical streak. “If I’m traveling in a foreign country, I’m always the one who has to bat
cleanup — get to the bottom of the tipping policy, deal with the front desk, book those tours,” she observes.
And, when she has to do the strong focused thing on screen, it does seem to be believable. “People like to see me do this,” she says, sounding
somewhat surprised. “They believe I’m capable of so much.”
In her most recent film, High Crimes, Judd played a lawyer defending her husband (Jim Caviezel), who is accused of massacring civilians while on a
covert military operation in El Salvador 15 years earlier.
It was while on that shoot that Judd started receiving impassioned letters from first time director Callie Khori to take on the part of the uninhibited
character of Vivi in the screen adaptation of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
The movie details the friendship of four women who stage a rather unorthodox intervention to help young playwright understand her eccentric mother.
The story begins in the 1930’s and ’40s, continues in the ’60s and ends in the ’90s. Ellen Burstyn assumes the role of Vivi in the present. Judd plays Vivi
in the ’40s and the grown-up mother in the ’60s. He role spans the character from the age of 18 through to her 30s. Sandra Bullock (Judd’s co-star in A
Time to Kill) portrays the grown daughter of the Judd-Burstyn character.
With all her starting turns lately, Judd told AOL that her supporting role in the film is a nice break. “I think it is important to mix up starring and supporting
roles — because, frankly, that much responsibility all the time would leave no room for a private life.”
That private like now includes a husband — Scottish race car driver Dario Franchitti. The two married last December at Skibo Castle in Edinburgh,
Scotland, where Madonna and guy Ritchie also exchanged their vows. the busy couple, who divides their time between her movie sets and his race
locations, now lives in Franklin, Kentucky. before settling down, the actress was known for her high profile dating, having dated singer Lyle Lovett and
Michael Bolton, as well and actors Robert De Niro and Matthew McConaughey.
Born in Las Angeles, she grew up living out of tour buses and hotel while traveling with her mom and sister. She attended 12 different schools in 12
years.
“My folks were on the road at a certain stage, and I was living with my dad (Michael Ciminella),” she explains. “I was 17 and there was a whole wee I
skipped school. My dad wasn’t there.”
Even so, this particular bad behavior wasn’t all that rewarding for her. “I didn’t have fun because there wasn’t anybody else skipping school,” says Judd.
“There was no one to hang out with, no one to share a sense on conspiracy and adventure. i was miserable… Fortunately, I was able to recover.”
That’s an understatement. Judd went on to be a top student — earning a place in the honor society Phi Beta Kappa — at the University of Kentucky
where she majored in French. After flirting with the idea of joining the Peace Corps, Judd decided to pursue acting and landed bit roles on television’s Star
Trek: The Next Generation and Sisters.
“I worked very hard to help make opportunities for myself,” she says. “When I lived in Los Angeles and was studying at my acting school, I drove all over
this town meeting people and auditioning for parts. I got some work, built some momentum, trusted my instincts, and here we are.”
One thing that is evident is that Judd appears to be drawn to strong character. In Double Jeopardy she was a betrayed wife with a purpose and in Kiss
the Girls she was a serial killer’s object of desire that refused to be a victim.
“It’s interesting, she says. “In an article, Jodie foster said she knew the links between the various character she has played, what connects them
thematically. People say that to me and I think what unites all my character is, they’re hurt. It’s most accurate to say I play character who are hurt but are
responding to their environment.”
As her stardom continues to grow, Judd is responding to changes in her own life and trying to figure out where the line is drawn between public and
private.
“It’s hard, but I try to do it,” she says. The right question is, do I get irritated while I try to retain my privacy? I have a picture from the film festival at
Deauville, France, where Kiss the Girls was premiering in Europe, and there’s this phalanx of photographers in a circle and I’m standing there, and I
wrote, ‘Abandon all ye who have hope who enter here.’”
“It’s a trade-off and I hope people understand my husband Dario and I give a lot. I have a responsibility to nurture and shepard my talent and when I’m
living the parts of my life not related to that I feel I have the right to be left alone…
“My sister disagrees with me. She said the lack of privacy comes with the whole kit and caboodle and it’s not open to negotiation. “If I’m in the toilet in an
airport bathroom, I don’t think it’s appropriate to slide a pad and pencil under the stall.”
Judd’s not totally businesslike, though, and admits it’s occasionally impossible to turn down a fan. She says: “You see the crestfallen look on the girl’s
face and she says, ‘It’s for my mom.’ And of course, you melt.”
Vogue 2002
Firestarter
Ashley Judd is known for playing sparky women. Offscreen, the actress is forthright, funny, and Sally Singer learns, a real flamethrower.
Ashley Judd was stroking one of her five cats–huge, fluffy, mixed-breed tabbies–when an alarm began wailing throughout her nineteeth-century
Tenessee farmhouse. “Something’s on fire,” she said. Judd turned her head. Flames, feet high, were leaping out of the living roo. A thich cloud of black
smoke was spewing quickly forward, toward us. i stood bare feet-no shoes are allowed past the Judd doormat-frozen, if that’s the right word, to the spot.
I was thinking, Bucket? 911? How do you find the telephone in a house whose every surface is covered with tea cosies, table mats of peacock feathers,
figurines, commemorative plates, buttercup sterling silver, needlepoint homilies on the wall and pillow, books-old, new, decorative, well thumbed–car-
racing helmets, trophies, bath products, photographs, and countless other objects of autobiographical, historical, and aesthetic significance?
The actress, in a sporty white tank and can-do khaki A-line skirt, jumped to it. Sprinting, she turned on the faucets in the kitchen and guest bathroom.
She grabbed towels–this is not a household short of terry–soaked them, and fearlessly whacked at the huge blazing armchair that was the source of the
trouble. “I’m, only worried about the animals,” she said as she gallantly struggled against the mini-inferno. “What should I do?” I asked pathetically. I had
already blown out some of the 30-odd candles that burned in the living room; one of them had evidently mingled with the upolstery. “Get more towls from
the guest bedroom,” Ashley said calmly. “Straight ahead, then left, then right.” Soon after Judd had singlehandedly put out the fire, her brother-in-law
Marino returned from the woodpile with the somewhat unbelievable intention of finding a flame starter to burn logs. he helped drag the arnchair into the
garden and turned a hose on it when it started flickering once more. Ahsley said, “Well we’re just going to have to tell ABC Carpet that this fabric is
flammable.” The she started looking through cookbooks. she ws preparing Pop’s (i.e., her stepfather’s) birthday dinner that night (main course: fried pork
chops), and she needed a recipe for devil’s food cake.
If I was awed by Ashley Judd’s comportment during this stunning sequence, perhaps I shouldn’t have been. She has made a career portraying either
ordinary woman in extraorinary peril, in the tradition of Joan Fontaine, or kooky, sweeter-than-pie stunners who operate in a pronounced domestic world
(Donna reed with a drawl). Thus, this spring has already seen the release of Carl Franklin’s High Crimes, in which Judd stars as an attorney whose ex-
Marine husband has a dark and dangerous past. (It was number two at the box office in its opening weekend, behind Panic Room, further confirming the
Hepburn/Tracy appeal of Judd and her wonderfully unlikely costar, Morgan Freeman. This month she can be seen in Callie Khori’s adaptation of
Rebecca Wel’s best selling novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya sisterhood. In the film, she plays the young Vivi, the most bewitching, beauteous, and
demented member of a circle of women friends (the Ya-Yas). The avtion unfolds in a world of large country houses, Southern priviledge, and intensely
grounded relationships.
This is a world that Judd happens to inhabit. She lives with her husband, the Scottish CART-racing driver Dario Franchitti, on ten acres of farmland that
abut her sister’s 490 acres and her mother’s 500. She enthusiastically maintains her sorority friendships (University of Kentucky, Kappa Kappa Gamma)
through E-Mail, and hangs out with old non-industry girlfriends (more of which later). What makes the setup no so Ya-Ya is her husband, who at 29 is five
years her junior, is absolutely pivotal to her life. They met at a friends wedding in Santa Monica, courted intensely, and then spent the best part of a year
trying to organize a pressproff wedding. The couple finally tied the knot last December, at Skibo Castle, Scotland, the scene of the Madonna-Ritchie
nuptuals. Judd wore a simple dress but “ended up with the most gigantic veil in the world. Like a fountain.” Grazie, Mr. Armani. Although the bride’s father
and stepfather were present, she walked down the aisle solo. “I don’t believe in women being handed over as an economic asset from one man to
another,” she told me over a home-made lunch of tuna casserole and chocolate cream pie.
Judd has been a cooking a lot recently. Since the wedding, thenewlyweds have been holed up in rural tennessee in order to devote themselves to yoga
(Dario studies with Ashley; Ashley with a local Ashtanga guru), woodshopping (excellent upper-body work), bird-watching, reading (Judd recently
finished Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride), and other pastimes that would no doubt meet with Thoreau’s approval. She has 20 pounds of powdered
sugar from Kroger’s market in her basement (”So I can bake whatever strikes me”) and eighteen kinds of diary products in her fridge. “Relentless work
and marriage are mutually exclusive endeavours,” said Judd, grating extra cheese on her casserole. “There’s no other way, at least if you want to have
any genuine intimacy in your married life. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Still, there are signs that all this restful behavior is making her restless.
“I was a little weird in my head yesterday, and I thought, An I not in my full flourishing because I ‘m not at work or something?” She gazed out the window
and saw an industrious woodpecker furiously sharpening his beak.
So here is the Judd predicament: how to reconcile strong ambitions for movie glory with and equally fervent desire to live a life of middle-class virtue and
down-home values. “She has really surburban dreams and fantasies,” Hugh Jackman, her costar in Someone Like You, says affectionately. “Being a
florist, baking cookies, wanting to teach. Judd obviously has mixed feelings about following an occupation that is not inconsistent with brainless egotism.
No one who meets her is allowd to walk away in the mistaken belief that she’s just a pretty face (although she is exceptionally lovely in person, with
shiny bob and glowing skin, courtesy of nature, Kiehl’s, and Lorac). Here is what I learned within minutes of meeting her. She prefers novels to
magazines. She is close friends with Bobby Shriver, with whom she discusses the campaign to eliminate Third Worls debt. she can cite, in an anecdote
about a massage therapist, and unfinished poem by Robert Frost. She speaks French and is addicted to NPR. The one chink in the intellectual armor,
perhaps, is a typically thespian sincerity about karma. She speculates that Dario, a voracious reader of literature about World War II, may have been a
smal Chinese boy who listened for snippets of wat news on the wireless. and her yearning to walk–how to put this?–au naturel in the woods could, Judd
muses, indicate an aboriginal previous life.
For possibly karmic reasons, she cultivates fatalism: “What goes around comes around. If there’s a project I’ve really loved but was passed over for,
invariably it has come back somehow. I have a very relaxed attitude toward all that, shich does not mean that I’m not ambitious. It’s just that I’ve kind of
innoculated myself against the disease.” Nevertheless, Judd cant’s stop herself from trying to fix things on the behalf of her nearest and dearest. She
worries that Dario’s CART racing cicuit is not well marketed in the States, so she turns up on obscure radio shows about auto mechanics to talk it up.
she worries about her sister Wynonna’s struggles to diversify her country-music success, and would love to help. “I would like her to do a song for a
movie of mine, but only if it had the right titlw placement. She would want to do it in any case, to help me.”
Of course, underlying all these dilemmas is a belief in the perfectibility of life. Judd exudes a quintessesntially American optimisn that goes some wa
toward explaining her strong mainstrean allure for cinema audineces. We love Ashley because we are grateful that such a beatuy could share our basic
bourgeous impulses. when she learns, in film after film, that her husban dis a homicidal maniac, there is little space between her horror and ours.
Judd’s clothing sense consolidates this appeal. She has a fashion historian;s knowledge of cut and ornamentatio, and stylist’s awareness of her own
body (one shoulder, she says, is fractionally higher thatn the other, so al straps have to be adjusted). And yet she is not drawn toward conceptual or
directional looks. Judd doesnt do edgy, ever; she sticks to the contiuum between just plain pretty (Lilly Pulitzer shifts, Marni prints, Missoni knits) and big
time glamour (Armani, Valentino, Chanel). Her walk-in closet–which is a room actually–reveals a whimsical, feminine aesthetic; tiers of Prada and Manoli
kitten heels; Muriel Brandolini caftans; stackes of sherbet-hued cashmeres (some vintage, some new); lots of Tuleh; old Voyage (which she recently
started wearing again); neatly pressed khakis; perfectly shrunken baseball tees. “I’m pretty simple,” she says. “I don’t participate in trends. the times that
I have, it’s because I haven’t been paying attention–when I’ve let someone do my hair, looked at it as I was walking out the door, and said, ‘Oh shit.’” Last
summer, in Portofino, Judd repeatedly visited the Pucci store to try on a dress. On her umpteenth session in the dressing room, Dario peeked in and
said, “What a pretty dress.” That sealed it for Judd. “He loves it, which for some reason I find endearing.”
For her red carpet appearances, the actress is helped by her stylist Samantha McMillen. McMillen won’t accept payment, so Judd “pays” her pal in
Marni. “I cleaned out the Milan store,” she says. McMillen, who used to work for Armani, is responsible fot Ashley’s long standing relationship with
Giorgio, which has resulted in numerous memorable looks. (For Oscars 2001: thirties-esque satin-bondiced dress with asymmetrical tiered skirt, which
the designer sketched after Ashley and Samantha sent him pictures of long beaded strands from Fred Leighton. For Skibo 2001: simple but stunning
wedding gown that Armani designed from an as Judd sent him of a matron-of-honor dress with a little silk pocket.) When the actress wats something a
little less austere, she turns to Valentino, with whom she has a similarly intense relationship. the glossy amethyst, side-twisted Oscar dress from 200? “It
was red in the couture show, and I loved it. We spoke on the telephone–I think I caught him on the slopes in Switzerland–and he said, ‘Do you know
anemones?’ Sold!”
A couple of weeks after the Tennessee conflagration, I met Judd and McMillen in the Bel-Air hotel. Judd was in Los Angeles to tape The Tonight Show
and walk the red carpet at the premiere of High Crimes/ The star had flown in from Sardina, site of the Vogue shoot, with her dog Buttermilk, a few tees
and jeans, a T. Anthony monogrammed makeup case, and the stomach flu. The scene in her suite was pure Ya-Ya. Ashley, who was having her hair
curled for the night ahead, was surrounded by her bridesmaids, Samantha and Gabrille (whom she met when she was three), and an ex-assistant,
Michelle, who was also present at Skibo. There was a lot of whoopin and verbal pillow fighting. Room-service guacamole, quesadillas, and iced tea went
untoched. “Anybody want a hand massage?” Ashley drawled when her manicure was finished. “Yes, please,” said Michelle. Then everyone–Ashley, the
girls, the hair and makeup guys, and I–played Password. (Judd: Don’t be a creepy journalist; you have to play.”) Somebody gave the clue “contour,” and
Judd snapped back, “Shade!” Correct. “You are so competitive,”Gabrielle at one point shrieked at Ashley. “So are you,” Ashley retorted competitively.
The somebodyu gave a whole bunch of agonizing clues that included “suburban” and trailer.” “Ball-hitch!” yelled Samantha finally. “Ofcourse,” everybody
shouted, “how obvious!”
Then it happened: Flames leaped from the coffee table. One of Ashley’s candles had set fire to tissues. Everybody threw iced tea.
We all escaped into the car and zoomed off to Leno. Judd was in an unusually provocative get-up: Earl low-rise jeans (”I can’t believe how much I’m
loving these jeans. It’s amazing what clothes tht fit can do for your self-esteem”); a Michael Stars tank top with a slogan, customized by Sam, that said,
This is what a Feminist Looks Like; Tod’s high heels; and a fisherman’s cap from Dolce & Gabbana. We started playing a new gane, Druthers, in which
everyone has to elect the worse of two evils. Sam: “One big nostril or a black tongue?” Ashley: “Gimme the uni-schnozz. At least it’s out there.” Sam:
“Wille Nelson or Johnny Cash?” Ashley (without hesitation): “Johnny Cash.” The atmosphere changed from Ya-Ya to Something about Mary. Sam: “You
wake up in the morning. You have either a dog’s penis coming out of your forehead or a dog’s balls attached to your chin.” Buttermilk perked up at this
one.) Ashley: “The balls. You can always wear a scarf.” Ashley: “You can either be a hard body or 30 pounds overweight but amazing at yoga for the rest
of your life.” Everyone: “Hardbody!” Ashley: “Oh, I’d go for the yoga, definetely.” Everyone: “Hey, we’re here.”
In her dressing room at the The Tonight Show, Ashley chats with Jay–not about herself but about Darios’s upcoming race at LongBeach. “You have to
comeout,” she says. “You’ll have paddock seats.” Leno wanders off. we watch his opening schtick, in which we see a joke clip from Panic Room.
“What’s a promo for Panic Room doing on my show?” Judd demand, mocking her own rivalrous nature. Then she finds a cansle and lights it.
InStyle 2002
Ashley Kicks Back
After four back-to-back films–including this month’s High Crimes–Ashley Judd is shifting gears. She and her race-car-driver husband have retreated to
their Tennessee farmhouse, where the only bright lights are cast by the fireplace and the only demands come from their five cats, two dogs, and yoga instructor.
Ashley Judd is with someone other than her husband in a converted garageon grounds of their Tennessee farmhouse. She’s breathing heavily. Sweat
glistens on her back. She moves her body in ways she hopes will please her companion, who is studying her carefully. Suddenly she cries out in
pleasure. “i did tittibassana!” she exclaims as she balances her entire body weight on two splayed hands while shooting her legs straight out in front of
her. “That’s great Ashley,” says her yoga instructor, who has been giving Judd private classes in a discipline called Ashtanga. The rigorous, 100-minute
workout consists of one gravity-defying pose after another, but with impressive physical control, the actress has segued into each position like a pro,
most conspicuously when she nailed this last pose. She’s so proud of her accomplishment that after class she runs into the house, jumps up into the
arms of her husband, CART race-car driver Dario Franchitti, and wraps her legs around his waist. “I did it!” she announces, as Franchitti kissed her and
beams. “I wasn’t even practicing it, and I just tried it.” This is the Ashley Judd you might expect to encounter: the indefatigably optimistic overachiever
who reads French novels in the original, goes on week-long boot camp style ashram retreats, and baked her own bread–a woman Hugh Jackman, her
co-star in last years Someone Like You, calls “very passionate and fiery and full of life.” But spend an entire day with the actress and it becomes
obvious that there’s a new Judd emerging as well–on who’s at peace even when at rest. In fact, she’s at times downright languid. Perhaps it’s because
since last May, Judd has been on an extended hiatus, the highlight of which was her December 12 wedding to Franchitti, her fiancé’ of two years, at
historic castle in Scotland. “I wanted to take enough time off to get married with the kind of pacing I felt was natural–not just fitting it in between other
things,” says Judd. Franchitti, who is Scottish by birth and Italian by decent, is on holiday too, at least until the racing season starts in the spring, and the
couple is not relishing what has turned into an extended honeymoon at home on their 1,00 acre farm.
The two cook enormous brunches, take long walks in the woods, eat dinners by the fire, and catch movies at the local the theater. “We hardly ever leave
the farm. We don’t really go anywhere,” says Judd, who, before her yoga class, had slept in until 10:30, a wake-up time justified by the fact that the night
before, she and Franchitti had stayed up late watching South Park episodes on DVD. And right now she has plopped herself down on an overstuffed
chair in her sunroom. Her husband has stepped out the shop for paintball guns with his brother Marino, who is visiting. But Judd is hardly alone. She has
snuggled down with a passel of pets, including her two cockapoos and three of her five cats. The cats are purring. “It’s home time. I don’t know when I’ll
go back to work,” says Jud, tucking her legs under her.
Before this respite, Judd had been on the go all the way back to when she was a kid living a tour-bus childhood with her famous singing mother, Naomi,
and sister, Wynona. (While attending 12 schools in 13 years, shoe would earn extra spending money by tidying up the bus.) In 1990, after graduating
from the University of Kentucky, Judd hightailed it to Los Angeles, where she worked as a hostess at the industry eatery the Ivy, then broke into movies
in 1993 with Ruby in Paradise. She has since done 18 films, vaulting to the top of the Hollywood hot list with such blockbusters as Kiss the Girls, and
Double Jeopardy, in which she has played determined, tough-as-horsehide heroines as few other actresses can. Perhaps because the nerviness is not
an act. Carl Franklin, the director of this month’s thriller High Crimes, in which she stars opposite Morgan Freeman and Jim Caviezel, explains: “There
was a scene where she’s wearing heals and she’s supposed to be knocked down, and I was really concerned about her twisting her ankle. I found out
later that she had been talking to the stunt person when I wasn’t looking. She was asking him to throw her all the way to the ground. She likes to do her
own stuff.” In fact, she might as well be describing herself when she says of one of her cats: “She’s definitely a hoss within her petite frame.”
But last spring while completing a number of movies in a row (including Someone Like You, High Crimes, this summer’s highly anticipated adaptation of
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya sisterhood, and the biopic Frida), Judd found that she has limits. “I was just knackered,” recalls Judd, grabbing a cup of
strong coffee in her spacious kitchen. “I didn’t have even a couple hours free for several weekends. I lost my will to work.” So she decided to hang it up
for a bit. “It was very simple. Walk away,” she says without a not of regret.
Judd headed for her 1819 farmhouse, situated amid softly rolling hills in a valley outside Nashville, the same region where her family moved when she
was 11. (The house, which she has owned since 1994, is just down the road from her mother’s.) She had practically every part of the estate restored,
refinishing century-old chestnut floorboards and wainscoting, covering bedroom walls with vintage style wallpaper, and filling rooms with embroidered
pillows and antiques. “One of the thins I appreciate about the house is that the flow of traffic is very even.” she says. “I spread things out so there’s no
area that is used more or used less.”
At least that was the case until last fall, when Judd spent most of her waking hours planning her wedding in an upstairs sitting room that she dubbed the
war room–just one sign that she took her battle to keep the media at bat very seriously. (She hung a picture of Winston Churchill on the wall to stiffen
resolve. “Some people don’t mind having a wedding in public,” says Judd. “That’s not our style.” So she and Franchitti invited all of their 100 guests by
phone just a week before the big day. Her tactics paid off. no paparazzi got anywhere near the wedding. Still, the couple couldn’t control what was
written about the event. “Practically everything in the papers was completely untrue,” Says the actress. “We don’t even know most of the people they
said we invited. Liz Smith decided that Sandy Bullock and I are best friends and that she was my maid of honor.” Judd recently e-mailed Bullock (though
the two both star in Divine Secrets, they share no scenes and barely know each other). “I said, ‘You know I got married.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I know.
People keep asking me [about it]. I just tell them I was too drunk to remember anything.’”
Allow us to refresh her memory. The five day extravaganza took place in and around Skibo Castle, the 20-bedroom stone edifice in the Scottish
Highlands where Madonna and Guy Ritchie famously wed. Judd, Franchitti and their family and friends (including Salma Hayek and Ed Norton) spent the
days leading up to the ceremony horse back riding and golfing, the nights dining in the opulent reception rooms, and, one evening, taking part in a ce’lidn,
a traditional Scottish dance. For the wedding the bride wore a white silk-satin Armani gown with an Empire waist and cap sleeves. (Says Judd, heading
back to the kitchen to prepare dinner, “Dario had said, “I really like your back. ‘ So it has a big, round opening at the back.”) Paper-whites, jonquils and
maidenhair ferns adorned the reception hall, and on each table sat a different photo of one of the couple’s beloved pets. Despite all teh attention to detail,
the pair chose not to videotape the celebratoin. “We’re relying on our guests for an oral history,” Judd explains.
Not that she and Franchitti will need help recalling things. “It was amazing from the moment we first showed up at the castle–just knowing that in a few
days we were going to be married,” says Franchitti, back from running errands. Judd, all smiles, runs over and pats him on the butt. She’s wearing the
number 27 around her neck. “It’s Dario’s race-car number, in white gold. Wher he wins [the Fedex Championship Series] at the end of the season and
gets to have No.1 on his car, I’ll have one made in platinum,” she says rather assuredly.
For that to happen their join vacation must end. But ther are no signs that the honey moon will end anytime soon. “Are we allowed to drink yet?” Judd
asks her husband, pouring a glass of the Laurent-Perrier Brut champagne served at their reception. “We just had uor one-month anniversary the day
before yesterday, and it’s really exciting,” she says. She pauses. “It’s unbelievable, incredible. Being married just goes so beyond anything. I can’t even
begin to describe it. Words fail. I over-rely on superlatives, but how do you express…?” This hoss with a delicate frame has finally met a hurdle she can’t
jump. and it seems she couldn’t be happier.
TV Guide 2002
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.
People Magazine 2002
50 Most Beautiful People 2002
She reads novels in French, mainlines Mars Bars and commands a vocabulary bigger than Webster’s. What’s more, says High Crimes director Carl Franklin, Ashley Judd can “stop a room,” even when she looks her worst. “At our first meeting, Ashley had the flu. She was wearing sweats and not an ounce of makeup,” he says. “But she was still gorgeous. To look beautiful when you’re blowing your nose is a gift from the gods.” And from Mom, country superstar Naomi Judd, who handed down her apple cheeks and southern joie de vivre. Raised in Kentucky and California, the 5′6″ 34-year-old now rejuvenates at her 1,000-acre Tennessee farm with her husband of five months, Italian-Scottish race-car driver Dario Franchitti, 28. “To really relax,” she says, “I stay in my house and spend private time with my husband.” Judd, a devotee of Ashtanga yoga, admits she clung to a Dixie-chick hairstyle until falling for Franchitti. “I used to be very southern about my hair, leaving it long and spending time curling it,” she says. “But driving fast for an afternoon with Dario would make anyone want to chop their hair off.”
Redbook 2001
Someone Like Ashley
Byline: Judd, Naomi
In honor of Mother’s Day, Redbook asked one of entertainment’s most beloved moms-Naomi Judd, half of the legendary singing duo the Judds-to host a cozy mother-daughter conversation with daughter Ashley, star of the new romantic comedy Someone Like You. What was supposed to be a simple conversation quickly turned into an unbelievably honest, funny, and eye-opening dialogue. Accompanied by never-before-published family pictures from Naomi’s personal photo album, Naomi’s loving introduction and the ensuing chat between two independent, intriguing women reveal a powerful bond that will surely be recognized by any mother or daughter.
Some things are endemic to motherdaughter relationships. And to me one of the most constant is the need of all daughters to have their mothers’ approval. I am 55 years old, and I still look to my mother for her approval. And I hate that. I resent it. Yet it’s a reflex. It’s almost like it doesn’t even go through my brain.
It is the same, I believe, with my daughter Ashley and me. I know she looks to me for approval. She may deny it, but you’ll never convince me otherwise.
But here is the best part: She already has it. She always has.
You see, I bear a lot of guilt about the way I raised Ashley. I was the gypsy sort, always traveling, and Ashley and I were on the road constantly. And I
know that was tough on her. As a child, Ashley craved a thermostat. Not a bicycle, or a new doll. A thermostat. We never had heat, and to her a
thermostat was a sign of stability, of the middle-class life she dreamed of. She wanted me to drive a station wagon; I drove a redhot ‘57 Chevy. She wanted a cookie-baking mom; I was a singer, constantly touring.
Of course there turned out to be an upside to all of this. Ashley took in a whole range of people, places, and things growing up. One night we had a
bluegrass banjo picker over for supper; the next, an undercover narcotics agent I was dating. She was exposed to a lot of life early. And I think that has helped shape her and helped her deal with everything her on-the-go life throws at her now. And while it also instilled a sense of wanderlust in her, I am blessed that she lives 60 seconds from my front door, here in the woods of Tennessee. When she’s home we go to the dollar movies in Franklin. She’s the best person to go to the movies with. We’ll head out to dinner after- ward and she’ll say, “Now, that shot of the wheel represents the symbolic da-da-da…”
Ashley is also very much a nature girl, and for some people that might come as a surprise. But when she’s home, chances are she’s barefoot, or out in
the woods, on a horse, or walking. She loves to have her hands in the earth-she’s quite the gardener. She knows every flower and bird going. That is one
aspect of her childhood that I think stuck. When she was little I would take her to Aunt Pauline’s, where there was no running water, no television. Ashley
had to draw water from the well, and we cooked supper on a woodstove. It might be hard for her fans to comprehend that Ashley Judd, who can be seen
in high-fashion magazines and at movie premieres wearing Armani and Valentino, also knows how to make homemade lye soap. But she does. I promise.
I think it’s this sense of what’s real in life-what’s important-that has allowed Ashley to deal so gracefully with her success. A few years back, when she
was first invited to the Oscars, she declined. She went to the college basketball Final Four play-offs instead. (She’ s a fanatic for the University of Kentucky basketball team.) Sherry Lansing, who is a big producer in Hollywood and one of Ashley’s biggest fans, once told me that she was impressed by the fact that Ashley had insisted one of her contracts allow her to take some time off from filming if Kentucky made it to the Final Four that year.
Wynonna was a very high-maintenance child. But Ashley was always independent. She could just melt you-I mean, she didn’t know a stranger. And
while I was trying to keep Wynonna out of the juvenile detention center, I had a powerful feeling that Ashley was OK. I’ve found in these last few years that I overestimated that-that Ashley was, in fact, suffering and lonely. But she was strong, and I think mothers have an innate sense of which of their children are needy and which are strong.
Ashley doesn’t want to see any similarities between us, of course. Our housekeeper; whom she calls Aunt Dot, had been at Ashley’s house one day,
and when she came to my place she said, “I swear, Ashley is getting more like you every day.” And I said, “Good Lord, don’t tell her that.” And while we are very different in some ways-our politics, for example, where I tend to be conservative and Ashley is more liberal- we are also a lot alike. Our love for tradition, rituals, ceremony, a belief in a higher power and in the ultimate good of people-these are things we share very deeply, mother and daughter. But when it is time for Ashley to start her family, she will not be a mother such as I was. She’ll be very smart, very prepared, fortified with folic acid and prenatal vitamins, and she’ll have planned the conception date. And that’s the way motherhood should be. She’s going to be a super mom.
This is a busy time for Ashley. Her new movie, Someone Like You, just opened. It’s a romantic comedy-her first-and she stars, along with Greg Kinnear and Hugh Jackman, as a woman who studies the way men behave. After hiding my eyes through half of both Eye of the Beholder and Double Jeopardy, I couldn’t be more delighted.
She’s also preparing for her upcoming wedding, to a wonderful man I adore named Dario Franchitti, who is a Scottish race car driver. I have always been
impressed with Ashley’s beaus-when she was in high school she was always dating the class president or someone like that- but when I met Dario I knew he was different. I was bowled over. He is charming and very grounded. And he absolutely adores Ashley, which is what any mother wants for her daughter. The cherry on top is that he also knows when to stand up to her. The first time I saw him do it I said, “Outrageous! This guy gets my vote.” After all, it’s always good to have your mother’s approval…
NJ: Today I get to pose questions you would normally blow off if I asked them. [Laughs] So first, how is your life now?
AJ: Cheerful. The first word that galloped through my mind was “complicated.” And the next word I thought of was “cheerful.”
NJ: Howdo you know?
AJ: Because my spirit is peaceful and I sleep well. And although I am the busiest I have ever been in my life-I haven’t had a weekend free in 2001, and there’s no break in sight until late May-I have a really good attitude.
NJ: How do you deal with stress?
AJ: By turning off the phones, getting enough sleep, saying no to people and things, and exercising-yoga, hiking. Those are the most immediate ways I
deal with stress. Making time for myself is critical to handling stress for me. Just getting outdoors seems to make a huge difference for me. It wakes me up, and it makes me happy.
NJ: I think you have a very strong sense of who you are. Where does that come from?
AJ: I’m a pretty classic case study for nature versus nurture. I think to be without purpose would be the most awful fate. I remember a kid who was a friend of mine when I was in my early twenties, and he just lounged and had no idea what he wanted to do with himself. That’s just such a miserable existence, I think. You know, to grope and grasp and come up with nothing. The point is, you don’t stay in one thing. I’m lucky: I get to express things that are otherwise left to just eat away at you, unacknowledged and unspoken. I’ve got a really healthy outlook because I can channel it through various characters.
NJ: Are you healthier doing a comedy?
AJ: No, not at all. You have to remember that the basis for comedy is someone else’s pain. You know, [in the movie] Jane goes through a genuine and
profoundly heartbreaking crisis, and that’s why she’s funny. The escapades that ensue come from a deep angst to try to answer some of life’s unanswerable questions.
NJ: So even though it’s a comedy, it’s still…
AJ: Poignant.
NJ: I want to ask you something about the filming, though. On the set you were with Deb [Hugh Jackman's wife] and playing with their beautiful baby boy,
Oscar. How do you go from that to doing mega-love scenes with Hugh?
AJ: Mom, what are you talking about? There is no love scene in the movie.
NJ: You’re in bed with him.
AJ: I’m not in bed.
NJ: Well, you wake up…
AJ: Oh, Mom! That’s not a love scene!
ON THE COMFORTS OF HOME (AND TOO MUCH MAKEUP)
NJ: Well, here we sit in your trailer, and I am watching you having your makeup and hair done and all that. And I know that in your personal life you don’t do any of this. Is that a statement against the fact that I often wear too much makeup?
AJ: Well, I could say yes and I could say no. Both would probably be true. But I would like to point out how you still manage to find all of my actions in some way a reaction against something to do with you!
NJ: I just find it curious that you don’t wear makeup.
AJ: Mom, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration. If I don’t look the way you want me to look, then that is something you have to deal with.
NJ: Don’t look at me like that. You know, I think you can turn a single look into a one-act play.
AJ: Are you telling me I milk it?
NJ: I’m asking the questions! [Laughs] What do you think I mean by that?
AJ: That you’re my mom and you think everything I do is infinitely interesting.
NJ: I do. Like, one of the things I’ve always observed visiting you when you’re on location for a long period is that you always have remembrances of home around you. What are some of them?
AJ: Well, Barnaby is here. That’s Dario’s beautiful little worn-out bear that he’s had since he was 3 years old. And Mr. Bear is here to be Barnaby’s
companion. And Buttermilk and Shug, my cockapoos, who are brother and sister. And then Emily and Agnes, the cats, who are sisters. And we always
have our own sheets and towels and blankets and pillows. And then everything gets washed, packed up, and shipped to the next movie. The aim is to
make transitions less agonizing, because I love making movies and I love having time off. What really harasses me is the transition period, you know,
and the idea of “settling in.” I’m good at it, but sometimes it’s just so chaotic. You get a bunch of people that you don’t really know bossing you around:
“Get on this airplane. Come do this. Try these clothes on. Get your hair cut. Actually, we want it blond.” And all of that can overwhelm me.
NJ: Is that the worst thing about being a celebrity?
AJ: I don’t perceive myself as a celebrity. I’m a creative person who’s had success. It takes a lot of care to manage the whole gestalt of it. The media
factor requires a steady analysis of attitude, to make sure it doesn’t infect your good, quiet, private life. The good newswhich I try to really appreciate,
because it is truly one of the only positives that Dario and I can think of-is that you can usually get something really good to eat on rather short notice.
That’s celebrity.
ON A MOTHER’S LOVE LOVE
NJ: Hearing about how you have to endure all this travel reminds me that I bear a great amount of guilt over the fact that I lugged you and your sister from one end of the country to the other when you were growing up. You had to go to 13 schools! But I have heard you say that all that exposure to America’s
subcultures helped you. Make me feel better about this.
AJ: [Laughs] I think going to all those schools prepared me to make transitions. For some people it’s the opposite. They have a consistently geographically based upbringing. And in their imagination, they dream about travel. So when it starts to happen to them, they embrace it. For me it was more like, “Oh, I can do this, because I have a lot of experience.” I know how to go into a new place and basically get along. Every time you make a new movie, you’re essentially embarking on a little magical journey-which is not at all unlike how I felt on the first day of school every time I went someplace new. And some of the moves brought a tremendous grace to my (continued on page 161) life-specifically, going to live with [my grandmother] Non in the twelfth grade. People who have spent a significant amount of time with their grandparentsit changes them. It’s a gift that endures.
NJ: What do you wish for your children?
AJ: I want my children to be comfortable in the world. Every person who might have children hopes that [they] will feel loved beyond any shadow of a
doubt. Where your children are going you cannot go to, even in your dreams, for they belong to tomorrow. I think their own sense of equanimity is the most important thing. I’d also like them to speak a couple of languages. And I think it would be important for me that our children understand what Scotland and Kentucky and Tennessee mean to Dario and me as historic places. As places not just of our personal heritage, but where they fit into history, you know? Especially Scottish history. It’s like a microcosm of world history, with independent people and struggles, and bad guys coming in and doing unspeakably bad things. It’s about people finding something that helps them transcend.
NJ: The other night you were filming; I think you started at 6 p.m. and worked till 7 a.m., and you had not been able to adjust your biological clock. You had your head in my lap, and I was rubbing your feet and giving you a head massage. And it occurred to me that them is no way you know how deeply I love you.
AJ: If I sat down and thought about it, to whatever extent I’m capable as a person who has yet to have children, I probably still couldn’ t really fathom it. But that actually meant a lot to me, because it restored me in a way that I couldn’t have predicted. And I’m positive that it was not just because you are a relative of mine, but the fact that you are actually my mother. I came from inside of you. So to just lie there for a little while and have you caress me…l was in the best moodit completely turned my mood around.
ON TAKING HIS NAME AND HER MOTHER’S ADVICE
NJ: I am sure you are thinking about your wedding. And that reminds me: One time at church, a senior pastor said he didn’t understand why women…
AJ: Oh, yes. He didn’t understand why they chose to use “Ms.” They were updating the membership directory. Everybody had a little card to fill out, and
he was sort of overexplaining it and saying, “OK, check the box that says Mr. or Mrs. or Ms.” And then he said, “I don’t understand all that Ms. stuff; don’t
even bother.” I raised my hand, and it was like, “Too late, preacher. I’ve already marked it.” Are you asking specifically about my name?
NJ: Yes. How do you feel about women keeping their last name?
AJ: I love the southern tradition, with a lot of women being named Mary and their middle name being their mom’s maiden name, so you get Mary Tripp, Mary Blanton, etc. They keep the legacy of the mother’ s lineage alive. I don’t think I will use the name Franchitti professionally. Those people don’t deserve to be dragged into the Hollywood hullabaloo. [Laughs] And there is not enough room for Judd-Franchitti on the side of a race car!
NJ: I’m glad you mentioned Dario. Was he wearing anything under that kilt at the Millennium Concert? [Laughs]
AJ: The proper way to wear it is with nothing underneath. He is a proper Scot.
NJ: Last question: What’s the best advice I ever gave you?
AJ: “Life is more important than show business.”
Psychology Today 2001
Someone Like You
ASHLEY JUDD’S NEW MOVIE, SOMEONE LIKE YOU, SHOWS HOW PEOPLE OFTEN LOOK TO THE LATEST ANIMAL RESEARCH IN A HASTY
ATTEMPT TO SORT OUT THEIR OWN BEHAVIOR. BUT WE LEARN THAT CAPRICIOUSLY APPLIED SCIENCE IS NO CURE FOR THE REAL
COMPLEXITIES OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS.
In the newly released film Someone Like You, based on the popular book Animal Husbandry, Ashley Judd plays Jane Goodall, a woman who formulates
a stunning new theory of relationships shortly after a romantic disappointment. Although the character has no relation to the famous anthropologist,
Goodall’s theory owes something to her chimp-observing namesake: it sees all men (read: males) as animals–not apes or pigs, but bulls in constant
pursuit of a new cow.
For Judd/Goodall, this notion conveniently explains why her boyfriend left, and why he wasn’t worth her time after all. The new theory proves so popular
that she is soon masquerading as a psychologist who writes an advice column on relationships. New-cow theory sweeps the country, and women everywhere see a lot of bull in their previous partners.
Judd’s character cobbles together her cow theory from snippets of real science reports and bits of biology books. Its prime proposition takes shape when
she reads that bulls refuse to copulate with a cow they have already mated with, even when researchers disguise the old cow with the scent of a new one. New-cow theory posits that all males will leave all females eventually because their biological imperative is to find the new cow. Voila, all relationships are eventually doomed, bull-based balm to dumped damsels.
We laugh not just at the movie’s exaggerated analogy between men and beasts, but because it accurately illustrates the way Americans seize on the latest pop-psych invention to help them understand relationship failure. “We use animal theories to explain our own behavior because we want some reason to explain why I am doing what I am doing,” proffers relationship therapist Janice Levine, Ph.D. “However, if we use this information to justify our behavior instead of as a tool for a different point of view, it becomes dangerous.” In the movie, as in the real world, a simplistic theory is seductive to people who are confused by the complexity of human emotions and relationships.
The laziness of such logic has not stopped a spate of science articles purporting to teach us about ourselves via the slimmest slice of animal behavior. What is left out of the stories is the overwhelming variety in animal mating rituals: suicide (the drone bees), aggressive harem-keeping (silverback gorillas), sexually aggressive females (crickets and birds), and insecticide (insects and spiders). Finding the correlation between the mating habits of cows–or spiders or silverbacks–and our own may be an amusing parlor game, but it is hardly a complete picture.
“You have to meet strict scientific criteria to make a claim of similarity,” says Ralph J. Greenspan, Ph.D., a geneticist at The Neurosciences Institute at
San Diego, whose observations of fruit-fly mating rituals appear in the book to suggest how low men are on the evolutionary scale. “One of the ways
species are most divergent is in their mating behaviors,” he points out. “It is sloppy thinking to make extrapolations based on superficial similarities.”
By the end of the film, Judd’s character realizes the folly of a one-size-fits-all theory of relationships. “It is not helpful to graft scientific explanations onto
human affairs when it doesn’t help you in the end to make a decision, to make a choice,” adds Greenspan. “Because we are willful beings we still have to make choices that can’t be reduced by science.”
Making choices is an integral part of being human. And while it’s enticing to think there is a formula for making choices, we happen to be a little more complicated than cows.
Premire 2000
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 andminored 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 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.
US Weekly 2000
Drive, She Said
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.
People Magazine 2000
50 Most Beautiful People 2000
Double Jeopardy was among last year’s highest-grossing movies, but while filming in British Columbia, the crew had to figure out how to make Ashley
Judd–whose character spends six years behind bars–appear a little more, well, gross. During the jailhouse scenes, “she looked so beautiful, I said to the crew, ‘Guys, c’mon, she’s in prison! We’ve got to stop with the makeup,’” recalls producer Leonard Goldberg. “And they went, ‘We’d like to take it off, but she’s not wearing any!’” Explains Judd’s makeup artist and friend Ashlee Petersen: “It was a challenge to tone down her amazing eyebrows, full, rosebud mouth and beautiful eyes that are of a whole other era.” Judd’s classic movie-star looks also impressed Valentino, the fashion designer whose Paris salon Judd recently visited. “She’s elegant and sophisticated,” he says. “As I was walking toward her I saw a resemblance to Lana Turner.” But Judd, 32, also knows how to climb off that pedestal and come down to earth. In this month’s Where the Heart Is, costarring Natalie Portman, she portrays a quick-witted Oklahoma mom and “needed to look like the rest of us,” says the film’s producer Susan Cartsonis. “Ashley is funny, warm, sexy and sensual, and from the moment I met her it was like she was in character.” Judd herself was reared in Kentucky, Tennessee and California while mom Naomi, 54, and sister Wynonna, 35, struggled to become the country-music superstars they are now. “I see a lot of her mom in Ashley, her eyes and mouth the most,” says her stepfather Larry Strickland, Naomi’s husband since 1989. To him, “Ashley has always been gorgeous. And she’s so well-rounded it’s kind of scary.” A 1990 graduate of the University of Kentucky (where she majored in French), the 5′7″ Judd reads voraciously and spends her downtime with Scottish race-car driver beau Dario Franchitti, 26. She also goes for walks in the woods near the farmhouse she keeps just down the road from
Naomi’s spread on the family’s 1,000-acre homestead outside Nashville. “When she’s here, it’s no makeup,” says Strickland. “She doesn’t care about her hair, she wears comfortable clothes.” And though Judd is known as the master of the made-from-scratch birthday cake, on sets she guzzles mineral water (”By the end of a shooting day, she’d have gone through 12 bottles,” reports Goldberg) and goes running. “She’s always on the go,” Strickland says. “Ashley enjoys life, every second of her life,” adds Cartsonis. “She’s a force of nature.”
Biography 2001
Ashley Judd, Smart & Sexy
When Ashley Judd packed her U-Haul emblazoned with a “Hollywood or Bust!” bumper sticker and left her Tennessee home for Los Angeles in the late ’80s, she was determined to become all actress. Having spent the better part of her teenage years as the “nonsinging” Judd (her mother is Naomi Judd, and her sister, Wynonna), she decided it was time to strike out on her own.
It was typical Ashley. Beneath that luminous Southern belle exterior is a steely inner resolve–so it never occurred to her that she wouldn’t succeed. “I like
striving,” she’s often said. “I’m very moved by human endeavor.”
An intriguing mix of plainspoken country girl and hyper-articulate intellectual, Judd is a relentless self-improver. She’s been known to talk at breakneck
speed about the four books she’s reading simultaneously or enthusiastically recount the 18-mile hike she just completed at a fitness camp. There’s no
time to waste in her busy, lull life. No matter what the subject–food, books, God, and movies are just a few of her passions–Judd takes charge of the conversation. And she certainly seems to be in command of her career, too. Her latest project, the romantic comedy Someone Like You with Greg Kinnear, comes on the heels of several successful films that proved the Judd name could make movie producers sing with joy.
If she ever did bristle at the notion of being considered the “Other Judd,” she’s never let it show. “Mother worked hard, really hard, to get the chance to show her talent,” she’s said. “I think you could say from my grandmother to me, we’re tough women.” Judd also has said she knows both her roots and her wings are inherited gifts from her family. “I was always told I was different. I was always told I was special. I was also assured I had a gift and a purpose,” she has said.
The young woman whose life seems so straightforward now had an unsettled early life. Ashley was born April 19, 1968, in Los Angeles to Diana Judd, who dreamed of being a singer, and Michael Ciminella, a salesman (and now a sports broadcasting producer). There also was a half sister, Christina. Ashley’s parents divorced when she was very young and she moved with her mother and sister to Kentucky. By that point Diana Judd had renamed herself Naomi and Christina had become Wynonna. Over the next 13 years, Ashley attended a dozen different schools and became “an expert at adapting.” The family survived on welfare checks and Naomi’s modest salary from a variety of jobs, and often lived without electricity, running water, or a phone.
Judd, who has always been extremely self-reliant, received “fractured nurturing” during her childhood mostly from Wynonna (whom she calls “Sister”) and her grandparents. She taught herself to cook in second grade because, as she explained, “When your mom is in nursing school and you live on top of a mountain, it’s a necessity.” Ashley was 15 when Naomi and Wynonna signed their first record deal with RCA. While they toured around the country in a bus they called Dreamchaser, Ashley earned $10 a day cleaning the vehicle–but has said she never felt like a latter-day Cinderella. “It was in my personal best interest to clean up-otherwise I would have been peacefully trying to read my book, with a pair of Sister’s underpants hanging over my head.”
While the singing duo set off in search of stardom, Judd found solace in books. “I think she felt left out–escaping into books made her feel protected,” recalls Wynonna, who says there’s never been any sibling rivalry between them. “I love her in a way no one else can. I kind of raised her and I’d do anything for her.” Wynonna even bought Ashley the Tennessee Victorian farmhouse she lives in just a few miles down the road from her own home and that of Naomi and their stepfather Larry Strickland.
The girl who read the dictionary “for fun” went on to study at the University of Kentucky where she majored in French. In 1990, she graduated Phi Beta
Kappa and toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps. Later that year, at her sister’s urging, Judd decided to pursue acting. “I didn’t really pick it. It picked me. I think sometimes you are just born with the knowledge of what you want to do with yourself,” she has said of her career choice. When she first arrived in Los Angeles, she lived with her best friend, took a job as a waitress at the chic Beverly Hills eatery The Ivy, and immersed herself in acting classes. Judd wouldn’t consider trading on the show business connections of her family to further her ambitions. “It was important to her that she do things herself,” says a childhood pal.
Judd’s cool, self-assured demeanor helped set her apart from other young actresses from the very beginning. “I was amazed by how well she carried
herself,” recalls Swoosie Kurtz, who first met Judd in 1991 when she joined Sisters to play Kurtz’s daughter on the television series. “She has always
been wise beyond her years.” During Judd’s third season on the show (she left in 1994), she starred in the independent film Ruby in Paradise and her film career took off. “With Ruby everything changed,” says Kurtz. “She would sit in her trailer reading a stack of film scripts. It was quite a sudden rise to stardom.”
Judd became a hot property in Hollywood. She received good notices in 1995 for Smoke (as the drug-addicted daughter of Harvey Keitel) and Heat (where she reportedly had a brief romance with Robert De Niro). In 1996, Judd starred opposite Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill (the two were also briefly involved) and with Mira Sorvino in HBO’s Norma Jean and Marilyn (which contained Judd’s first nude scene).
In 1997 Judd was diagnosed with “mild, anxious depression.” With intensive therapy she unearthed “unresolved childhood grief” and decided to take a
year off to reconcile her differences with her mother. “Ashley and Mother have a really complicated relationship,” says Wynonna. “When the three of us are in a room, it can be very sweet or very explosive because we’re all so different.”
Today, Judd has made peace with her past. “I understand very well what happened when I was growing up–the good and the bad,” she told GQ in 1999.
“I grieved it.” But the steel magnolia emerged stronger than ever. “I recommend being sad for a season,” she said. “Because God can’t be faithful to you if you don’t give Him a chance to see you through something.”
Judd is drawn to roles that showcase her hard-won emotional and physical strengths. In 1997’s Kiss the Girls she convincingly played a doctor who
matched wits with a psychotic killer. “She ran every day to stay in shape and didn’t shy away from the physical stuff,” says co-star Morgan Freeman, who is currently working with her on a second film, the legal drama High Crimes. “She is incredibly disciplined and extremely willing to do whatever the role calls for.” As a wife wrongly convicted of murder in 1999’s Double Jeopardy, she starred in one of the most commercially successful films of the year. In a town that loves labels, the back-to-back hits earned Judd the title of “Action Girl.” But she refused to be pigeonholed, preferring to use her star power to make the films that intrigue her most. Last year she followed up another action film, Eye of the Beholder, with the sensitive drama Where the Heart Is, playing a sympathetic maternity nurse in a small Oklahoma town opposite Natalie Portman.
While she’s never worried about her career, Judd once confided to good friend Salma Hayek that she feared she’d never find “the right guy”–then she met Scottish racecar driver Dario Franchitti at a friend’s wedding in May 1999. The couple announced their engagement in April of last year (no wedding date has been set). According to Wynonna (who’s been asked to perform at the ceremony), her sister wants an intimate wedding. Judd calls her fiance “the greatest person I know” and has become a pit stop fixture (and even taken up the sport herself). Having endured the scrutiny of high-profile romances (most notably with singer Michael Bolton), the usually forthright actress has vowed to keep her relationship with Franchitti private.
Judd’s Someone Like You co-star Hugh Jackman says the couple (and the actress’s two cockapoos, Buttermilk and Shug) was inseparable on the set
and loved to spend free time playing games with the cast (”running charades” is a favorite). “Ashley is addicted to games. I’m sure the two of them will have competing treadmills in their basement someday,” he says. “They’re just a very fun couple.”
Being an actress allows Judd to indulge in one of her favorite childhood pastimes-playing dress-up. Growing up, she frequently raided her mother’s closet (”I loved trying on her secondhand ’40s dresses”). These days she finds there is no shortage of fashionable frocks at her disposal. Judd’s chiseled 5′7″ frame (from yoga and running) has earned her a top spot on many designers’ wish lists of actresses they most want to dress. Richard Tyler, Giorgio Armani, and Badgley Mischka are among her favorites.
But Judd considers the whirlwind world of glamorous premieres and award shows her “imaginary life.” She’s most comfortable at home on her farm. She rarely wears makeup offscreen and lives in button-fly Levi’s, J.Crew T-shirts, and tennis shoes. When she’s not cooking up a storm (she makes a mean butterscotch pie), she’s likely to be found in Wynonna’s backyard playing with her nephew, Elijah, 6, and niece, Grace, 4 1/2. At the end of the day, she loves to unwind in a warm tub surrounded by candles before heading off to bed (for nine hours of sleep). “The most important lesson I’ve learned in life is that I have to take care of myself,” she has declared.
It’s a lesson she has learned well. Ashley is no longer the odd Judd out–she’s a woman firmly in charge of her life and loving every minute of it.
Harper’s Baazar 2001
This Side of Paradise
Ashley Judd is in full bloom with a new movie and a new fiance’. But, as Zoe Heller discovers, the actress would rather talk about religion, poetry, abortion, her favorite designers, and her e-mail relationship with Gloria Steinem.
While she’s working on her latest movie, Ashley Judd has been renting a rather spectacular house in the Hollywood Hills. her real home may be in a
Tennessee holler, just down the road from the houses of her famous mother and sister, but she takes the the slightly spartan luce of the west coast style like a natural. When I arrived for our meeting, she had just finished a private yoga session with an instructor and was fresh out of the shower. Sitting on a sofa, with wet hair and bare feet, and a pair of black velvet pants and a string of her grandmother’s pearls, she proceeded to eat an irreproachable post exercise snack of papaya orange, washed down with green tea in a clay cup. Not mush here of Naomi and Wynonna’s spangles Southern Gothic. “From a very young age,” Judd noted demurely, “I despised artifice.”
Judd’s ascent to stardom has been a stelthy one. Since her 1993 debut in the independent feature Ruby in Paradise, she has made no fewer than 13
movies. But it was only with the 11th–1999’s surprise hit Double Jeopardy– that she was confirmed as a box-office draw. That movie ended up grossing $116 million. As a result, 2001 is proving to be what she calls a “good work year.” She is now starring in her first romantic comedy, Someone Like You, based on the Laura Zigman’s best selling novel Animal Husbandry. She is finishing up work on the courtroom drama High Crimes with Morgan Freeman, and at some point later this year, she will also make a cameo appearance as teh photographer Tina Modotti in Frida, a movie about the life of Frida Khalo, starring her good friend Salma Hayek. In between times, Judd is making (discreet) plans for her wedding to Scottish race-car driver Dario Franchitti and maintaining a scrupulously clean house. On the Sunday we met, in fact, she had been up at 5:30 A.M., scrubbing and polishing. “My environment,” she explained, “is very important to me.”
Such remarks support Judd’s reputation as a supercapable, somewhat fastidious personality. in addition to her acting career, her Phi Beta Kappa key and degreee in French, her aggressive sportiness (hiking, yoga, tennis, et cetera), her large , rather otiose vocabulary, and her extensive knowledge of literature (she’ll quote you Pope or Dickenson at the drop of a het), Judd boasts a terrifying command of the domestic arts. She bakes; she gardens. she regularly shampoos her own dogs, she told me, with an organic citrus shampoo from a company called Four Paws. Sheesh. If you had to get stuck in the jungle with a movie star, Judd would probably be the one to choose. She’d be a little intimidating, perhaps. but it’s a sure thing that within a few hours, she would have improvised a glamorous sarong, built a fire, run up some rope hammocks–and done it all reciting Rilke and Gloria Steinem.
Someone Like You is your first stab at romantic comedy. Were you anxious about that?
I was. Not having done a comedy before, but believing that I had funniness in me, I was a complete neophyte. I remember e-mailing a girlfriend of mine from college, saying, “I don’t know if I’m funny.”
Elle 1999
Ashley’s World
Compulsively gracious Ashley Judd gives a guided tour of her house, her wardrobe, her woods, her loves, her work, her dreams, her peeves, her backhand – and that’s just one day. Bob Morris tries to keep up.
Her red brick house, which sites on a thousand rolling acres in Tennessee, was built in 1819 and is just down the road from her mother’s and around the bend from her sister’s. There’s a flag hanging over the front porch, which looks out beyond the picket fence at th eold barn where sheep were just sheared for summer. Ella Fitzgerald’s voice is blasting from insie the house and out over the garden. It feels very down-home and monied at the same time-Tara redux.
I walk up the steps to the screen door and see her in the kitchen in a white terrycloth bathrobe, hair in pigtails. I blow my nose (hay fever) and clear my
throat and yell “Hello!” but she doesnt hear me because she’s singing along with the music. I yell again, louder.
“Ashley? Hello! Ashley?”
With the spunk of Scarlett O’Hara she runs over, flings open the door, and welcomes me into her home. Immediately, she can’t do enough. She wants to
be friends and it throws me off.
“Sing me a song,” says Ashley Judd, who plays a vengeful ex-con this fall in Double Jeopardy opposite Tommy Lee Jones, and a stylish serial murderer
pursued by Ewan McGregor in Eye of the Beholder. “That’s the rule of this house. Guests have to either sing or do a chore.”
All I can squeak back is, “Really?” She senses that I’m thrown, takes my arm, and walks me over to a ceramic jug in the airy room looking out over a sea of grass and a sugarhouse, and pours me a glass of the sweetest water I’ve ever tasted. “It’s from our own spring,” she says as she watched me drink. “There’s no better water in the world.” She introduces me to her cockapoo, Buttermilk, and her tabby cat, Buttercup. She has tied bows around both in honor of my visit. Buttercup isn’t pleased. “She cant keep her clothes on for very long,” Judd says with the same flirtatious tone that encourages gossip on all her movie sets, ” so you better enjoy the show while you can.”
After leading me to a seat and making sure I’m comfortable, she goes upstairs to her massive walk-in closet filled with designer outfits, only to emerge, moments later in a state of almost undress, wearing an unabashedly revealing tube top with tiny tennis skirt. She had warned me about this outfit the night before, whe she called my bed-and-breakfast to welcome me. We get into her Jeep and head off to her tennis lesson.
The tiny Tennessee village where she lives is outside the town of Franklin, which lies along the historic Natchez Trace Parkway far enough south of Nashville to be rural. Her mother, country music singer-turned-inspirational-speaker Naomi Judd, has lived here for twenty years. So has older sister, Wynonna, the other half of the award winning singing duo. Ashley left after tenth grade and returned about ten years later as a movie star. Although the area is home to many other well-to-do people in the country music industry (some even call it Nashville 90210), many plain country folk live here, too. It is the kind of place where people call little valleys hollers. It is the kind of place where low-fat is low-priority and barbeque, cornbread, and sweet tea are standard fare. It is the kind of place where a suitor might bring a female cashier bouquet of daisies wrapped in a piece of paper with “1 corinthians 3:9″ or some such thing written on it. It is also the kind of place where everyone knows everyone’s business, especially the Judds.’
One night, not so long ago, for instance, Ashley was seen going into the movie theatre in Franklin with gary Chapman, the host of a successful Christian
country music show. It was a purely innocent evening, but since Chapman was married to the singer Amy grant at the time, it got into the gossip column of the local paper. Judd, who had to endure sniping gossip columns a few years ago for dating Matthew McConaughey while on the set of A Time to Kill with him, was so angry she considered putting up posters on the phone poles to defend herself. “I mean, I’m from here. I should be able to move with impunity.”
When we arrive for the tennis lesson, Chapman, the man in question, is standing, tanned and shirtless, in the driveway of his posh gated home on
endless acres. He’s lending Judd his court for a lesson with a local tennis pro. He’s also lending a right-to-life group (”It’s an organization for prolife people
who don’t want to be jerks,” Chapman says)is property for a big benefit party that is in the process of being set up under a nearby tent. Off from his lucrative TV job (”It’s fun to get paid to be an idiot”) and recently divored he’s able to admire the thirty-one-year-old Judd openly: “She is one beautiful woman and she has the will to do anything she wants,” he tells me. Just by watching her take a lesson, I can see what he means. She pounds the ball with the same unrestrained vigor she has lent to her roles, from cerebral ingenue of Ruby in Paradise to the kick-boxing medical intern in Kiss the Girls. But when she makes mistakes she doesn’t curse. Instead, she says “I whiffed it” or “Shucks” as the sweat drips down her nose and she lifts her tennis skirt (revealing ruffled panties) to wipe her brow.
“All the Judd women are pleasantly edgy,” Chapman tells me as she aces a shot, then turns and spits like a hillbilly. “You dont find many actresses spitting like that in Manhattan, do you?”
Well, um, no. Nor would I be likely to find any insisting that I get out there and play tennis with her teacher. It’s fun and also extremely unsettling to play
while she watches and cheers me on like a long-lost sister, and after a few minutes. I insist that we stop so I can get on with the interview. Judd thanks
Chapman for the use of his court. He pecks her glistening cheek.
“Your mother’s already introducing me as her new son-in-law,” he says.
Back in her Jeep, Judd tells me “My mother says that about every man she meets.”
IT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN EASY growing up with Naomi Judd: the daughter of a gas station owner fron Ashland, Kentucky, she spent years as a single mother (she had divorced Ashley’s father, Michael Ciminella, an aeronautics parts salesman, early in the marriage) trying to make a life for herself in Hollywood, and Marin County, among other places before she succeded at country music with her older daughter Wynonna. Somehow, young Ashley managed. She got lost in books and excelled at whatever school she attended. When the Judds hit the road, she cleaned their bus got pocket money. Given a chance to get into the act (her mother got her to take fiddle lessons), she opted for other activities.
Dispite the fact that she was often left behind, she never worked up much resentment. Instead she read assiduosly, socialized aggressively, dressed
preppy (even though she didn’t have much money), and ended up graduating from the honors program at the University of Kentucky in 1990. Eventually, she moved to Hollywood, studied acting, and started making industry contacts by waitressing at the Ivy. When Ruby in Paradise took first prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993, Judd was suddenly on everyone’s radar.
But like so many other young actresses who are treated like godesses, Judd is, perhaps, better known for being a glamorous symbol of young hollywood than for any one role. She has not found her There’s Something About Mary yet, and there have bee a few disappointments since Ruby through no fault of her own. Still, her enthusiasm and protean ability to play everything from the sexy Norma Jean in HBO’s Norma Jean & Marilyn (Mira Sorvino played Marilyn) to the sorority-girl wife in A Time to Kill prepared her to take on the leading role opposite Morgan Freeman in Kiss the Girls. And last year, when a pregnant Jodie Foster dropped out of Double Jeopardy, Paramount’s Sherry Lansing decided that Judd had the box-office clout to carry the role of a wel-to-do young mother who wrongly ends up in prison for murder, and then, while on parole, sets out on a breathtakingly ruthless vendetta.
“Ashley’s intensely interesting to watch,” says director Bruce Beresford. “And her soncentration is very goo. She latched onto things and does then very well. But I suppose that’s what actresses do.” What most actresses don’t do, however, is give dinners for the cast and crew where grace is said before eating. “She’d both well-read and devout, and it’s not an affectation,” Beresford says of Judd’s christianity.
While shooting Eye of the Beholder, a stylish thriller by The Adventures of Priscilla , Queen of the Desert director Stephan Elliot, Judd gave another dinner. At this one, she asked everyone at the table to talk about their favorite childhood birthday.
In Hollywood, young people are always trying to out cool each other,” says Jason Priestly, who plays a junkie in the movie. “But Ashey loves being a host and bringing people together and getting everyone talking. She’s not one of those actresses who likes to sit in the corner and smoke. She’s outspoken and incredibly gracious. She liked to grab life and squeeze every ounce out of it.”
INDEED, SHE SEEMS TO BE squeezing every ounce out of me on my visit. Asfter tennis, we are driving back to her house, and she wants me to notice everything: the yellow wax bean plant blossoming in the fields, the steam rising off the road, the stone “slave walls,” the historic signs, the buffalo on her sister’s land, the place where a boyfriend with “the most beautiful lips” kissed her in sixth grade, the field where she departs by helicopter for the Nashville airport. “In summer,” she says, “the lightning bugs go all the way up to the treetops, and it’s the best show on earth.”
Clearly, some artist from the South can go home again, regardless of what Thomas Wolfe wrote, adn it didn’t take Judd long to realize that. Around the
time her house in Malibu burned down in 1993 (she was in New York, starring in Picnic on Broadway), she went to Tennessee and broke her foot while horseback riding. She stayed to heal, and because she had to sit still, she started to get a sense of what it was like to really be around her mother and stepfather, Larry Strickland. And it seemed right. “Having a broken foot was God’s way of telling me to stay home,” she says. Her sister was there, pregnant with her first child, and Hollywood was already giving Judd the creeps, and Franklin was as much a home as any she had known in life.
So she made the maverick decision to stay for good. In 1993, she renovated the house down the road from her mother and moved in. “It’s a half-mile from her driveway to mine,” Judd says as we drive past her mother’s suprisingly modest brick house. “The critical thing is that my house is beyond hers, so she doesn’t have to drive by me several times a day to fo to the main road.” It was her churchgoing, New Age-y mother who introduced Judd to Michael Bolton at a dinner party ageter the 1996 Country Music Association Awards. They became lovers. Now they’re just friends. “He’s family and very sweet,” Judd says as she points out some trees in her yard. “he gave me those pink dogwoods for my birthday.”
INSIDE, SHE CHANGES INTO OUTFIT NUMBER THREE-VINTAGE white linen skirt and diaphanous blouse, and gives me a tour of her home, which is pretty without being fussy. There are books everywhere and a Bible on the kitchen table. Although there’s plenty I’d like to ask her about-being famous, devout, and single, for instance-she does not want to talk about herself. She wants to talk about the novelist Anne Lamott. She wants to talk about The New York Times. She wants to know what authors I like. She wants to introduce me to the artisan who does the decorative painting that makes her home see so French-ified. She wants to talk about gender apratheid in Afghanistan and her beloved Wildcats basketball team from the University of Kentucky. She wants to tell me all about Aunt Dot, who has come over from Judd’s mother’s house to bake a peanut butter cake. And she wants to make me some cornbread.
“I’m the designated hostess in the family,” she says.
“Ashley,” I have to ask, “what is it that makes you so aggressively gracious?”
She shrugs. She does not say that it’s because she grew up as a typically accomodating child of divorce or that being a hostess is a way of making
herself feel at home in the world after somewhat of a rootless childhhood. She just tells me that she’s Southern and it’s normal. “Look, I’m just a goober,”
she says, as she wolfs cornbread and peanutbutter cake, making me feel like a neurotic weight-watcher because i only nibble at it. “I just tend to get very
excited at things.”
In fact, she seems excited about every single leaf and stone on our hike around the property. To me, it’s just a lot of woods and fields. To her, it is the most beautiful place in the world. “I’m walking in front of you so i can break the spiderwebs,” she tells me. On a pond, she charms a white duck out of the
water. “Whitney, you’re the most handsome duck I ever met!” She is speaking to him in a high-pitched baby talk voice. “Where’s your girlfriend? When is she coming back?”
She may sound girly. She may seem loopy. She is not naive. She was smart enough to lobby for her role in Eye of the Beholder, which was written for
an older acterss like Susan Sarandon or Meryl Streep. She’s smart enough to turn down roles that keep her away from home unless they’re big enough
to pay for the pool and screening room she wants to build. She’s smart enough to say to me in the most breezy manner imaginable, “O.T.R.” (meaning
off the record) every time she dishes the dirt about anyone, from actresses to editors. Everything she says about her opinionated and protactive mother,
however, is fair game. “She just has her own kind of reality,” Judd says. “Sister says she’s going to write her own version of Mom’s autobiography someday, and it’s going to be called The Truth.”
We are still hiking, but she has decided that instead of walking on the trail in her woods, we need to be sloshing through the creek. She does so in her sneakers. I, however, am going barefoot since I dont’t want to fly home with wet shoes. “Are you okay?” she keeps asking as she practically skips through the water, pointing out tadpoles and the spot where she liked to take dips with her little nephew, Elijah. I am too embarrassed to tell her that I’m trying not to slip and break an ankle while keeping up with her, worrying all the while about cottonmouths and leeches. Once out of the woods, I think that I’m well, out of the woods. But immediately we are plowing through a waist-high field of grass and I’m having a hay fever attack and worrying about ticks. Yet, she is so beautifully fearless, in her faded sundress (outfit number four) and with her ponytail bouncing in front of me, that I am pulled along by her energy, like a bird sucked into a jet engine.
Her friend, the New York socialite Blaine Trump, says that Judd’s “a lot to handle” and “there’s a whole lot of lady there.” Actually, there’s a whole lot of
everything in Ashley Judd: faith, curiosity, sexuality, intellect, graciousness, style, and of course, beauty.
WE’RE STANDING IN FRONT OF HER HOUSE AND, ALTHOUGH she’s been entertaining me for seven hours, nonstop, she’s not done yet. Do I want to ride bikes? Horses? See her llamas? Visit her sister? Eat some Jell-O salad? Actually, I feel like a wet rag that has just been through the spin cycle, and I want to go home.
“Is there anything else I can do for you today?” she asks.
It’s all I can do to keep myselff from yelling “No!” and running for my car.
“Well, I hope that when you come back,” she says, “it’ll be without the notepad.”
I’ve interviewd many celebrities. None of them has ever said that before.
People Magazine 1999
25 Most Intriguing People
Julia, Meg, Demi, Sandra. The exclusive sorority of actresses who can make a potential hit movie on their star power alone is a small one. But this year they pledged a new member. With Double Jeopardy,Ashley Judd, 31, energized the big screen with a tough-tender role that left viewers and critics ready for more. Her portrayal of a woman wrongly accused of murder, who is physically and psychologically determined to set things right, sent a largely female audience hurrying to the multiplex, where Jeopardy has grossed more than $112 million. “She’s a star,” says actress Salma Hayek of her pal’s appeal. “Other actresses have glamor, but Ashley has this grace like Audrey Hepburn.” Her new status is a sweet one for the hardworking Judd, whose mother, Naomi, and big sister Wynonna are the Judds, country’s pure-platinum duo. As a teen the nonsinging Ashley cleaned their tour bus for $10 a day. Now her own payday is an estimated $8 million per picture. And her dance card has been filled with the likes of A Time to Killcostar Matthew McConaughey and balladeer Michael Bolton. Still, current beau Dario Franchitti, a champion race car driver, told Scotland’s Daily Record,”Ashley’s not really into that big showbizzy scene.” Judd, who nailed the Jeopardy part opposite Tommy Lee Jones after a pregnant Jodie Foster dropped out, lives in her own place on her family’s 1,000-acre spread near Nashville with a dog, a cat and llamas.One negative aspect of fame followed her home though — a security guard who stalked her was arrested last September for trespassing on her property. With typical bravura, Judd told him to leave, and he did. (Franchitti followed him in a car until police caught up.) On the set, Judd, who stars in the January thriller Eye of the Beholder,throws her weight around over just one thing: She insists on doing her own stunts. “Sometimes we had to trick her away from the set so the stuntwoman could do the very tough stuff,” says Jeopardy producer Leonard Goldberg. “It was easier not to have to argue with her.”
Cosmopolitan 1998
Fun, Fearless, Female of the Year, actress Ashley Judd
The competition was fierce–now, find out who’s worthy of our highest Cosmo honors. Read on about our 1998 celebrity fun, fearless female, our winning
readers, 11 women in the news who blow our hair back, plus stars who live what Cosmo preaches. Yes! you can have it all!
Fun? Yes! Fearless? Oh yeah! Female–without a doubt (see picture at right). Now, add to her list of Cosmo qualities the fact that she speaks fluent French, kick-boxes, and skydives for kicks. All that and her big box-office hit Kiss the Girls is precisely why we agree with her boyfriend, Michael Bolton, that this woman’s confidence, drive, and thrill-seeker outlook make her worthy of our highest Cosmo honors.
Ashley Judd is a woman who knows what she wants. And she wants many thins. For example, during today’s rehearsal for the VH1 Fashion Awards, which she’s cohosting with Harry Connick, Jr., she variously demands (and gets):
A cup of wheat-grass juice and a slice of pumpkin pie
Some stationery, so she can write a note to her friend The Edge from U2
An appointment scheduled at Harry Winston Jewelers around her upcoming lunch with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner
A volume of Emily Dickinson poems, so she can copy a particularly apt favorite in longhand for a friend whose son just died
A chartered plane to Europe, to transport her to her boyfriend, singer Michael Bolton, after she tapes the awards
No matter what the subject–food, affairs of the heart, career–Ashley Judd is usually in charge. Joel Schumacher, who directed Judd in A Time to Kill, says, “Whether you’re climbing Mount Everest or playing charades, you would want Ashley to be with you, because you feel she can focus her laser-intense intelligence on almost anything and do well at it.”
She’s certainly in command of her fastrising star, which is thankfully based not on hype but on a vivid presence and a nononsense perceptiveness that
translates brilliantly on screen. After debuting in 1993 in the modest Sundance hit Ruby in Paradise, she appeared in several other interesting independent films (Smoke, A Perfect Life) and less-interesting roles in bigger movies (Heat, A Time to Kill). By last fall, she had graduated to a star-making studio vehicle, the thriller Kiss the Girls, which was an unexpected smash, taking in some $60 million in the U.S. alone.
And she’s come this far with surprisingly little compromise. Her wardrobe for the VH1 show is a case in point. Actresses hosting fashion awards often become mannequins for contemporary designers, and that’s what VH1’s producers expected of Judd–especially since she’s personal friends with Giorgio Armani, Valentino, and the design team Badgleu Mischka. Instead, she opted for vintage dresses, each representing a different decade.
The vintage dresses, explains Judd, 29, “are more indicative of who I am.” Which is ? “Not very into momentary fancy or slobbering over the latest hoo-hee-ha. I thought it would be more substantively to reflect on where these fashions that we now value came from.” She pauses and smiles. “Also, I feel sensational in them!”
Judd proves her female instincts correct when she models the outfits for her hair and makeup people in her dressing room. As she dons a silver-beaded flapper dress, then an orange sleeveless femme-fatale number from the ’30s, then a poufy yellow theatrical gown from the ’50s, Judd displays her period versatility, her timeless beauty, her fierce individuality–and, not incidentally, her recently toned body.
Judd slips the garments on and off without bothering to retreat behind a screen, though she’s wearing nothing underneath. She never blushes or breaks stride, despite the presence of several men and mirrors in the cramped space. “Who cares?” she asks later with a shrug. “Everybody’s working. It’s much more coy to leave the room.”
Coy is not an adjective that will ever apply to Ashley Judd. “I am counter programmed against that feminine-wile thing,” she says. “The thought of being
strategic makes me want to throw up. To toss my head or bat my eyes–that is not about my essence.”
Judd prides herself on her directness. “I confront problems sooner as opposed to later,” she says. “That’s big motto for me. And it pays excellent dividends.” Though she recently reverted to her natural brunette after several films spent as a blonde, she says her personality wasn’t affected. “I’m a ball-buster, blonde or brunette!”
Of all the actresses trying to navigate Hollywood’s murky waters, Judd most deserves the designations “fun” and “fearless.” Her idea of fun, though, is a
little offbeat. As she says, “I don’t know too many people who like to read the dictionary.”
Also, most people would be anxious at the prospect of hosting their first awards ceremony, an often thankless job that invites catty scrutiny. But Judd attacked it with verve. “I’ve been attending awards shows since I was 14,” she says–her mother, Naomi, and sister, Wynonna, were the country music at The Judds–”so it’s a very comfortable atmosphere. Besides, it’s not a serious exploration of my arty side.”
That’s for certain. Judd and Connick spend much of the rehearsal day filming comedy bits that will precede the show, in which they pretend to rehearse their lines, boss models around, build scenery, even deliver a stagehand’s baby. During one of Connick’s scripted mistakes (”Welcome to the 1997 Oscars”), she giddily ad-libs, “Are you wasted?”
“She’s a lot of fun,” Connick says between takes. “She’s a woman, but she likes to act crazy–making faces at you, cracking jokes. She’s a good girl, but she doesn’t have any inhibitions. It’s a great combination.”
Such multiplicity is crucial to Judd. To her, the word womanhood means “fullness and integrity,” she says. “It means having it all in terms of being a physical, emotional, and spiritual person.”
Steel Magnolia
Though Judd’s mind is constantly ticking, she also has a strong playful streak. Both were in evidence when she signed on to star in A Small Miracle, due in theaters this spring. She took the job after barely reading the script, because she’d read and loved the book on which it’s based, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. But also, during filming, she and one of her 12-year-old costars spent a night toilet-papering the director’s trailer.
She’s always been a restless, forceful soul. You could chalk it up to her tumultuous childhood–her parents divorced when she was 4, and before The
Judds became successful, mom Naomi worked several jobs and moved the kids around a lot. Or perhaps Ashley had to learn early on how to hold her own with two other charismatic women in the family. “My mom gave me the nickname ‘giraffe,’” Judd says, “because I was always sticking my neck out. They perceived me as bold. I’d go places she and my sister didn’t, geographically and interest-wise.”
The only fears she had growing up were “micro,” she says, “because it’s too terrifying for a child to worry about the ‘macros.’ Instead of worrying how we
were going to pay the rent, I was afraid of getting grounded, having telephone privileges suspended, if people were going to be able to tell my shoes were
cheap or I’d safety-pinned my dress because it didn’t really fit right. My imagination was a great, safe retreat. And doing well in school–that was the area
where I could be in charged of my own destiny.”
After graduating from the University of Kentucky with a degree in French, she was accepted into the Peace Corps, but friends convinced her to give
Hollywood a shot. When she moved out there, she had braces on her teeth and had to learn the ropes. She took acting classes, waitressed at the
Hollywood hot spot The Ivy, and worked as an assistant at an agency that handled actors, directors, and writers.
Even in those circumstances, she was no wallflower; when she turned 23, her then-boyfriend’s present was a skydive. “I’ve always emanated a certain sense of fearlessness,” she says. “Why else would someone take you skydiving on your birthday?”
Asked about the experience, she says, “It’s absurd to fling yourself from a flying aircraft, with the planet far beneath you and the noise of the wind. It is the
definition of hysteria–and a great deal of fun. I wanted to go again right away, and I did.”
One-Man Woman
A few weeks after t he VH1 taping, Judd settles into a banquette at a New York City restaurant, wearing silver-glitter nail polish she describes as “a third
grader’s dream” and a snakeskin Valentino jacket that she calls “the coolest thing I’ve ever had. Isn’t it funny,” she remarks, “I’m trying to get warm with a
cold-blooded creature.”
Actually, she’s been getting warm with one of the most popular crooners of the past decade. Asked to describe her ideal man, she replies immediately:
“An equal.” Then she adds, “Someone willing to express his feelings. Someone who leans forward as opposed to looking back.” Michael Bolton, 43, whom she met at a concert of her sister’s, has provided that her her. His vegetarianism inspired her to become one, even though she used to relish devouring a big steak.
Judd had experience dating a fellow celebrity–she was with her A Time to Kill costar Matthew McConaughey just before his media blitz. But she says, “I
don’t look at them as public figures. It’s about knowledge of a person’s spirit.” For instance, she maintains friendships with both bad-boy actor Sean Penn
and socialite Blaine Trump. “Quality people are quality people,” she says, “regardless of their personal styles or seeming differences.”
And it was Bolton who helped her last year when, after filming six movies in a row, she found that her “tanks were empty,” and she suffered about of
depression that lasted several months. She cherished being “with a grown-up, a person with some experience and seasoning and understanding, who as also fallible.” Looking back, she says, “I recommend being sad for a season. Your dark night of the soul. Because God can’t be faithful to you if you don’t give God a chance to see you through someting see you through something.”
And no, Bolton didn’t chop off his famous hair for her in a sort of Samson and Deliah act; in fact, Judd was kind of sorry to see it go, “like retiring your
favorite pair of sweatpants. But he’s a gorgeous man, and I think it’s much better presented now.”
Ashley recently dreamed about a pool with three diving boards–low, medium, and high. “If you close the low board, you’d break your neck,” she recalls. “You were only safe if you chose the higher boards.”
And he often throws herself into things, be it love, work, or just a book. “A friend of mine doesn’t understand why I’m so bold with regard to risking my heart, why I just assume the world is a safe place,” she says. “But of course, you’re going to get knocked around. You can’t avoid heartache.
Though her mother gave her the nickname “fearless,” Judd insists that it be softened. “A label us limiting,” she says. “I’m not fearless, but I do have
courage, which is action in the face of fear.” She makes the distinction between being courageous and being hard: “I still want to be able to be vulnerable or broken or frightened.”
For instance, when she drops the biggest bombshell of the interview–”I have a voice lesson tomorrow”–she immediately regrets her candor. Judd has long sworn that she had no interest in treating on her mother and sister’s turf, claiming she couldn’t sing a note. But her decision to study singing has nothing to do with that, she insists. “People are going to read so much into it, but I don’t mean it that way at all.” She’s just hoping to get the role of Ruth Etting, a 1920s torch singer, in an upcoming movie. “It’s like doing an accent,” she says, “or learning to kick-box for Kiss the Girls.” Still, even if it’s for a job, getting into that arena, given her roots seems–well, fearless.
Last summer, Judd had a blast hanging out on her family farm in Kentucky with her sister’s kids, Elijah, 3, and Grace, 1. At the pool, she would entertain them with “the no-hands squirrel dive,” she explains, “this bombastic leap off the diving board.” For an encore, she would line up all the floats and try to run across the entire pool on them without falling in. No, she hasn’t mastered that maneuver yet, but never count her out.
Esquire 2000
Women We Love
Women We Love: Ashley Judd, Naked Children, killer depression, scratch biscuits, and further evidence of the superiority of celebrities
‘have you eaten yet?”
“No,” I lied. “Well, I had some breakfast, but that was a while ago….”
“Well, I’m hungry,” she said. “So if you don’t mind, I’m going to make some biscuits.”
“Um, you’re going to make biscuits? Like, from scratch? If you’re hungry, doesn’t that take a while?”
“Oh, about twenty minutes,” she said with blithe purpose, with her face slyly averted, already busying herself If with fetching buttermilk from the icebox and spreading flour and whatever else it takes to make biscuits on the board she uses for baking. It was just after twelve noon on a startlingly temperate
blue-sky day in early June, and I was visiting Ashley Judd at her house, south of Nashville–or, to put it properly, Ashley and I were visiting, since she is nothing if not a southern woman, and it is a southern habit to use visit as an intransitive verb. It is her remittent southernness, indeed, that aroused my interest in her in the first place, for she is one of very few celebrities who are very clearly from someplace, and one of even fewer who are very clearly from the South. Although well-known as a second-generation celebrity, as Naomi’s daughter and Wynonna’s sister, she still bears the imprint of her Appalachian origins in her face, with its alternating extremes of severity and softness, with its flanking of fine bones around the eyes, with the whisk of judgment in its reflexively arched eyebrows, with the nearly painted quality of its lips, with the overall cupidity of its shape, and with its promise of harsh misgivings and strenuous delights. In her blood is incorporated the entire ascent not only of American celebrity but of American beauty in general, and now here she was making biscuits from scratch, as generations of southern women had before her, uncelebrated, crushed by the heel of ceaseless toil into the dust of history.
Here she was in a plain steel-blue dress–silk, yes, and surely expensive, but the essence of homespun modesty all the same–that, when it wiggled off her shoulder, revealed the strikingly white strap of her camisole; here she was, just a wee slip of a thing, flat and hard, perfectly postured and precisely one dimension smaller than you expected her to be; here she was with no makeup and a head of glossily dark, unwashed hair, its screwy tangles held down by two white barrettes; here she was in sandals, with two cats curling around her bare calves and two small dogs dodging the tread of her heels; here she was pouring buttermilk and scooping shortening and sifting flour and pinching salt; here she was digging her lovely, grasping hands into the ball of dough and kneading it until the white flour crept up her wrists; here she was working, and dampening with the effort; here she was talking about the pie she wanted to bake, some baroque southern concoction, banana-bloodroot-muscadine-sphagnum, something like that, the recipe for which she had obtained from her mother’s housekeeper, whom she called by the honorific “Aunt”; here she was complaining about the rising agent she was using in the biscuits, saying: “This is a Yankee brand, so I’m not very proud to be using it. Listen, I hope you don’t mind that we stay here and eat. I know we were supposed to go to Dotson’s, but I don’t feel like going anywhere.”
“Dotson’s–that’s country cooking, right?”
“Yeah. It’s a meat and three. Yankee journalists always call it a greasy spoon–that’s how you can tell they’re Yankees. We always take visitors there. I was talking to Sister last night, wondering what I should do with you. She said, `Take him to Dotson’s, that’s what I always do. I always take those Yankee journalists to Dotson’s and just leave them there, and they always go home thinking they’ve had an adventure.’”
Actually, I was happy to be in her house. I had never been inside a celebrity’s house before. I had written a few stories about actors and actresses, but no
matter how hospitable they seemed to be, their homes were always off-limits. Ashley was different, because she wanted you to know that her home spoke for her–that it acted as her envoy, that she had preserved some essential part of herself, as well as of her tradition, within its walls. It was an old farmhouse, built after the Civil War by a man named Meacham out of bricks baked in a local kiln from local clay. It was set close to a country road, with its front side facing–across the street–fields freshly cut and dotted with whorls of hay that resembled the droppings of an enormous rabbit, and with its back side opening out to a gentle green valley. Ashley owns the valley. Her sister–whom she always calls just that, “Sister”–bought the house and property for her in 1994, and Ashley spent the next four years fixing and furnishing and finishing it, until its every surface bore her fingerprints and the house appeared, like its owner, warm and welcoming behind a wall, a warning, and a locked gate. I had stood around in front of the gate for a few minutes before she let me in, and had seen her in the shadows, bustling behind screened windows. There was an imposing domesticity to the place, an intimacy that established its own boundary, and the first thing I remember her saying, after she buzzed me in, was this: “You didn’t ring, so I thought you were someone from Fan Fair.”
“Fan Fair?”
“It’s an event they have in Nashville every year. Basically, it’s a chance for really fat people to get on a bus and see their favorite stars’ houses. Not that I mind, if people respect the idea of my privacy. Most people do. I went to Dario’s race this weekend in Milwaukee and walked around without any problems. I try to deal with people individually. You give them what they want, when they want it, so that what they want doesn’t turn into something else, in the aggregate.”
I knew that “Dario” was Dario Franchitti, her boyfriend and fiance, a daring driver of open-wheel race cars, so I asked her how he had done in Milwaukee.
“He had equipment trouble. He was having trouble with his steering. It’s very hard to finish a race like that if you have steering problems, let alone win it. He came in, like, sixth. He is one of the very best in the world at what he does. He is absolutely world-class. But in that kind of racing, equipment often determines the outcome. Every few years, a certain kind of car, a certain team, becomes dominant and wins everything. Right now, it’s McLaren and Ferrari. You know, I was talking to Prince Albert not long ago, and he told me…”
I had heard this about Ashley. I had heard that she talks, so I was prepared. Still, it was hard keeping up with her and harder still to square the soundtrack of her conversation with the sight of her making scratch biscuits, for if she was a peasant at the baking board, she was relentlessly aristocratic in speech. I mean, if this was a southern kitchen, what in hell was Prince Albert doing there? But he was there, and so was everybody else, in the aggregate, as Ashley would say, because she prefers words like that, just as she prefers elaborately constructed sentences-spoken sentences that sound composed, that sound written. Prince Albert was there, in Ashley’s conversation, and, in due time, so was everybody else Ashley knew. She was a name-dropper. Or, more precisely, she used language in its original function of naming things and naming people, as though she were determined to make every sentence an act of self–definition–as though she were an artist listing her influences. Most of the time, she used names as points of reference without bothering to provide surnames, so that, presiding as spirits in her butter-yellow kitchen, there was Rosie (O’Donnell) and Natalie
(Portman) and Tommy Lee (Jones), along with Sister, who is her sister, and Pop, who is her mother’s husband, and Aunt Scrumptious Pies, who is her mother’s housekeeper. There was also Gloria (Steinem), who sent her a book she had just finished reading; and then of course the inevitable Oprah–”a brilliant woman,” in Ashley’s regard–who sent Ashley a copy of The Bluest Eye to read, for in Ashley’s world, Oprah’s Book Club is strictly personal, hand-to-hand; and then, at last, at the end of the kitchen table, there was the empress herself, Joni (Mitchell), in a framed picture with Ashley taken the night Ashley hosted the tribute concert to Joni at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York.
I saved her cigarette from that night,” Ashley said. “I called my friends, and they all agreed it was a significant object. I mean, Joni. `Woman of Heart and Mind’? It just doesn’t get any better than that. ‘I am a woman of heart and mind / With time on her hands / No child to raise / You come to me like a little boy / And I give you my scorn and my praise.’ It just doesn’t get any better than that, and that includes anything Dylan ever wrote.”
“Hey, now, don’t go messing with Bobby D.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Ashley said. “I forgot about boys and Bob Dylan. It’s one of those gender distinctions.”
She put the biscuits in the oven. She made coffee. She cut up a cantaloupe she bought at a market that brings in local produce. She scrambled some brown eggs. She opened the refrigerator and found whipped butter and four kinds of homemade jam. She put the jam and the butter on the table, along with a jar of honey, the eggs, and the biscuits, tucked in a basket and covered with checked cloth. She was so hungry her stomach was making creaky mechanical squirting sounds, like something made out of springs. Was I hungry? You bet I was. I wasn’t even disoriented anymore by the seeming disjunction between her domesticity and her celebrity, because I realized there was no disjunction: She enjoyed her domesticity not in spite of her celebrity but rather because of it. She had come up from the farm–or, more precisely, the Judd bloodline had come up from the farm–in order to go back to the farm. She was rural, then royal; now she was both, enacting precisely those rituals her forebears had abandoned, making biscuits from scratch because she had the time to make them. Indeed, there was something intimate in Ashley’s celebrity: She spoke about Prince Albert as though he were the charming, seersuckered dipsomaniac who spends the day expostulating from the bench next to the Confederate memorial in the town square. She spoke about Rosie and Oprah as though they lived around the corner, and in a sense they did, for as it turns out, celebrity is just a small town, bordered not by ridge or rill but by a commonality of fame. Its nature is atavistic, and so when you ask what Ashley Judd wants, the answer is this: She wants
what everybody wants. She wants to go home.
THE RACE IS EVOLVING. In Louisa, Kentucky, where the Judds came from and where they are buried–where Ashley went as a girl to visit the hollered farm of her mother’s relatives–there is a McDonald’s off the highway and a big chain drugstore, and the downtown restaurant is named Sweet Sensations, and all the women in town sport huge, springy perms, and there are no Judds in the phone book anymore: They all got out of town. They went up the river, to Ashland, a dusty, blue-gravel city where Ashley’s mother grew up and where her grandmother, whom Ashley calls Nana, still lives. She was pretty, Nana was, when she was young, with reddish hair and some of the shaping you see in the lovely faces locked in old-fashioned cameos. Now Nana’s running for city council in Ashland, and she goes to Scotland with Ashley to visit Dario, whose own family migrated to Scotland from Italy and who lives when he can with Ashley in Tennessee.
The race is evolving, you see, because it can’t stay put. Earlier, I said that Ashley is one of very few American celebrities who are very clearly from
somewhere. Well, in fact, she is: She’s from the Great American Nowhere. Her mother, Diana Judd, got knocked up as a high school senior in Ashland, and from then on she–Diana–was always from somewhere else: the place that’s never as good as the next place, the town forever shrinking in the rearview mirror. She found a man to marry her, bore the child she named Christina, and then, with her husband, Michael Ciminella, had the little girl she named Ashley, who was, her mother writes in her autobiography, Love Can Build a Bridge, “a perfect baby. She slept through the night and rarely cried.” Ashley was, in other words, a child who could take care of herself, and in due time she was doing exactly that. Diana divorced Ashley’s father and moved with her two girls to Hollywood, California. Then to Lexington, Kentucky. Then back to Ashland. Then to a mountaintop south of Lexington, a house named Chanticleer. Then back to California–Marin County. Then to Nashville. Then to Franklin, south of Nashville, where Ashley went to high school. Actually, it’s hard to keep count of how many homes she’s had, because there were stretches when she had no home at all–she shuttled back and forth between the care of her mother, her father, her grandparents, and the families of her friends. She spent her life being dropped off and waiting to be picked up and went to twelve schools in thirteen years. She never complained, however: Ashley was formed in a crucible of anxiety and discontent and constant motion, and it fell to her to be settled and centered and satisfied–to be, as her mother writes with a kind of ruthless equanimity, “a poised
charmer…a happy-go-lucky child…the respectable part of my own character…a natural-born winner…our little cheerleader… the Can’t Miss Kid.” She was too composed to mourn her lack of place, and besides, she was learning from her mother and sister that place was nothing but a construct, for it was not until Diana rechristened herself “Naomi” and Christina became “Wynonna” that “the Judds” began making their own soap and advertising the fact that they washed their clothes in the manner of their Appalachian forebears; it was not until the Judds became singing celebrities, in other words, that they came from someplace that wasn’t no place.
“You know what Sister says about my mother’s book, don’t you?” Ashley asked. “She says she’s going to write a sequel, and she’s going to call it The Truth.” Still, Ashley has done her very best to live up to Naomi Judd’s portrayal of her as a child with an untroubled brow, and by the time she had her first leading role in a movie, Ruby in Paradise, in 1993, she seemed astonishingly complete–as well as astonishingly herself–playing a young woman who moves to the Florida panhandle from a holler in east Tennessee and finds all she needs of home in the dead calm in her eyes. As if in compensation for her frangible upbringing, she maintains to this day an implacable and sometimes unnerving composure and is always at great pains to let you know that she is rooted, even when she is discussing the mass of clear, uncorrupted stone that is her engagement ring.
“Jesus, Ashley,” I said when she was kneading dough and I saw for the first time the ring on her finger poking out of the glove of white flour. “That is some serious rock you got there. You’re a serious woman now.”
“Yes,” she said quickly, instantly, with that no-shit brown-eyed stare and only the faintest smile. “Yes,” she said, and then pronounced the words she might have chosen to describe herself the day she was born, at the same time they were chosen for her: “I’m a serious woman. And I’m seriously happy.”
“WHO IS THE GREATEST person you know?” I asked her.
“The greatest?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “The greatest.”
We were back in her kitchen. We had gone out for a walk. We had walked on her property. It took a long time. She owns the valley and the creek that trickles through it. She owns twelve hundred acres, as far as the eye can see. She owns the lake impounded at the mouth of the valley, and the woods beyond the lake. She owns the sleeping porch built at the edge of the woods, and she owns the swimming hole, where the creek has gathered of its own accord. She owns the ancient stone steps where the creek first pours itself down into her property, and she owns the paths that crawl up the ridges and allow her to look down upon what she owns, to behold it. Hell, she could get lost in what she owns if she didn’t have authority here–if she didn’t put her footprints on every path; if she didn’t know the names of every bird and bush and take the time to pronounce them. “Oh, that’s a redbud tree,” she said as we were walking. “Oh, that song–that’s a thrush.” It is very important for her to know the names of things, and once, when she came back from performing a run of Picnic onstage in New York, she was so shocked to realize that she had forgotten the name of a yellow flower–it was a waxflower–that she pulled her car into the driveway of Sister’s own farm and wrote a poem about it. It is very important for her to know the names of things, because it is very important for her to know that she is here, in a place that is, as she says, “a reflection of my values.” She uses that word a lot, as when she is evincing her distaste for a celebrity couple who have in her opinion put their marriage at the mercy of the public eye: “They’re marketing their
relationship,” she says. “I know that’s strange for me to say, coming from my family, but I…at least I have values!” It is because of their lack of values that she doesn’t have all that many Hollywood friends, she says–that and because “so many actors are so screwed up”–although when we were out walking in her woods she mentioned that Reese (Witherspoon) might be buying a farm nearby with her husband, Ryan (Phillippe), and allowed that she would “like to have a smart, talented peer in the neighborhood, someone I could talk to.” Indeed, as she tramped along the paths she’d charted, her conversation was characterized by a curious kind of coexistence–for every bit of flora and fauna she named, she also named Dennis (Quaid) and Bob (De Niro), along with Spielberg and Scorsese and friends who still lived back in Ashland. Her childhood had been as open as it was disorganized; people had continually passed in and out of it, and now it was as though she were holding on to anyone who ever meant something to her, here in her valley. It was as though in addition to knowing the names of everything, she felt compelled to know the names of everyone, and when we came out of the woods, she waved to the man working the tractor in her fields. He offered a practiced hand back to her, and she said, “That’s Ralph.”
“Ralph?”
“Ralph Meacham.”
“Meacham? Isn’t that the family that built your house?”
“The very same,” she said.
Finally, when we got back to her kitchen, I got curious and asked her. “You know an awful lot of people. Who is the greatest person you know?”
“The greatest?”
“The greatest.”
“Nelson Mandela,” she said without another moment’s hesitation.
“Wow,” I said. “He’s pretty great.”
“Yes, he is,” she said. “What do you say to a man whose every word and every gesture carries the most sublime and profound resonance?”
“I don’t know. `How are you doing, Mr. Mandela?’”
“That’s basically what I did say,” she said.
She was swigging from a bottle of water. She was sweating from the walk, just as she sweats in the movies, that ambered glaze. She was wearing a tight gray top with KENTUCKY printed across the front; tight black workout pants, clamdiggery in their cut; and a pair of Nikes. She disappeared around a corner and upon her return said: “I was wrong. You asked me to name the greatest person I know. Nelson Mandela is the greatest person I’ve ever met. The greatest person I know is Dario. Without a doubt.”
SHE HAD WARNED ME THAT she was a fast driver–”kick-ass” is how she put it. She said that the worst part of dating a race-car driver is that “you never get a chance to drive, ever,” and so when she has a chance to drive, well, she likes to drive. Now I was meeting her by a stop sign on a country road in preparation for paying a visit to her sister, Wynonna. It was dinnertime and I was hungry again, but when she pulled up in the two-seat Honda roadster lent to her by Dario’s sponsor, she rolled down her window, called out, “I’m counting on you to have the courtesy to excuse yourself before dinner,” and drove off. I followed, and as she kept on speeding up, from forty-five to sixty-five then to eighty-five miles per hour, I wondered: Was that a southern thing to say or a celebrity thing? Then we parked at Wynonna’s farm, and Ashley–with a scarf wrapped around her head like a do-rag–said, as we stood at the front door, “Although I know this is the very antithesis of southern hospitality, we’re going to keep your visit short, and stop short of offering you dinner.” And then I knew.
The thing was, Sister’s house was real southern. It was as southern as you could get. For one thing, Sister’s two children, aged five and three, were named Elijah and Grace. For another, they were stark naked when we went inside. They were sitting at a tiny table in the corner of the kitchen, and when they saw Ashley, they said, “Hi, Aunt Ashley!” and stood up, stark naked. Though both were towheaded, they both looked an awful lot like Wynonna around the eyes and nose, and Elijah had a few metal teeth, and Grace had something close to a black eye. “Don’t you think you might want to put some clothes on?” said Aunt Ashley, who prides herself on being a sternly loving aunt and considers her sister’s home a place to “test drive” her theories on parenting. They disappeared and came back sheathed in overalls. “Hey, you want to play hide and seek?” Elijah said to me. “Yeah,” Grace said. “We hide and you seek!” I was mulling their offer when Wynonna came downstairs from her nap. She was wearing a long white terry-cloth housecoat, sweats, and slippers, and her hair was hued a shockingly candied variant of orange. She was about the same height as Ashley, but she was larger, looser, swingier, with the heavy eyes of an oriental panjandrum. She smiled sleepily, and in a second the kids were tugging on her, asking if I could go out and play with them. She looked at Ashley, and Ashley looked at me and said primly, “Sure, you go out and play, and in the meantime, Sister and I will sit and visit.”
So that’s how it happened: They hid; I sought. Elijah and Grace scattered out onto the farm, and I chased their trails, around Mama’s big old tour bus, around the big old goldfish pond, around the big old barn emblazoned with the sky-high admonition BELIEVE, around the fence encircling a couple of big old buffalo, and around the restored ‘57 Chevy that the Judds drove when they were in the process of transforming themselves into Naomi and Wynonna. Finally, after about an hour, Wynonna appeared at the door of the house and bellowed, “Dinner’s ready!” Elijah and Grace were in hiding, nowhere to be found, and as for me, I’d overstayed my welcome without even speaking to Wynonna, but then she hollered, “Tom, c’mon in, you’ve been promoted to dinner!” and I got hungry again.
I don’t know how they would’ve eaten it, anyway, without my help. There was a lot of food, courtesy of Holly, the housekeeper. There was a platter of carrots, sugared and peppered. There was a platter combining two kinds of green beans. There was a basket of homemade bread. There was a platter of pork chops, cut thick and heaped high, flanked by a bowl of gravy as thick as caramel. There was a platter of vegetarian lasagna, and, in front of the places set for the two Judd sisters, there were salads dressed with tomato and avocado. I looked at the food and sighed. Ashley looked at me and said, in the voice of every chiding southern woman ever born, “You’re welcome,” and then at Wynonna’s request bent her head to pray. Wynonna is a Pentecostal Christian, Ashley an ardently ambivalent one, but Ashley commandeered the invocation, ending it by giving thanks to God for his “holy gift of words, which allow us to transcend our boundaries.” Sitting between them, I held both their hands: Wynonna’s was warm, Ashley’s cool. On a recently televised “Judd Reunion” concert, Wynonna serenaded Ashley while cradling her to her bosom, and it seemed to me then that Ashley was doing another telegenic celebrity turn–she kept her eyes closed the entire song, and then, at the cessation of the last note, she opened them and released a perfectly timed squirt of tears. To see them together, however, is to see a relationship more authentic than any of its paid advertisements. To see them together is to see two women freed by sistership to say anything about anyone, including each other, and so not long after we began eating, Ashley opened up for the first time since I’d met her, calling one lauded director’s movies “pieces of shit” and saying of one vaunted young thespian considered for a role in her next thriller, “Im sorry, he just doesn’t have a leading man’s jawline. He’s a beautiful actor and a very shy guy, but his jaw just goes straight from his ear
to his chin. It doesn’t do anything.” Then she did a precise impression of Sean Penn calling to praise Wynonna’s acting in a recent episode of Touched by
an Angel–”she was fucking phenawmenal”–and urged Wynonna to try out for a role in the remake of The Women. “There’s an opening for the role of a really bitter woman who works in the nail salon. You should go for it, Sister. You do bitter so well.”
“I wonder if I’d be as good an actress as you are a singer,” Wynonna said.
“Oh, is Ashley a good singer?” I asked.
“When it comes to her singing, we dearly love Ashley’s acting,” Sister said.
Then the kids came out, Elijah in a suit of Presleyish silver and Grace in a pink tutu. “You’re supposed to applaud,” Grace said. “No,” stern Aunt Ashley explained. “You’re supposed to do something to make us applaud,” and so inspired them to put on a show. It got loud after that. They sang–”Listen: perfect pitch,” Wynonna said–and they danced and they did magic and when Ashley and Wynonna moved to the couch, Elijah set up a drum kit and began a burly solo at around the same time Grace was discovering that her mother was leaving early the next morning to do a show in Michigan, and so there was Grace sobbing piteous tears while Wynonna explained that she had to leave because there were people in Michigan who wanted to see her, and there was Elijah beating the holy hell out of the drums while Aunt Ashley said, “You got it, Elijah–I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, you got plenty of it,” and there was me, in the middle of all this, getting up and going to the bathroom and clogging the toilet. Well, the toilet was already clogged by Elijah’s experiments with toilet paper, but the burden of accusation was clearly going to fall on me, so I went back to the living room and asked, “Where’s the plunger?” Ashley, by this time, had squeezed close to Wynonna; she was indeed as close to Wynonna as she had been during the reunion concert and was helping comfort Grace, but now she lifted her face, and before I could protest–”It’s not what you think!”–she smiled, and it was that smile, the celebrity smile and, yes, I saw it now, the family smile, and she let go a lewd laugh and crowed: “A plunger! All right, Tom! You’re one of us now!”
ONE DAY, WHEN I WAS VISITING Ashley at her house, we sat outside in the sun and gazed out upon her valley. I had to use the bathroom again, so I handed her my tape recorder and asked her to name, in my absence, every plant she saw. Later, when I played the tape, this is what I heard: “I see zinnias, which I absolutely love. Along with morning glories, zinnias were the first flowers I planted as a little girl. I was in second grade and I had a flower bed outside each of my bedroom windows. These zinnias are a lovely soft peachy-coral color. Daisies. Lantana. Plumbago. Sweet alyssum. Obviously, the bamboo. Johnny-jump-ups, which I love. Ivy. Geranium. Roses. Regular ivy. White yarrow. Yellow yarrow. Pansies. I have a grapevine and several varieties of antique climbing roses. I have hyacinth, which anyone who knows flowers will dispute, because it’s too late in the season, but this is a special variety. Thyme. Rosemary. Did I say vinca? Oh, and this here actually has `wedding’ in the name of it, and it was planted the day Dario and I announced our engagement. Sweet bridal something–I can’t remember the name of it. Marigolds. More zinnias. Those are my old daffodils from spring, and I’ve got azaleas, and this is a clematis vine. There’s sweet pea over there. I don’t know what that yellow climbing vine is, but it’s very sweet. But I named a bunch of things. Oh, yeah, and this: mint.”
SHE OWNS THE VALLEY. Or rather, they own the valley: The Judds do. Naomi lives down the road. Wynonna is moving from the farm with BELIEVE on the barn to a house she’s building between Ashley and Naomi, in the valley that people around there call Judd Valley, although Naomi calls it Peaceful Valley, and Ashley calls it Juddville, Population Six. Some folks, she says, call the valley a holler, but she’s from Kentucky, so she knows what a holler is. People get the hell out of hollers, if they’re driven or talented or beautiful or lucky enough. They go to valleys and stay there forever, the way Ashley wants to stay here. “To have a little piece of land that you can make your home, in every sense of the word–that’s the American dream,” she says, although she says this in the curious Scottish burr she occasionally falls into, as a consequence of her being “very verbal. I have a very good ear for language, so I’ve picked up Dario’s cadences without meaning to. I can sympathize with Madonna, with her accent.”
She owns the valley, and so now she’s outside facing it, or maybe the valley is facing her. It is not that large a valley–just two green ridges, gently enfolding a creek and a lake before opening out into woods–but when you stop talking, you can hear the wind going in and out of its walls, and it seems to contain an immensity. “It sounds like the ocean, doesn’t it?” Ashley says. Then: “That’s a woodpecker.” Then: “That’s a hawk.” She is barefoot, in a pale silk skirt with a blazing-pink border, and she is curled up in a woven chair that leaves bite marks on her arms. She has not washed her hair. She has not put on lipstick, either, though her lips don’t need it. Her lips are naturally adorned with a pattern of spokes and striations that look like exclamation points or rays of light around an empty sun. Her bare calves are scratched and bugbit, and her top rides up as she sits and shows the stripe of her dusky belly. “Are you hungry?” she asks. Damn right I am–I’ve been hungry ever since I met her, and so she goes inside and a few minutes later comes back with an apple, a couple of knives, and a jar of peanut butter. “This is my all-time-favorite snack,” she says. “Now I think I’ve turned the nation of Scotland on to peanut butter, because they don’t eat peanut butter. Well, they didn’t. They do now.”
It is an amazing statement when you stop to think about it. Ashley Judd, changing the fate–or at least the culinary habits–of nations. Because of Ashley’s
attachment to her favorite snack, Scotland overcomes centuries of suspicion and takes up the cause of peanut butter. And that is when it hits me, what it means to be a celebrity–what it means to be able to leave your imprint on the world in the same proportion the world leaves its imprint on you. They’re supposed to be better than us, these people–that is why we watch them, listen to them, write about them–and yet in our secret hearts we comfort ourselves by entertaining the suspicion that they are far, far worse. Well, what if they’re not? What if they’re indeed more alive than we are? What if the race is evolving, and it is evolving because of them? Ashley says that Dario is great–a great man. Maybe he is. She says that Blaine–Blaine Trump–is also great, a great woman, because she has what Dario has, what all great people have, that quality of fairness. Well, maybe she is, too. Hell, maybe they all are–Naomi and Wynonna, along with Ashley’s agent and Ashley’s publicist and everyone else Ashley chose as exemplars of greatness, next to Dario and Oprah and Nelson Mandela: Maybe they’re all great, and that’s why they know one another and send one another books and that’s why they get to live in the valley. Do you know what we talked about, Ashley and me, there in Judd Valley? We talked about religion and Christianity. We talked about books. We talked about poetry, with an emphasis on the French symbolists, whom, it is necessary to add, Ashley has read in the French. We talked about the various translations of Rilke–as it turns out, Ashley is partial to Stephen Mitchell, though she admits that the original Norton translation of the Duino Elegies has its charms. We talked about Emily Dickinson, many of whose poems Ashley has committed to memory, along with those of her favorite, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
“Longfellow!” I said. “That…that rhymester?”
“He saved my life,” Ashley stated flatly.
It was two years ago, during the filming of Double Jeopardy, and Ashley was, in her words, “cracking.” No one knew, of course–”in my Judd hillbilly way, I was very proud of myself for going out and doing my job,” but at the same time, “there was a significant rupture,” which she explains thusly: “Certain unconscious constructs and paradigms I was acting out needed to be cleared away.” She will not say what caused her crisis; all she will say is that “I tend to be a little accelerated, so maybe it was something like a midlife crisis I was experiencing while I was still young”; all she will say is that she had to admit to herself something she never wanted to admit, which was that she had been terribly lonely, growing up as a child in the Great American Nowhere; all she will say is that one night when she was alone, she called a psychiatrist back here in Tennessee, and the psychiatrist recited from memory the first three stanzas of Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” and stopped Ashley from dying. “Tell me not, in mournful numbers, / Life is but an empty dream!–/For the soul is dead that slumbers, / And things are not what they seem.” As a gift to herself each birthday, Ashley commits a poem to memory, and for her birthday that year, the poem she chose was “A Psalm of Life.” She also took a year off from making movies and came back home to rest in her valley, and it is “by benefit of that year,” she says, “that for the first time I understand that I earned this. I worked for this and I earned it, you know? I mean, my sister bought me the house and the land, but it’s by the fruit of my labor that I’ve restored it and decorated it and bought the sheets and planted the garden. And that’s definitely enhanced my attachment to it, because it’s a reflection not only of my values but what I’ve accomplished in my life to date.”
Birds sing in the valley, and Ashley, in turn, sings to her dogs, two cockapoos, Shug and Buttermilk. I ask her if she ever thinks of the women who came before her–the generations of American women whose silent sacrifices, in the aggregate, delivered Ashley Judd to Judd Valley.“No,” she says. “Uh-unh. Hadn’t thought about that. I mean, my Nana’s life, by any measure, is successful because of the fruit of her womb. Because of the quality of the lives enjoyed by her children–and I don’t mean that in a financial fashion, and I don’t mean `successful’ in a way arbitrated by the media or by contemporary culture. I mean that she has nice kids who are happy, and there’s no greater value than that.
“You know,” she says, “I’m pretty happy with my whole stinking family here. We’ve got a good thing going. May it last. But maybe each generation gets
better, you know? Maybe that’s the new great awakening–the push to improve our circumstance, not just economically and socially but spiritually. It used to be that parents dreamed of sending their kids to college, with a little help from the state–well, that’s an admirable aspiration, but maybe they were focusing on too little, and maybe it’s our turn to start focusing on the immensity of life.”
She names the flowers then, at my request, and when I come back, she shows me the hill she’s going to plant with wildflowers, and where just last week her mother’s husband, Pop, came over and shot a rattlesnake. She gives me a firm handshake, and I notice, for the first time, the few strands of gray in the ferrous blossom of her hair. She hits the button that opens the gate, and I see, in the fields across from her home, Ralph Meacham, on his dutiful tractor. His ancestors settled this valley, and they built this house. They planted, and they farmed, and they harvested. Now he works in the fields of someone who never has to worry what to bring to market. The race is evolving, and it calls celebrity home. I drive slowly by, down the country road that will take me out of the valley, but Meacham never lifts his gaze from the grass he’s cutting, and doesn’t raise his hand, in either greeting or goodbye.
The Fabulous Judd No One Knows
Redbook 1997
She’s gone from being the other one in a famous family to being a Hollywood success story. Now Ashley Judd talks about her painful childhood, her recent depression, and the one (very special, very famous) man who saw her through it.
ASHLEY JUDD BITES HUNGRILY INTO AN APPLE. She’s curled up on a chair in a corner cabana beside the rooftop pool of a Beverly Hills hotel. The late afternoon sun shimmers over her hair, still drenched from a swim. A few moments ago, Judd finished up a phone conversation with her mother, Naomi Judd, the singer and author, who is at her home outside of Nashville. Her older sister, Wynonna Judd, 33, the famous country singer, has just left the pool with her husband and their two children.
“All three of us are so knit together, emotionally and historically, it’s something you can almost touch,” says Judd, now sipping a glass of iced coffee. “I’m the youngest, so I have the benefit of what we have gone through individually and collectively. I’m like this repository of everyone’s experiences.”
At 29, Ashley Judd has quite a repository of experiences. She grew up. sometimes poor, sometimes lonely, as the sister and daughter of the singing
Judds? whose early years were marked by hardship. She went on, however, to carve out a successful career as an actress in films like Ruby in Paradise (1993), Heat (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), and now Kiss the Girls. And on a personal level, she’s enjoyed highly publicized relationships with actor Matthew McConaughey and pop singer Michael Bolton.
Today, Judd’s life seems golden: The scripts are pouring in and she’s deciding on her next film. She’s just returned from a trip to Italy, courtesy of designer Giorgio Armani, who sent her two first-class airline tickets to Milan simply to show up at the glittering presentation of his fall collection. She’s restoring a 180-year-old farmhouse on the 1,000-acre plot of land outside Nashville where her mother and sister have homes. She’s brainy and beautiful, and her love life is pretty good too.
And yet…
Dealing with the Pain
Last year Judd had just returned to Nashville after finishing six movies when she got a cold that she just couldn’t shake. Day after day, she found herself crying and nursing sensitive feelings that would get hurt way too easily. “I was real raw and tender.” she says quietly. “I felt pretty ravaged and I said no to people, no to jobs, no to my dad, who wanted me to come to Louisville a lot and see him. I said no to everybody. And one day I was a little bit weepy, and all of a sudden I thought. Oh my God, I think I’m depressed. This is what people do when they’re depressed. The sickness was brought on by emotions, and I realized that my body was not going to get better until I looked at my emotions.”
Doing so forced Judd for the first time to confront her past–and the realization that it wasn’t quite as sunny as she had wanted to remember. Indeed, growing up in an all-female household had a powerful impact, positive and negative, that she’s still trying to understand.
As a child, Judd watched her mother struggle to deal with a broken marriage, poverty, abuse, and an almost desperate hunger to succeed as a country singer. While the Judds rose to worldwide fame in the eighties, Ashley was only a teenager, and often seemed to fade into the background.
“Ashley had been hearing us on the radio, seeing us on TV, reading about us in magazines, just like everyone else in America,” says Naomi. “Any kid who was less secure, less sure of herself than Ashley would not have handled it so well.”
But in fact. the price for that facade of security would come later–when it was least expected.
In October 1996, at the Country Music Association Awards in Nashville, Judd was introduced to Michael Bolton by her sister, who was singing a duet with him for the show. When Ashley appeared backstage at Wynonna’s urging, well, sparks flew.
Ironically, it was the happiness of her new love with Bolton and the security she derived from that relationship that, Judd says, gave her the strength to recognize her own pain in the midst of her illness. “Michael was loving me in such a way that I felt safe enough to express my depression,” she says. “I felt so completely and deeply loved that whatever I was and whatever I needed to feel was okay. And it just came out.”
For a few months last winter, Judd virtually secluded herself at her cottage outside Nashville. She underwent intensive therapy to deal with her complicated relationships with her mother and her sister, as well as the resentments, loneliness, and anger that Judd had harbored since childhood.
“At some point everything comes up in your life and you can either layer upon layer your evasion or you can be brought to your knees and deal with it.” she says. “It turns out I had never really grieved for a lot of stuff. It was not ideal growing up, but that’s not to say we didn’t have love. It’s just that having love and having trauma are not mutually exclusive. I saw and felt a lot of things that broke me. And I had never let myself be broken.”
Born in California, Judd spent her childhood all over the map from the West Coast to Kentucky and Tennessee. Naomi’s divorce from the girls’ father,
Michael Ciminella, whom she married as a pregnant teenager, left her virtually penniless. “I was barely able to keep a jar of peanut butter on the table,” Naomi says. The two small girls and their mother shared a bed and moved around a lot. Ashley has joked, “We grew up in the back of a car asking. `Where are we going now?”‘ She attended 12 schools in 13 years. And she saw more than a child should.
One night is most memorable to Naomi: “I had been in a very unfortunate relationship with a boyfriend,” she remembers. “He beat me one night. I had a
busted face. And I took my two kids, in pj’s, to a motel. I was totally broke. The night clerk took pity on us and gave us a room. Ashley was exposed to these very dramatic events, the divorce, the bad people I brought around when I was trying to find myself–I’m sure it had a tremendous impact on her.”
Judd’s bout with depression stunned her mother. “It shook me to my core to see Ashley in that condition,” says Naomi. However, Judd seemed to tackle her depression with the same determination that she attacks acting. “When she was going through this she was either at the therapist’s office or by the fireplace reading self-help books or taking walks in the woods,” says Naomi, whose own determination led her from single welfare mother to country music star. “In life you’re either inactive, reactive, or proactive, and Ashley Judd is one of the most proactive people I’ve ever met.”
Judd’s depression ultimately eased, but only after she confronted her mother and sister about past hurts. “I was looking at old stuff,” she says. “And the fact is, I really encourage people to look at it, because it doesn’t break you. It actually heals you.”
Looking back, both mother and daughter say the experiences of the family led to an unbreakable bond–and a powerful sense of strength between the women. “We trusted each other with our lives,” says Naomi. “We knew back then that the source of our identity and love was so impenetrable, we felt bulletproof.” Judd says simply, “The way I live my life is my tribute to my mother. My hard work, my grit, my can-do attitude definitely come from her.”
Becoming Her Own Judd
Even as a child, Judd clearly viewed herself as entirely different from the two most important women in her life. She never had the inspiration to sing that her mother and sister did, nor did she feel the need to join the act. “We were worshiping different gods,” she has said. “With Wy it was music. I just always read.”
While in middle school, Judd recalls she had an experience that probably altered her life–and led her into acting. She remembers watching Jane Fonda on television in The Dollmaker, in a scene where Fonda is running to save a baby who is about to be hit by a train. The scene was so powerful that Naomi leapt up across the kitchen and grabbed Ashley and Wynonna to comfort them. Judd says, “I thought, That’s what I want to do. I wanted to be the girl in the movie who rocked your world, who had that kind of emotional power.”
It seemed only natural, therefore, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Kentucky with a degree in French, that she pack a U-Haul on the
back of her BMW and head for Hollywood. (She had been accepted by the Peace Corps to work in West Africa, but was determined to give acting a shot.)
Arriving in Los Angeles, Judd took acting classes and worked as a restaurant hostess. She turned down an audition for the female lead in the 1992 Christian Slater film Kuffs rather than do a topless screen test. She told the producers, “My mother worked too hard for me to take off my clothes in my first movie.”
Judd did take a smaller, fully clothed part in Kuffs, then won a recurring role as Ensign Lefler in the syndicated Star Trek. The Next Generation, which provided Naomi with the first glimpse of her daughter on screen. “Perhaps the first time in history someone has wept their way through Star Trek,” Judd has said. From there, she went on to the series Sisters. This led to roles in films like Ruby in Paradise (1993), Smoke (1995), and critical acclaim for Michael Mann’s Heat, opposite Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Val Kilmer.
Then she received an Emmy nomination in 1996 for HBO’s Norma Jean and Marilyn, followed by Joel Schumacher’s A Time to Kill, in which she played
Matthew McConaughey’s wife.
In her new film, Kiss the Girls, a psychological suspense thriller, Judd stars opposite Morgan Freeman. Another film, The Locusts, in which she costars
with Vince Vaughn, is also out this fall.
Who Was the Mystery Lover?
If Judd’s career has been gliding along at a fever pitch, so has her high-profile personal life. This past summer she ran into former boyfriend and costar
Matthew McConaughey at an after-party for the MTV Movie Awards. The two had a steamy affair after meeting on the set of A Time to Kill. They broke it off after the movie wrapped, but their latest encounter put the rumor mill in motion again. (Judd insists they’re just friends.)
Although Judd tries to keep her personal life quiet, she can’t help but praise McConaughey. “I have the highest regard and fondness and love for him. I mean, I can say that. I love Matthew. He’ll always be my friend. We share something very special. We have a common spirituality, and a practice of faith in common. That gives us an extremely special connection. And we were there for each other at an exquisite time of life for both of us.”
At the same party, she laughed with McConaughey about a recent article’s exaggeration that she dates all of her male costars. Judd explains, “Matthew
said he loved my answer and cut it out to put in his trailer while he was making Contact. I had said, `I’ve been involved with precisely two of my costars in ten professional outings, and I believe 20 percent is far below the national average.’ And the other person [besides McConaughey] people would like to think is Robert De Niro, but it’s not. I think more happens at the water cooler than has happened with me and my costars.” (She has never divulged who the other fling was with.)
After Judd and McConaughey ended their relationship, Bolton came along. Although Judd and Bolton split up after a few months, the two remain close
friends. Judd has a special attachment to him for helping her through her depression. As she says, “I’m just…I’m really lucky, I’m really, really lucky.”
Judd catches herself before she says too much, but in keeping her feelings private, her evasiveness almost says more. “I just don’t want to say anything
specific, because it doesn’t do it justice. Michael’s special beyond description and terribly, terribly important to me.”
By now the late afternoon sun has faded and the pool and cabanas are near-empty. Looking ahead, Judd says she has no immediate plans for children
of her own. She shrugs. “Someday, yeah, but I never thought about it until my sister had hers. Her children give me little introductory lessons.”
The light catches her right hand, where she wears a simple gold wedding band once worn by her great-grandmother. It’s not only a cherished memento, Judd says, but a link that binds her to her family. Her other hand bears no ring. Asked if her mother has given her any advice about men, Judd smiles. “I know what she wants for me,” she says. “She wants someone to think I’m as exquisite and extraordinary as she does. She wants someone to hold me in the same precious regard as she does.” Judd seems deep in thought. “What more can you ask from your mother?”
Judd Country
InStyle 1997
It’s home to a former single mother who became a country music legend; her older daughter, a successful solo singer; and her younger one, Hollywood’s
hottest new star. Could there be something in the water?
As daylight fades to early evening, the crisp, lung-tingling Tennessee air cools quickly. Split-rail fences cut like giant black zippers across an emerald
plushness that rolls to the horizon. Ashley Judd, whose latest movie shoot has taken her to a half-dozen locations in the past week, has come home for her fix. Flushed, invigorated, the 29-year-old actress bounds into the kitchen of her mother Naomi’s house in Peaceful Valley, the 1,000-acre family homestead an hour from Nashville. Naomi, 51, and Ashley’s half-sister, Wynonna, 33–country’s beloved former duo the Judds–are already setting out their KFC chicken and mashed potatoes on the round dining table, command central curing Judd reunions. “Biggest magnet in the world,” says Naomi with a proud nod as she knocks on the table.
Ashley’s homecoming coincides with the release of her box office blockbuster hit Kiss the Girls, and her career is the subject of serious buzz. “It seems my life is going to be dispersed and peripatetic,” she says, matching her sister’s flair for big-hair outrageousness with big-word loquaciousness. “It’s good to be far from the movie business.”
Not that she’s the only star at the table: Wynonna has a new single and CD, The Other Side, scaling the charts; and Naomi’s Home Companion, a folksy mix of comfort-food recipes and alternative-healing wisdom, is hitting the bookstores. “This is Judd Awareness Month,” Naomi jokes.
And no one is more Judd-aware than Naomi, who clearly rules her roost. These days, the exotic film world that Ashley inhabits–unlike Wy’s familiar gig
–has her mother’s intuition working overtime. “I’ve seen her pace quicken to a worrisome degree,” says the youthful, drawling matriarch. “They hate to hear this, but I can read these two. The minute they walk in the door, I know. I’m concerned Ashley is living in an insular fantasy world. So first I had to have my time alone with her, and I asked, `Are you happy?’ And she said, `Absolutely.’” Wynonna cuts in with a well-timed wisecrack: “No, Mom, you asked, `Are you wearing a bra?’”
Peaceful Valley is the ultimate reality check for the Judd women. Naomi and her second husband, Larry Strickland, live on a 500 acre tract that adjoins an equally enormous spread owned by Wynonna, although Wy chooses to live on a farm several miles up the road with her husband, Arch Kelley III, and their children, Elijah, 3, and Grace, 1. Ashley is renovating a house on Wy’s land. Country life and the comfort of family are their touchstones. “I’ve sat at this table when I was going through being pregnant and unmarried,” says Wy, “and when I was No. 1 and everyone was diggin’ me. There are no judgments, no auditions here.” But not to overstate the case: “We are not the Brady Bunch,” says Wy. “We put the fun in dysfunctional.” “We don’t do Ozzie & Harriet,” Ashley notes. “It’s more like The Agony and the Ecstasy,” Mom adds.
The agony goes back to Naomi’s being, she says, a “battered wife, on welfare, raising two high-strung–no, high-spirited–daughters.” In 1983, when she and Wynonna, then 19, signed with RCA, she had no credit or savings, and spent her first paycheck on a garbage-pickup service and a set of hot rollers from Target. Then came the ecstasy: eight years at the top, 14 No. 1 hits, and 20 million albums sold. But the withering pace took its toll, and, behind the airbrushed, sisterly promo shots, there was tension–and disease. In 1990 Naomi, then 44, learned she had chronic, life-threatening hepatitis C, a diagnosis that silenced the Judds and brought her crashing to earth. “I had this M.D. tellin’ me I’m outta here in as little as three years,” she remembers. “First call I made was to a therapist. I just couldn’t tell Wy, `You’ve never been away from me in your life, I may be dying.’”
The years of three-way therapy after Naomi’s retirement marked a turning point. Old wounds stemming from fierce attachments and clashing personalities (”I’m codependent, Ashley’s independent,” Wy says) had to be healed. Indeed, since the early nineties, their lives have flourished: Wynonna is now a giant solo act, and Ashley broke through in 1996 with A Time to Kill. Naomi’s 1993 memoir, Love Can Build a Bridge, was made into a miniseries, and in her now successful quest to wrestle her illness into remission, she began to hang out with mind-body gurus. “I’m very Charles Kuralt,” she says. “My travels and research prove it pays to believe in miracles.”
Having grown closer, the Judds take enormous–and quirky–pleasure in keeping one another in the loop. Wy and Naomi handed out “Ashley 8-by-10s” at a Kiss sneak preview in nearby Franklin, with Ashley available for cell phone chats. Wy once called Naomi from her mom’s favorite fairground stage, in Puyallup, Washington, and had 10,000 fans scream “We love you, Naomi!” Then the whole joint sang “Mama He’s Crazy.” “I broke down,” says Naomi. “I miss the road deep in my bones. Wy’ll call from, say, Topeka, and I’ll know just where the bus is parked. Or I’ll hear a Judds song on the car radio and sing until it takes my breath away. We put so much heart into the music. It was bliss on earth.”
But a very tough act to follow. “My biggest fear was not finding my own place of existence,” Wy explains, “but I did. I don’t want Mom to feel I’m abandoning her, but I don’t want to lose myself anymore in her either. I don’t want to be the Judds. I wanna be Wynonna Alone-a.”
Ashley remains more independent. “I am an extension of [Mom's] dreams, but I lead my own life,” she insists. “I’m not in the business of placating my family.” And she knows Naomi is not all jitters over her success. “When Ashley called from a festival in France, I almost exploded with pride,” says Naomi. “They rolled out the red carpet–she’s got the big movie life.” And there’s also Wy to keep an eye on little sister. “Ashley gets to fly in private jets to Mexico and wear $800,000 of Harry Winston jewels. I’m scared she’ll be in a limo, away from somebody who could give her a noogie and say, `Hey, you’re the same kid I used to know.’”
The evidence hardly shows Ashley losing touch. During dinner she affectionately hops on Wy’s lap and hugs her, then stays there until Wy announces her leg has gone numb. She tells of flying recently from a Nova Scotia location to L.A. for the Kiss premiere: “There were no vegetarian meals aboard, and there was this big debacle about it. So a flight attendant offered me a frozen chickpea sandwich. Here I am, with these so-called accoutrements of success, cracking up with my frozen chickpea sandwich.” (”What kind of word is that?” Wy asks. “Nova Scotia?” Ashley asks back. “No, debacle,” says Wy. “Big word.”)
The most striking changes have occurred in Naomi. Both daughters are inspired by her display of courage and strength. Says Wy: “I’ve seen Mom come home from 10,000 people adoring her and go through agonizing hours alone with just her dogs and the gardener to talk to. I’ve watched her come close to death, and climb a mountain to survive.” The daughters find her lighter and gentler than the hardworking single mom they grew up with. “I just thought she was some kind of a nut case on a bus,” says Wy, “torturing me into understanding life. Now I see she was reacting to some heavy stuff. Music was all she had.” She clearly has much more than that now.
After dinner, Ashley pops a video into the VCR in the roomy dining area. “Mama,” Wy calls out toward the sink, “you’re not gonna like this but you better come look.” Naomi pulls up a stool and stares at a rough cut of Michael Bolton’s new video, “The Best of Love.” As in life, Ashley is playing his love interest. When the buff, newly shorn Bolton grabs her for a sexy surfside clinch, Naomi’s hands clutch her hair in shock. Her jaw drops, eyes widen–and she lets out a shriek of delight. “Mama,” Wy warns, “your daughter’s not a little girl anymore. She’s moved up to video babe. Brace yourself!” The video fades, Naomi hugs Ashley and Ashley high-fives Wy. From the looks of it, Mama is coping just fine.
Esquire 1997
Feeding Ashley Judd
A brief, bracing encounter with one very hungry actress
LIKE MOST OF YOU, THE FIRST thing I think of when I rise to greet each new day is how much I really love actresses. Ashley Judd, up in her hotel room fifteen floors above me, is nearly an hour late, and it’s almost as if she’s done me a great service. Just look at Bemelmans’ bar! The atmosphere here could tease the Cary Grant out of anyone, even a wretch like me. And when Ashley finally appears, I truly feel like a leading man, something like Matthew McConaughey must have felt opposite her in A lime to Kill. Raven curls, virginal complexion, and tall in the saddle–she is stayin’-alive gorgeous, her smile cocked with enough sexual firepower to wipe out a busload of high school wrestlers. And Lordy, what a handshake! She leads me into a sitting room for lunch.
Daughter of Naomi sister of Wynonna, girlfriend Michael Bolton, Ashley seems to know more people than the three of them combined–everyone from guests to hotel employees–and to a select few, she speaks in confidential French. When we take our seat at a very well-positioned table (think of us as the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center), I am privately happy. Ashley wants to know the source of my joy, and I oblige her: For just a moment there, I feared she might not show, leaving me to piece together the mystery of Ashley Judd without her. The idea intrigues her.
“Ooooooooh . . . It would’ve been a nice psychological profile that I could’ve taken to my new therapist,” she says, gesturing for a waiter. “I could say to her, `Look I,m not an integrated person. This is my public persona. Integrate this with the reality you have in front of you!’”
There are laugh lines, but there’s also an undercurrent of distress. She affects this mood well in film, maybe even better than any young actress around, if you consider her searing performance in Heat as Val Kilmer’s muse. She assures me that nothing is wrong, but more than anything I want to ease her mind. I have come to her, I tell her, without a list of questions, without a stilted game plan–I am her open slate.
“That gives me soooo much confidence,” she grumbles. “That gives me so much assurance about our upcoming discuter.” Something has her in a knot, so rankled it seems to have affected even her French. What is it?
“Well, I’ve been fasting all week,” Ashley confesses, “and they’ve been so helpful here at the hotel. You never know if you’re going to have a healing crisis or get really sick and you might need something. They prepared this really delicious, like, millet–they had it on twenty-four-hour standby for me.”
Perhaps she’s a little hungry, then. But that can’t be the whole story. It’s this whole interview business, isn’t it? Yes! Once she is confronted, there is an
incredible release in her.
“I think we are most vulnerable when we express ourselves. We’re not sure how it’s going to be perceived–even though one of my nicknames is Fearless. Also, I get irritated when people have demands on my time. I get really bent out of shape.”
Throughout her fast, Ashley has been ingesting purifying herbs, powdered vitamin C, and trace minerals, bringing a sparkle to her ginger-colored eyes.
She has a sweet way about her, which could almost be used as a weapon if she were so inclined. When I mention this, she laughs.
“I think when you’re intense, you can go pretty far in either direction,” she says, “so consider yourself forewarned. But really, I think I’ve cultivated tact. Waiter! What’s the soup of the day?”
We finally dig in. I’m hopeful that some food will help her. A bite from the salad, however, sends Ashley into a deeper funk. Pushing it aside, she attacks the french fries on my plate, which I am now thankful she ordered for me.
“What I don’t like about interviews,” she says, “is that I’m a very candid, verbal person. And that, to me, makes for relatively interesting conversation, but it can sometimes come back and bite you in the butt.”
“Just . . . be you” is my suggestion.
“Well, I was going to try and be Helen Gurley Brown,” she joshes. “I bring her up because I did Cosmo recently. It’s about beauty, and in it, of course, I’m talking about my inspirational books and how you have to come from the inside out in your approach to beauty. I had that conversation, by the way, in a red silk push-up bra.” The french fries seem to be working–maybe even a little too well. “This week has really been uneven in terms of the quality of the people with whom I’ve worked in photo sessions. Actually, your magazine’s was the worst. They were nice people, but I didn’t have a lot of confidence in them. The photographer kept asking his assistant to check focus because he seemed to be relatively blind. They turned out great, but it was a bit of a process.” Clearly, Fearless Ashley Judd isn’t afraid of conflict.
Then we are discussing her two recently completed films–Kiss the Girls, with Morgan Freeman, and The Locusts, by the talented J. P. Kelley, costarring
Vince Vaughn.
“Oh, yes, Locusts. It’s such old-fashioned cinema. It’s David Lean. It’s Giant It’s beautiful composition, gorgeous acting. It’s the proudest I’ve ever been of my work.” Ashley gushes on until she remembers that her hairdresser is waiting for her up in the hotel room. The plan now is for me to finish my hamburger while she showers; then we can reconvene up in the suite. As she’s leaving, she flags down another hotel employee.
“David! Wasn’t I supposed to get something from catering? Some lovely dessert party tray? Could you take it up to Mister Herr’s room?”
MICHAEL BOLTON, REGISTERED under the name Ben Herr, is hunched behind a table in the living room of their double suite, eating hash browns and listening to opera. All around him are signs of an alien female presence: frilly pillows, doilies, stuffed animals. Michael points me toward the other room.
In the bedroom, a makeup-and-hair person hovers around Ashley’s erect body, preparing her for a fashion show. I’m still ruminating on the inspirational-
reading-in-the-push-up-bra thing, this naughty girl who quotes the Scriptures, the game dame who jumps into a pond in her skivvies with Matthew McConaughey for a photo shoot but who also refers to herself as a WASP–a White Anglo-Saxon Pentecostal.
“You mean, balancing my faith and my sexuality? I thank God for sex every day,” she proclaims without moving a muscle. “I am a very active Christian, yes. I know that conjures certain ideas about political affiliations, predilections for proselytizing. But that’s not what it’s all about for me. It’s the paradigm
through which I access my spirituality. As far as my acting, I have a responsibility to play my character with the full width and breadth of my own capacity of feeling–that’s the only currency I have to invest in my characters. So, if I feel something to here in my real life, I’m looking when I’m playing something
to resonate down to that same spot of depth. And eventually, like a Redgrave, I’ll act from my toenails.
“Look at the kind of robe they give you in this hotel,” she grouses, showing off a gaping hole.
“They’re just trying to make you feel at home,” I offer. “They really want you to be happy.”
“Well, I’m not,” she jokes, then hollers out to Michael, “I’m not happy at all, am I, Chief?”
Michael mumbles something from the other room, and for a moment I feel sorry for him.
“Poor Michael. I mean, doesn’t he feel emasculated with the stuffed animals, the flowers, the makeup everywhere?”
“Oh, please,” Ashley snorts, “he’s next in here. He wears more than me. Now, could I ask you to do a housekeeping chore for me? Could you open those blinds? They’re acting like a diffuser and spoiling the light on my face.”
All right, then. She has the world by the short hairs, money in the bank as a rising film actress, and a rock-star boyfriend. Does it get any better than this?
Could she possibly accomplish anything more? She considers the question for a spell as I draw the blinds, then responds with a squint:
“Do you have trouble getting chicks?”
“Oh, you kidder. Come on, now. Answer the question.”
“Hmmm . . . What do I want to be?” Ashley, ready for her close-up now, levels her gaze. “What do I want to be? Me–just more so.”
All About Ashley
InStyle 1998
Whether kick-boxing on screen or kicking; back at her Tennessee farmhouse, embracing haute couture or homespun comfort, Ashley Judd has the simple sophistication of a natural beauty.
Growing up in a matriarchy of country-music legends can have its side benefits, especially if you’re a young girl who adores beauty products. “I was raised in a house full of suede-and-sequins showbusiness glamour,” says Ashley Judd, sipping herbal tea at Zen Palate, a vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan. “Whenever my mom discarded her newest shade of Lancome, I grabbed it.”
Of course, Ashley Judd, 30, inherited more than face cream and makeup from her mother, singer Naomi. They have the same exquisitely sculpted cheekbones. But when it comes to style, that ineffable presentation of who you are, Ashley developed hers all on her own. As she dines on steamed vegetable dumplings, she crystallizes her philosophy: “Fashion may be irrelevant, but it sure is fun.” Combining country spunk with a sprinkling of chic, Ashley’s subtle beauty has radiated in films like Ruby in Paradise and Kiss the Girls. That loveliness, along with the ability to project the underlying intelligence of each character she portrays, has made her one of the nation’s top young actresses.
The evolution of Judd’s style has been lifelong, and a bit bumpy, perhaps because her childhood was somewhat chaotic. Her parents divorced when she
was very young, and Ashley lived with her mother during the school year, and her father in the summer, attending 12 different schools in 13 years. With little extra money in the early days of this nomadic existence (her mother was just starting out as a country singer), she immersed herself in the fantasy world of dress-up. “I loved going into my mother’s closet and trying on her secondhand forties dresses,” says Judd. “While my girlfriends dressed as ladybugs at Halloween, I came as a full-grown woman in cocktail attire. By fifth grade I had bought pearlized mauve and gray Borghese eye shadow.”
In junior high in the early eighties, Ashley had the requisite Farrah Fawcett feathered hairdo, as well as a passion for anything preppy. “I worshiped at the
altar of Izod. It was ‘Give me the alligator or watch me suffer,’” says Ashley, who painted her bedroom pink and green in the 10th grade. “I think I fixated on the preppy clothes of the establishment because it was an easy way for me to fixate symbolically on what we didn’t have at home.” She also went through a Laura Ingalls Wilder prairie-girl period, a Laura Ashley phase, and a brief Doc Martens moment. But when she entered the University of Kentucky she cut her hair in a bob and stopped wearing makeup altogether. “All of a sudden I didn’t go into a new situation and like something just because it was part of the paradigm,” says Judd, who graduated with honors in French. “I liked something because I thought it looked great on me.”
Has her style changed now that she’s a star? Not really; she just gets to indulge it more. “What’s great is that as an actress I have this professional right to legitimize the frivolity of beauty,” she says. For a night out, “the first thing I do is brush my eyebrows, because that is the place where the presentation starts,” says Judd. “If I’m a little tired and feel like my face is whacked, I add some slate to this one eyebrow I have that gets kind of cockeyed, and then I use my Shiseido eyelash curler.” Judd dabs on some Kevyn Aucoin mascara, sent to her from Japan, puts on Chap Stick instead of lipstick and, if she wants to have a little fun, applies a touch of Stila’s plum-brown All Over Shimmer on her eyelids, or the rose-hued shimmer on her cheeks. She finishes with a touch of essential oil, either jasmine or vanilla. “My main goal is to cover up anything that needs to be covered up, and otherwise just let it be about skin and shimmer,” she says. And for that unexpected last-minute special occasion, she always keeps evening bags on hand, each filled with a handkerchief, a $20 bill and a package of Emergen-C powder for quick energy.
Though Ashley refers to the world of premieres and award shows as her “imaginary life,” she dresses for it with real zeal, favoring designers like Badgley
Mischka, Armani and Valentino. She also loves the colorful, contemporary clothing of London’s fashionable boutique Voyage. “There’s just something so
glamorous about a dress when you cross your legs,” says Judd, who attended the couture shows in Paris in January. She prefers Manolo Blahnik shoes, and praises the underrated psychological benefits of wearing high heels. “If you don’t feel so great about your legs or if you are carrying a little extra weight, you can feel very perked up by wearing a good pair of heels,” says Judd. “They do a wonderful job of giving stature to your silhouette.
In her off-hours she cuts a different figure, that of the down home Ashley, the Southern girl who, after losing her possessions in a 1993 Malibu house fire,
decided that she wanted to return to Tennessee to live near her family (see “Judd Country,” December 1997). So Ashley built herself a farmhouse on the family’s 1,000- acre homestead. When she’s home in Peaceful Valley, she dresses casually, wearing her favorite pair of button-fly green Levi’s, J Crew T-shirts and green Chuck Taylor tennis shoes. “Dressing casually never makes me feel sloppy,” she says.
The one thing Judd is fanatical about is exercise. She loves to play softball, “horse around” with her sister Wynonna’s kids, Elijah, 3, and Grace, I, or hike
to a crest overlooking her beloved “hollers.” When she wants a proper workout she runs, swims or puts in an hour on the Stairmaster. “You feel pretty sassy when you’ve got a great bum,” says Judd, deciding to forgo Zen Palate’s desserts and order chamomile tea instead. Her ultimate relaxation is yoga, which she values as much for its spiritual qualities as for its physical benefits. In February she spent a week on a retreat at The Ashram in Calabasas, California. She’s careful to get plenty of rest (nine hours, if possible) and she drinks as much water (room temperature) as she can. “The most important lesson I’ve learned in life is that I have to take good care of myself,” she says.
That includes pampering. Ashley gets bimonthly manicures and pedicures, and frequently unwinds in the steam shower she built in her farmhouse. Before going to bed at night she takes a quick shower and then jumps in the tub. “I light candles in the bathroom, put on my favorite CD, In Search of Angels, which includes verses by poets like Milton, and just soak for hours.”
Even when she’s on location, Judd focuses on healthy self preservation. She begins her day with herbal tea and lemon, eats salads at lunch, and augments her vegetarian dinner with wheat grass. Before eating she blesses her food, often with a passage from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Integral to Judd’s sense of well-being is making sure that she brings mementos with her wherever she goes. When she checks into a hotel, she always brings her own homey touches: “Mr. Rabbit” and “Mr. Bear,” her favorite stuffed toys, on loan from her nephew, and an antique quilt for her bed. Although comfortable in the Hollywood limelight, she says, “I’m happiest when I’m surrounded by my Southern heritage.”
Ashley Alight
1998
Because she illuminates much more than movies with her feisty aplomb and earthy aura, Ashley Judd is a spirit for now.
The word “star” doesn’t hang well on Ashley Judd. A star is remote, celestial, and illusory – it may have burned out by the time we get to see it. The light
it gives isn’t to be trusted. Judd, by comparison, is undisguisedly elemental, someone so grounded in the reality she’s constructed for herself that when
we watch her we don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that she’s as unreachable as most stars. As Imperiously and nonchalantly beautiful as
Elizabeth Taylor, she’s as much a pistol as Liz: lusty, opinionated, and proudly hormonal. How smart of director Joel Schumacher to show Judd glistening with sweat in A Time to Kill (1996). She is altogether a different kind of star – an “earth,” if you will – with her own kind of light.
The non-singing, thirty-year-old daughter of Naomi Judd and sister of Wynonna, Ashley has been no stranger to the pages of this magazine since we first saw her In Ruby in Paradise (1993). Her performance in that film remains her greatest, although she was outstanding in Heat (1995) and Smoke (1995); there’s still the sense that Hollywood has yet to create for her the big dramatic roles she warrants. Simon Birch, the movie she appears in this month, is modest and her part in it comparatively brief. Had it have been a negligible role, we would have still paid her as much attention as we do here because, frankly, any excuse will do – she’s that vital a presence.
Since we wanted something intimate, we went to one of Judd’s closest friends and colleagues, herself a one-of-kind – Salma Hayek. They hooked up on a fiercely hot Saturday evening recently when Judd was in Vancouver and Hayek in New York City. The phone line positively hummed.
SALMA HAYEK: I can’t believe I’m interviewing you, Ashley. I hope I don’t bore you to death.
ASHLEY JUDD: [laughs] Never. It’s good to hear your voice. Remember when you said to me the only thing that frightens you is a weak woman? Well, I said that to a couple of guys recently, and they were like, “Ah!” So now I refer to it as “Salma’s soliloquy.”
SH: That’s what happens. They go, “Oh!”
AJ: Yes, it’s emotional blackmail. But your wisdom is unbelievable.
SH: [laughs] But now I’m going to take this seriously and become a journalist. The first question is: What are some of the games that you remember playing with your father or mother?
AJ: One thing I did with my dad, which was very dramatic, was play outdoor hide-and-seek. We would play with grown-ups, and they took it so seriously.
When I was in kindergarten Daddy took me out of school for a couple of weeks to go up Highway I with him to the Pacific Northwest. He was turning thirty, and he wanted to celebrate with a bunch of his wild, quasi-hippie friends, some of whom lived on government property in a domed tent. We played out there in the forests, and I was just thrilled and scared to death; I felt like I was the only person on the planet.
SH: Was that a good feeling or a bad feeling?
AJ: I don’t really know. I mean, there’s one moment in particular I can remember where I didn’t know where anybody was, and I was just standing in the forest alone.
SH: That’s a good thing for a child to experience. if you think about it, in a way we’re all standing in the world alone. I think you’re incredibly independent, and you . . . I was going to say you play with yourself, but in English that’s not a good thing to say. [laughs]
AJ: [laughs] But it’s true, Salma. Go right ahead and say it.
SH: You like your own company, and that’s a wonderful quality. Did your mother ever teach you songs when you were a little girl?
AJ: I was around music so I absorbed a lot, but she didn’t really teach me. When I was in the second grade, we lived on a hilltop in a very rural, beautiful, old-feeling part of Kentucky and we learned: [sings] “Kentucky! You are the dearest land inside of heaven to me / Kentucky! Your laurel and red bark
trees / When I die, I long to rest upon some peaceful mountain so high / For that is where God will look for me.”
SH: That reminds me: One of the things I find fascinating about you is how you take “home” wherever you go. I remember walking into a hotel room and feeling like I was in a Kentucky house; you’d turned the most cold – elegant, but still cold generic hotel room into a homey, warm place. Is it a way of making sure that you keep your roots and stay true to yourself and to who you are? Do you think that home and stability and the South are all part of your strength?
AJ: Well, I will say a few well-placed quilts and some seashell lights will do wonders for a hotel room. But actually, you’re catching me at a very interesting tune, Salma, My definition of home is changing, and my internal compass is being reoriented, and . . . I mean, here I am, crying already.
SH: Oh, I’m sorry.
AJ: No, it’s a good thing. But I don’t know how much more I can address the actual question because I’m still in the process of changing, and you know how you can get such a good perspective on what you’ve just left behind when you see it more clearly over your shoulder.
SH: Did you pray as a little girl?
AJ: Yeah, I prayed. There was one thing my mom said to me that to this day I consider to be the foundation of my faith. I was really young and a little
bewildered about some things. She came into my bedroom to say goodnight and I told her I was at a loss, and she said, “Well, what’s the Golden Rule? I’ll give you some time to think about it, and you’ll remember.” And sure enough I did remember: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” In that moment, she taught me that no matter where I am, I know how to live this life: It was probably the greatest gift she ever gave me.
SH: And what are some of the rituals that you have now as a woman?
AJ: Well, in the mornings when I wake up, I don’t rash into things. I write, and that comes and goes. I’m in a heavy writing phase at the moment. If something big has happened in my life, or something memorable, I say, “OK, time to go back to pen and paper again; this needs to be registered somewhere.” And, I think that one of the rituals I have in my mind is, I seek to understand. Last night, for example, I didn’t sleep. I was trying to understand something, and I had a mental sunrise at about four o’clock. Again, it’s kind of a process, but it classifies as a ritual – if something has happened I am determined to figure out what it is and why, and I’ll give myself the space to accomplish that.
SH: As much as you reflect on life and you love philosophy, you are incredibly giving. Does this influence your way of working with directors?
AJ: Oh, absolutely. When I accept a role, I feel that as an artist I have to submit completely to the tutelage of my director. And while I expect to be heard and encouraged and honored, at the end of the day, man, it’s the way the director wants it. And that gives me a great adrenaline rush, because I like the
challenge of doing it the way they want it done. If they ask me to do it, I can get to a place where I can deliver completely what they’re looking for – with my own oomph.
SH: Are you a pleaser?
AJ: Oh, it’s pitiful. When I love somebody . . .
SH: Before we get to love, I want to ask you about loyalty, because I think you’re a very loyal person.
AJ: I’m learning how to be more loyal, though, Salma.
SH: But I’ll tell you, loyalty is a quality that I think you either have or you don’t. I will never forget the time I spilled that glass of wine on my white shirt in the most popular restaurant in town, and you had a white shirt, and you took a napkin and copied the same stain on your shirt in solidarity. Loyalty is in your nature.
AJ: And you know what, sweetie? I loved doing that. And it was great, because it was over our hearts! We made the guy we were with cry!
SH: [laughs] And now about love. Do you find it easy to fall in love?
AJ: Hmm. I’m assessing that right now. I think it’s easy for me to connect to some people, and I don’t know if that’s the same thing as falling in love
whereas before, I might have said it was. Right now, I’m starting to believe I’m a little bit different from other people. Because otherwise, why haven’t I had
fourteen amazing boyfriends in sustained relationships?
SH: Because there aren’t fourteen amazing men out there willing to have sustained relationships. Feel lucky if you find one – men by nature are not
interested in sustained relationships.
AJ: But I think that if somebody gets who I am, something happens. And it may not necessarily be the true love that I thought it was. It is still, however, romantic love and it’s a valid connection. It’s just in a context.
SH: I sense maturity here.
AJ: Salma! I’m growing up!
SH: You are growing up, Ashley, I can see that. Because before, you thought you’d found true love.
AJ: I know.
SH: There was that romance and passion and the greatness of the moment.
AJ: You were there, too. You saw it. And you know what? You were awesome about it, because you never belittled it.
SH: No, because it’s a great feeling to believe you’re in love, and I’ve been there. But I hope you find someone.
AJ: Oh, yeah. But you know how I feel about life: I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t going to. I don’t think that I was sent down here to get robbed.
SH: I think probably all your romances happen so you can understand the right person when he comes into your life.
AJ: Yep. And when that happens, it’s a miracle.
SH: Ashley, I must say, you are one of the hardest-working actresses in the business; you do so many movies and take so many classes. For me you’ve been an inspiration on this matter. I’ve never seen anyone work so hard on herself spiritually, physically, intellectually, and emotionally. You have
amazing discipline. You’re overwhelmed with a thousand things, but you always manage to give yourself the time to do yoga, to read a book, to put a
mask on.
AJ: To dig around that temple. Yes, it’s something I have to do.
SH: Tell me, how come you have this discipline? Do you write things down all the time? Do you make lists?
AJ: Well, a bikini wax is definitely on that list. [laughs] But the rest of it . . . I guess it just has to do with knowing what I require to go into that easier, softer
part of myself. It also comes from having spent so much time alone; though I can go a little too far in that direction. When I was working on Eye of the Beholder, I played a character who is so aloof that my whole lifestyle became very aloof. If someone knocked on my door, there was a part of me that went into a rage, because I wanted to be isolated and alone. I mutated into something that was a little to my detriment – not to mention unpleasant for other people, because I was a raging meanie! It’s already so different here on the set of Double Jeopardy, where people come in and out of my trailer, and I’m hugging the set costumers and getting very excited at the prospect of having some new girlfriends.
SH: Did you enjoy working on Eye of the Beholder?
AJ: That movie was a very different kind of movie for me. There’s a lyric in a song my sister sings that goes, “When you hit rock bottom / You’ve got two ways to go / Straight up, and sideways.” I know when I’m working on a performance, I’ll go sideways for a while before I go straight up. If I’m trying something in a take and it’s not working for me, t will absolutely exhaust the idea in myself before a change will occur to me. And I almost need to do that. It’s the way my neurons work. To answer your question, I was really unhappy in Montreal because the weather was so glum; it might as well have been the middle of December, whereas back home there were daffodils and jonquils and forsythia bushes. I missed the dogwood trees, I never saw a blooming Bradford pear. And that was upsetting.
SH: So the weather affects your mood?
AJ: It really did in Montreal.
SH: What about the moon?
AJ: Yeah, I can get a little crazy, a little sentimental, a little ripe.
SH: Are you affected by the smells of places?
AJ: Oh, love, you don’t even know. I rented a house that has a huge, beautiful, warm, umbery-colored master bedroom, but every night I’d go up into the little hovel of an attic to sleep, because it reminded me of my grandparents and I could smell the pine trees through the windows.
SH: Now, Kiss the Girls opened huge – a lot bigger than anybody expected. You were a star before that, but I don’t know if the industry really understood your star power until then. Do you get a feeling that the audience knew something the studios didn’t?
AJ: Hmm. You know, before Kiss the Girls opened I was a little nervous. I was in a very rural and remote part of Canada, shooting Simon Birch -
SH: I was there with you. I came to visit, remember?
AJ: Yes. I got a little bit anxious, because I thought that maybe my life was going to change a lot. I called both my morn and my sister. As it turned out, it
all was free, but the sweet thing was that my sister, having heard my tone, called me back with her son, Elijah, who’s two and a half, and he left me a message. It was very cute, because he said his sister’s name before he said mine. It was like he was consoling all the women in his life. He said, “Be OK, Gracie; he OK, Ashley. I love you. I miss you. I pray for you.” And I still have it on my voice mail.
SH: That changed everything.
AJ: OK, what else? Sock it to me.
SH: Do you want to talk about your passion for basketball?
AJ: Oh, my Cats! My Kentucky Wildcats! I love them.
SH: You fly around the country just to watch them play?
AJ: Yes. And it blew my mind when I started to get wind of the fact that they actually liked me being around. That was humbling, because Kentucky
basketball is a big deal, and I am not the biggest fan – I am just the most notorious one. [laughs]
SH: Oh, my God. Do you like guys who are into sports?
AJ: Umm . . .
SH: Or Just guys who are into music . . .
AJ: Ahem!
SH: OK. Do you want to have kids?
AJ: Salma . . .
SH: I know it started hitting me this year. I think you’d be fantastic mother.
AJ: I love carrying my niece around like a little sack of potatoes. She’s awesome. She hooks her arms through mine when I’ve got her on my hip, and I
think, “Right on.” I think that, as with marriage, you just know when it’s time to have kids.
SH: Because you grew up with two strong women and because you are a girls’ girl, would you like to have a girl?
AJ: I have to have a girl. I think it would be a wonderful thing to have a boy, too, because he would simply come through me and would be slightly less me. Because, obviously, when I see a little girl, I’m seeing myself, even though it may not be conscious. And the encouragement I give her is a way of loving myself.
Heartbreakers
08/1996
Ashley Judd. Matthew McConaughey. Are you ready to have your heart touched?
The great movie stars who emerged in the 1950s were the last of a breed that had originated a generation before with the beginning of the talkies. It’s not
indulging in nostalgia or the fallacy of “how things used to be” to acknowledge that no galaxy of brilliant young actors from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s has
come along to rival the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Paul
Newman.
Here, however, are an actor and an actress who perceptibly radiate the flavor of that ’50s magic. Ashley Judd and Matthew McConaughey, who play a married couple in the recently released courtroom drama A Time to Kill, directed by Joel Schumacher, are, in their appeal and even occasionally in the sensibility of their performances, throwbacks to the era of films like Giant (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Hurl (1963).
We’ve thrilled about Judd ever since she appeared in Ruby in Paradise in 1993, and she’s no stranger to the pages of this magazine.
Matthew McConaughey is a newly launched dream boat with a seductive courtliness and more than a touch of Paul Newman’s insouciance. Yet,
watching him in A Time to Kill, his vehicle to stardom, it’s difficult not to think of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Like Peck, McConaughey plays a Southern lawyer who has pledged to defend a black man in an atmosphere of white bigotry, with a young family that is suddenly vulnerable. But the similarities to Peck go beyond the plots of these films. There’s a gravity and sincerity in McConaughey that we’ve learned to do without in this era of boy stars – it comes across most emphatically in his character’s beautifully weighed summation, a clarion call against inhumanity. An actor lacking these qualities or looking for a chance to preen might have undercut A Time to Kill’s antiracist urgency, but McConaughey carries the day, the movie, and the message. He seems to have arrived fully grown, a man. It’s a feat that should carry him far.
Two young actors. Separate or together – what promise, what elegance, what earthiness. They are as reliable in their naturalness as the stars that come
out every night – you can see that in these Bruce Weber photographs, and in the interviews that follow. No phony cool here, and no gloss, just a piercing
immediacy.
INGRID SISCHY: I want to start the Interview with what I noticed about you during the photo shoot that we did for todays’s story.
ASHLEY JUDD: I’m an exhibitionist. [laughs]
IS: No, actually, the opposite.
AJ: I will remember that day for the rest of my life. I wish I’d had a third eye, so I could have seen what was going on all of the time from the outside.
IS: Since I was on the other side of the camera, I got to watch you all day. And with your statement that you wish you’d had a third eye, you’ve just hit the
point I want to make: I am really struck by how aware you seem to be of other people, how curious, and how genuinely interested you are in them and in all kinds of things.
AJ: Thank you. That is a lovely compliment and it is deeply felt. And the first thing I do is bounce it back to my mother [Naomi Judd, the country singer],
because she always encouraged my sister [singer Wynonna] and me to have a genuine interest in other people. My mother has said that she is proud of me, not because I can act, but because I know how to act, as in how to behave. She will appreciate your statement.
IS: Was there a father around when you were growing up?
AJ: Sporadically. I was at an advantage that came from a seeming disadvantage. While I was rather bounced around on the occasions when mother couldn’t really keep me with her, sometimes I ended up living with Daddy. It served me very well because I had a touchstone and a base with him that is the foundation for my relationship with him as a grown-up. And I’ve also had granddaddies for whom I have the most inordinate affection. We spent our summers with our grandparents in Kentucky. They were such a blessing. Who knows what I would be if I did not have my grandparents. Our mother loves us beyond love, and she worked her butt off at raising us well. But the contribution of both sets of grandparents is rock solid. My sister and I can sit around and talk for months about every nuance of Mamaw and Papaw [Ciminella]’s house, every nuance of Nana and Papaw Judd’s house. People have poked fun at me before for the way I talk with all my heart about my grandparents. They have no idea what they’re getting into when they blow off about that.
IS: Tell me about the effect of being bounced around.
AJ: Someone could lament, “Oh my gosh. This girl went to twelve schools in thirteen years,” but I don’t. Somebody once asked me what I wanted to be
when I grew up, and I said, “Me, but more so.” And by that, I meant that I wanted to continue to have the variety in my adult life that I was privileged to have as a child. I happened to have been born in Los Angeles and I have accrued the most time in Kentucky. My family has made its home in Tennessee since 1979, and we also did a couple of years in Marin County [California]. There’s a marvelous synchronicity in my life despite having moved around a lot. In the end, I graduated from the same high school in eastern Kentucky to which my mother and aunt and uncle went. I really believe that I’m designed to be an actor with the immutable facts of this lifestyle – it seems as though what could potentially have been a hardship has actually been sugarcoated for me because of all my experiences.
IS: Can you trace back to when you knew you wanted to act?
AJ: I always had an imaginary life. I had fairies and built houses for them. And when I was in third or fourth grade, going to school in Marin, I remember
walking across a field after school to I think it was a yoga class, if you can believe that, and -
IS: A yoga class in third or fourth grade?
AJ: That’s Marin for you. Anyway, I remember wanting to look at the world and experience things like the girl in the book that I was reading at the time did. I don’t remember the title of it, I just remember that she was in a rather extraordinary circumstance, and I wanted to receive the world the way she
would have. I’d look at a bush and wonder, How would she feel when she looked at that bush?
IS: So you had begun your life as an actress?
AJ: It wasn’t like a stage play or fluttering around the room saying, “Look at me, I’m going to perform for you.” For the most part it wasn’t about “presentation.”
IS: It’s Interesting that you say that because when I watch you act, I’m impressed that it’s not “showy.” There’s always a sense of some strong internal
understanding of the characters that you’re playing. But keep going with how you got to today. Were you trouble in school?
AJ: I would say for one or two years of high school I was on the verge of getting into some trouble, or going in the wrong direction. It happens when you get hormonal and crazy. I didn’t, at times, have a lot of supervision, and it’s good that I ended up being so protected despite some of my actions.
IS: College?
AJ: I went to the University of Kentucky – I didn’t get in anyplace else. It was the best thing for me. I would’ve gotten lost elsewhere. I wasn’t solid enough. At UK I learned a lot about my own strength and self-reliance. Instead of simply reacting to curve balls, I was throwing some really nice pitches.
IS: Were you talking out loud about wanting to be an actor?
AJ: It was never something that you stated out loud. Wanting to be an actor was embarrassing, unlike being a nurse or a fireman or something. There’s no sanctioned definition of acting. What comprises it is mysterious. What it takes is elusive to define. I knew I had all this stuff inside me, all these urges and impulses, and this love for it. On the outside, being an actor appears to be something really different from what I felt it was internally, and up until actually busted the big move to California, I was waxy that acting consisted of having your picture taken in front of a good restaurant in Los Angeles.
IS: [laughs] It does seem to be about that a lot of times, though, doesn’t it?
AJ: It sure the heck does – which may be why a lot of people turn to other outlets like writing and directing, because they’re another exercise of expression.
IS: Do you think your mother expected you to become an actress?
AJ: We were always told that we were special and different, and kids who are told they’re special and different can become physicists or botanists or anything. Being told one is special tends to breed a sense of potential for extraordinary and rare achievements. We’re all pretty acquainted with the odds against actually making it in show business, but the constant benediction made it seem like it was the naturally ordained path.
IS: Were they disappointed that you didn’t become a singer?
AJ: Music became a part of our lives when I was so young, that if I’d been interested in it, I probably would’ve exhibited that inclination at four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, ten years old. I never did. And I don’t think anyone, especially after having heard my voice, would be remotely disappointed that I didn’t
become a singer. [both laugh]
IS: I remember the excitement that our executive editor, Graham Fuller, expressed when he came from the Sundance Film Festival in January 1993.
He’d seen you in Ruby in Paradise and said we had to rush to tell everyone about you. In fact, I believe we were the first ones to do a big piece on you,
weren’t we?
AJ: Yes ma’am.
IS: Was it a hard journey to get such a part – one that really allowed you to show at least something of what you’ve got inside you?
AJ: It happened exactly the way it should have happened. I had just enough acting-class experience to know how to approach material in an open, heartfelt, natural, real, moment-to-moment way. And I had just enough auditioning experience and a few little jobs under my belt to make me professionally aware. I felt gripped inside by the script of Ruby in Paradise from the opening paragraph. I thought, This is it. This is for me. This is everything I have been waiting for since the third grade. Here is the story, here is the girl. It could not have been a more perfect piece of material for me to make my debut in.
IS: In A Time to Kill, for which we’re doing our cover story on you and Matthew, he has a huge part and yours is modest. But it’s a pivotal role, nonetheless. You’re the Southern wife. Watching what you did with your moments onscreen, again I was struck by your depth. You don’t go for the cheap tricks. In the film, you maintain the truth of human beings, which is exactly that – we’re human. There is a moment when your character takes off with kid – because of what’s going on due to her husband’s decision to defend a black man – which particularly Impressed me. I found myself sitting there wondering if she was on the right side, or selfish, or resentful, or some combination. And, of course, all that’s part of the story of race, of politics, of personal protection, of fear, of ignorance, et cetera. But the fact that you carried it all so convincingly, without needing to signal “the answer” to the audience, was noticeable. Of course, it has to do with the intelligence of the director, Joel Schumacher, as well. But if you couldn’t pull it off, we wouldn’t be seeing it. When I talked to Joel after seeing the movie, I congratulated him on the way he embodied all the complexity that the story involved. Sure there are people who are obviously so bad – they’re evil, no question. But then there are also characters who have many dimensions, and who have to learn about all sorts of things, including the full meaning of consequence and the full meaning of people being equal.
With black churches being burned in the South yet again, it’s clear that the hate that the film depicts is not a tragedy of the past, by any means. Nor, of course, is racism exclusive to the South. But I’m interested in your experiences growing up when and where you did.
AJ: I have some suspicions about a distant relation or two in my family who will remain unnamed. And during a board-of-trustees meeting at my college, a prominent and dearly beloved Kentuckian said the word “nigger.” Hello, hello – that is not acceptable. At the meeting there happened to be a reporter from the university’s newspaper, and he printed it. I was like, “This is definitely not O.K.” I ended up organizing a campus-wide walkout. I went to a couple of meetings that the African-American students held to talk about what had happened, and we teamed up and there was a walkout of classes in protest of the administration not requiring [this board member's] resignation. I’m very glad I did it. I was a sorority girl and I was friends with the man’s granddaughter. Some of my sorority sisters were looking at me like I had aliens living with me in my room. They just couldn’t believe what I was doing. But what had occurred was just not acceptable to me.
IS : Is the subject of the film part of what attracted you to it?
AJ: I was attracted to the intensity of the drama. And I was also desirous of working with Joel. It wasn’t a huge part, but I really wanted to start the
relationship, and I want to work with him again. It was a really fantastic moviemaking experience. There was a lot of decency and kindness and
consideration going around. On top of it, there was the most fabulous homemade food. Sisters from a local church baked for the movie. Every morning there were cinnamon rolls and these little cream-cheese rolls, and in the afternoon there was everything from homemade black-walnut fudge with marshmallows to the most delicious vanilla cupcakes, homemade blueberry pies with a crust on top spelling out the initials T.T.K.
A Ruby in the Rough
Newsweek 1993
ASHLEY JUDD DOES A LITTLE DANCE. The actress is in New York promoting Victor Nunez’s “Ruby in Paradise,” in which she plays Ruby Lee Gissing, a wandering soul trying desperately to clear her head and heart. New York. it turns out, is just the latest stop on a 13-city press tour. “My ears are ringing,” says Judd. “That’s how little sleep I’ve had.” She stares down at a newspaper ad for “Ruby,” which is full of raves about her performance. She’s determined to remain calm, but suddenly she smiles and shimmies in the middle of a restaurant. It’s a quick swivel of the hips, a victory dance.
At 25, Ashley already has the advantage of name recognition. Her mother and older sister, Naomi and Wynonna, spent the ’80s as a Grammy-winning
country act called the Judds. But Ashley grew up before the boon, during lean years lived partly in Kentucky. “I went to 12 schools in 13 years because we moved around,” she says. “I made it my strong point. I could assess a classroom in five minutes and tell you who my boyfriends were going to be and in what succession. The thing is, you sink or swim, and I tried to do the butterfly.”
Judd graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1990, and, in person, she’s equal parts Phi Beta Kappa and Kappa Kappa Gamma: a disarming mix of booksmarts and Southern charm. “I run a really tight house,” she says of her Malibu bungalow. “I’m proud of everything from my flower bed to the fact that my spices are in alphabetical order.” Judd had a tiny part in the Christian Slater vehicle “Kuffs” and a role on the NBC drama “Sisters,” but there’s been nothing to prepare us for “Ruby,” which shared grand prize at the last Sundance Film Festival.
Not much happens in this lovely, meditative movie, but one thing that does happen is Ashley Judd. She’s honest, unaffected and hypnotically calm. Early
on in the movie, Ruby pulls into Panama City, Fla., in a banged-up car with a Tennessee plate. “I got out of Manning without getting pregnant or beat up,”
she says. “That’s saying something.” Ruby works in a souvenir shop, test-drives two lovers, chooses solitude instead. Judd has enough presence to carry the minimalist plot. In those wistful moments when Ruby simply stares out her window, one is reminded that movie-making begins with an agile face and a camera.
A couple of studios are now vying for the actress’s affections–she says she can hear “the sound of the troops gathering outside MY door.” Judd is looking into two books by the Southern fiction writer Ellen Gilchrist, and she recently finished a harrowing courtroom scene for Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers,” in which she plays the only survivor of a serial-killing spree. “I’d sob my bead off during the takes, and between takes I’d cry even harder,” she says. “It was the most fun I had all summer, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. And that is the mysterious perversity of acting.” Some sink. Some swim. Some do the butterfly.
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