Judith Davis (born 23 April 1955) is an Australian actress. Regarded as one of the finest actresses of her generation, she is known for her work across both screen and stage, often in roles of brittle, neurotic women in independent media. Her accolades include a record nine AACTA Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards and a Laurence Olivier Award. Her frequent collaborator, director Woody Allen, has described her as "one of the most exciting actresses in the world".
After graduating from the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Davis began her career on the stage and had her film debut in 1977. She rose to international attention with her leading role in the period drama film My Brilliant Career (1979), winning two BAFTA Awards. This led to starring roles in Hollywood projects, receiving her first Emmy nomination for the docudrama A Woman Called Golda (1982). She received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress for starring in the historical film A Passage to India (1984) and Best Supporting Actress for Allen's comedy-drama Husbands and Wives (1992).
Davis won three Primetime Emmy Awards for starring in the television film Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995), and the miniseries Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001) and The Starter Wife (2007). Her subsequent films include Children of the Revolution (1996), Celebrity (1998), Marie Antoinette (2006), The Eye of the Storm (2011), To Rome with Love (2012), The Dressmaker (2015), and Nitram (2021).
Davis was born in Perth, Western Australia, in the suburb of Floreat and had a strict Catholic upbringing. She was educated at Loreto Convent and the Western Australian Institute of Technology and graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Sydney, Australia in 1977.
After making her feature film debut in the buddy comedy High Rolling (1977), Davis first came to prominence for her role as Sybylla Melvyn in the coming-of-age saga My Brilliant Career (1979), opposite Sam Neill, for which she won BAFTA Awards for Best Actress and Best Newcomer. Davis was particularly praised for her performance; Janet Maslin of The New York Times admired her for bringing "an unconventional vigor to every scene she's in, even in a film that's as consistently animated as this one", while Luke Buckmaster, writing for The Guardian in 2014, commented that Davis gave "a rousing performance as bull-headed protagonist Sybylla Melvyn. The term 'once in a lifetime' tends to be slapped around like a bumper sticker, but this meaty role lives up to the accolade."
Her success continued with lead roles in the Australian New Wave films Winter of Our Dreams (1981), as a waif-like heroin addict; the drama Heatwave (1982), as a radical Sydney tenant organizer; and the thriller Hoodwink (1981), as a sexually repressed clergyman's wife. Of her performance in Winter of Our Dreams, Roger Ebert wrote that: "Davis brought a kind of wiry, feisty intelligence to My Brilliant Career, playing an Australian farm woman who rather felt she would do things her own way. She's wonderful again this time, in a completely different role as an insecure, distrustful, skinny street waif. [She] performs her movement magnificently.
Her international film career began when she played the younger version of Ingrid Bergman's Golda Meir in the television docudrama A Woman Called Golda (1981), for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Miniseries or a Movie nomination. She then played a terrorist based on Vanessa Redgrave in the British film Who Dares Wins (1982).
She was cast as Adela Quested in David Lean's final film A Passage to India (1984), an adaptation of E. M. Forster's novel, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Variety praised Davis for having "the rare gift of being able to look very plain (as the role calls for) at one moment and uncommonly beautiful at another. Likewise, The Washington Post wrote, "With makeup the color of smudged ivory, her pallor enhanced by the off-white linens she wears, Davis is daringly unattractive for a leading lady; that plainness is emphasized in the book. Davis' neuroticism, her way of twitching and thrusting her jaw and looking up hungrily beneath the brim of her straw hat, brings to life the ravenous sexuality beneath Miss Quested's decorous exterior."
She returned to Australian cinema for her next two films, Kangaroo (1986), as a German-born writer's wife, and High Tide (also 1987), as a foot-loose mother attempting to reunite with her teenage daughter who is being raised by the paternal grandmother. Her performance in the latter won her glowing praise. Pauline Kael called Davis "a genius at moods" and wrote, "As one of three backup singers for a touring Elvis imitator, Judy Davis is contemptuous of the cruddy act, contemptuous of herself. The film's emotional suggestiveness makes it almost a primal woman's picture: Judy Davis has been compared with Jeanne Moreau, and that's apt, but she's Moreau without the cultural swank, the high-fashion gloss. She speaks to us more directly." She won additional Australian Film Institute Awards for both roles, and a National Society of Film Critics award for High Tide's brief American theatrical run.
Her final film of the decade, the Australian thriller Georgia (1988), saw her play dual roles, a mother, Georgia, and her daughter Nina. For her performance, Davis earned another Australian Film Institute nomination for Best Actress.
Davis had a cameo in Woody Allen's Alice (1990), her first appearance in an Allen-directed film. The following year, she was featured in Joel Coen's Barton Fink, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, an adaptation of the hallucinogenic novel of the same name.
She returned to E. M. Forster territory in Where Angels Fear to Tread and won an Independent Spirit Award for her work as mannish woman author George Sand in Impromptu, a romantic period drama with Hugh Grant as her consumptive lover, Frédéric Chopin. Davis was especially lauded for her performance as Sand, and Hal Hinson of The Washington Post wrote, "Judy Davis makes her entrances as if she were straddling a cyclone. She doesn't just walk in, she blows in on a torrent of extravagant self-assurance and wild temperament. Sand, who's the locus of this blissfully high-spirited romp about the circle of writers and musicians in 1830s Paris, never does anything halfway; her life is an experiment in full-throttle, passionate immersion, and that's why Davis is the ideal actress for the part. She's the most atmospheric of actors, perhaps the only one around capable of streaking the screen with lightning."
She earned an Emmy nomination and her first Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film for her portrayal of a real-life Second World War heroine Mary Lindell in the CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation One Against the Wind. Adrian Turner of Radio Times noted of her, "Judy Davis, one of the greatest and least "starry" actresses around, plays Lindell and shows the same sensitivity that she brought to her role in A Passage to India."
Cast in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives (1992), Davis performed the major role of Sally Simmons, one half of a divorcing couple. Husbands and Wives was well received, and Davis's performance drew high praise. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "Sally must be one of the most endearingly impossible characters Mr. Allen has ever written, and Ms. Davis nearly purloins the film" and Todd McCarthy of Variety thought Davis had revealed "a whole new side to her personality that has never surfaced onscreen before." For this performance, she earned both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress.
In 1993, Davis filmed Dark Blood with River Phoenix; it would be his last acting role before his death by drug overdose that year. Delayed by Phoenix's death (he had reportedly completed shooting 80% of his scenes), the movie was finally released in 2012.