Tike Sir Francis Drake with his bowls, Ashley Judd is reluctant to let a mere interview interrupt the game she’s playing with a friend. Judd is trying to guess the name of a famous dead female whose surname begins with “M”. “Margaret Mead?” she suggests. Her friend looks blank. “Author of A Coming Of Age In Samoa?”
The friend is none the wiser, but the message has reached the journalist lurking in the doorway of the Dorchester suite in London that Judd is no vacuous starlet: she knows her dead, discredited anthropologists. There’s something else that has to happen before we can talk: someone has to be dispatched for vitamin C tablets. London’s virulence has alarmed Ashley Judd, and she has no intention of catching our flu.
Judd is in a position to have things her way. The thriller she’s in London to promote – Double Jeopardy – has lifted her on to the A-list. It’s not a great film, and far from Judd’s best performance, but it did surprisingly well in the States. Top billing actually goes to Tommy Lee Jones, but he doesn’t turn up until 35 minutes in, whereas the whole film is about Judd’s character.
She plays a wealthy wife and mother who wakes up to find that she has apparently murdered her (missing) husband. Jones is the parole officer who eventually – stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before – comes to understand that she was framed. By mainstream Hollywood standards it’s a terrific part for a young actress. She gets to wear prison overalls or tracksuit bottoms for most of the film, crash cars, shoot guns and still be obsessively maternal. She describes it as “a really juicy role in a fun commercial movie”.
If you know one fact about Judd, it is probably that her mother Naomi and sister Wynonna made up the massively successful country act The Judds; or that she used to go out with Michael Bolton, he of the unspeakable hair. But she’s carved out what looks like the perfect Hollywood career plan. She certainly has a steely sense of being in control, even when her name is connected with every big movie in development.
“I’ve never spread myself too thin. I’ve certainly never attached myself to too many projects and that’s not going to change now. And although my name may be mentioned in association with various parts, it’s usually erroneous.”
Surely you’re not going to claim you only go for good scripts? Everyone says that, but there are plenty of films with lousy scripts getting made.
“People have different definitions of what comprises good. There are a lot of things I’m not interested in and then I find that so-and-so is dying to play the part. A really good example of a movie that was so successful is While You Were Sleeping. Sandy [Sandra Bullock] really wanted to do that and I didn’t even want to meet the producers. Who’s the fool? Nobody. Because she did what was right for her and I did what was right for me.”
Judd grabbed people’s attention with only her second film, Ruby In Paradise (1993). She’d been in LA for three years, doing bits and pieces of TV, but this quiet, thoughtful indie movie gave her the perfect opportunity to show you could build a film around her. And it taught her a vital acting lesson. “I learnt that doing nothing does come across.” It was something she used for small but arresting parts in Smoke and particularly Heat.
“Michael Mann is a great film-maker,” she says with awe, “Absolutely outstanding. Incredibly thorough. Any actor with a lick of sense would do a throwaway line and walk-on part just to pass through his greatness.”
She did wifey roles in commercial hits such as A Time To Kill (1996). In the same year she starred in – and got great reviews for – John McNaughton’s hugely bleak Normal Life. And she turned up regularly in the gossip columns. (These days, she has a strict veto on questions about her relationships).
In 1997 she appeared in Kiss The Girls. Two parts The Silence Of The Lambs, one part Seven, the film ended up weighed down by clichés but Judd got to play a kick-boxing girl who survives the attacks of a serial killer. She was cast opposite Morgan Freeman, which never seems to do anyone’s career any harm. It showed she could do action, help carry a commercial movie and work well with older men. She was perfectly set up for Double Jeopardy, a $4 million-and-rising wage packet – and the ability to order people out to buy vitamin tablets.
She was born in LA in 1968. Her father left her mother four years later. When she was a small child she moved frequently, sometimes living with her father and sometimes with her mother. Living on the road was perfect training for the itinerant life of an actor. “It has helped, believe me. There’s no doubt I can go in commando style and convert something into a decent and nourishing living space and then walk away from it three months later.”
Her childhood is part of country music legend, the story of how Naomi Judd heroically brought up little Wynonna and Ashley on no money at all. They were so poor, the story goes, they had to make their own soap. The way Ashley tells it now the story is a little different.
“There’s a college in a very small town in Kentucky called Beria,” Judd explains, “It’s an Appalachian college and and your family must be living well under the government level of poverty for you to go there. The kids earn their way through school by doing Appalachian crafts. There’s beautiful handmade cherry furniture and the school runs a tavern and they make soap. We lived near Beria: and my mom was very interested in things like that. And so making soap was continuing a really neat part of that heritage. But when my mother and my sister were trying to get a singing career started in Nashville there was a morning programme on which they appeared and the guy that did it could never get their name right, so he called them the Soap Sisters. And so this story takes off…”
However poor they might have once been, Naomi and Wynonna made it big in country music and Ashley ended up at the University of Kentucky, where she studied French and presumably amplified her wide reading and impressively broad vocabulary. She also helped organise a protest when a senior university official was overheard using the word “nigger”.
She briefly considered doing voluntary work in the Third World but instead drove off to Hollywood. She talks a lot about being Southern, and she lives on a farm in Tennessee – but she doesn’t have a Southern accent, and she’s clearly cosmopolitan and business-like. She has that combination of undisguised ambition and new-age aura that seems to slot naturally together for famous American women.
She talks about ‘modes of gratefulness’. And she explains her vegetarianism thus: “I believe that you eat the animals’ fear.”
Their fear?
“When they are going to be slaughtered and they hear the other animals being slaughtered and the chemicals released by the fight-or-flight response – among many, many things. Universally it’s recommended that you eat lower on the food chain, because the higher on the food chain you eat, you’re consuming not only that animal but everything it has eaten. I’m not, hopefully, an obnoxious vegetarian – I can prepare meat in my home for people who do eat it – traditional Southern things like bacon or sausage to go with biscuits and grits in the morning. Or fried chicken. If I didn’t have those things as cultural staples of my growing up, I wouldn’t even have that. But I find myself wanting to witness about it more, to teach by example.”
Here’s something that’s firmly in Judd’s favour: she knows she’s got it made: “When I wake up I think ‘Oh my gosh, I really have everything I could possibly want or need in this life’. Acting is something that, at the end of the year, I haven’t done enough of. Maybe that’s why some people make too many movies. The time spent in the actual performance is incredibly brief compared to the time it takes to fly to location – you spent more time getting there than the running time of the movie!
“Maybe that’s why I’ve got increasingly interested in the creative aspects of the movie – design, costume, shot selection…”
Sounds very much like she wants to direct.
“Some day,” she says.
Then she piles four huge vitamin C tablets into a glass. And her mind is back on that mysterious dead celebrity beginning with “M”: “Maybe it’s Jayne Mansfield. A good clue for that would be ‘Are you a sexpot who lost her head?’ “
The steps to stardom: Ashley Judd’s defining roles
o Ruby in Paradise (Victor Nunez, 1993) Excellent, subtle film about a young woman from Tennessee (Judd) who heads off to Florida looking for some kind of freedom, but finds dead-end jobs instead. In her then second film Judd’s range was impressive.
o Heat (Michael Mann, 1995) Mann’s macho cops-and-robbers epic was built around the Pacino-De Niro confrontation, but Judd was not outclassed, as she played the small but crucial role of Val Kilmer’s under-pressure wife.
o Kiss the Girls (Gary Fleder, 1997) Routine serial killer movie with a twist – the psycho isn’t killing his victims, he’s collecting them. Judd is the feisty doctor/kick-boxer who escapes to team up with Morgan Freeman. Not the finest film of recent years.
o Double Jeopardy (Bruce Beresford, 2000) Formulaic “innocent wronged” thriller. Judd is the resourceful heroine determined to get her son back and take revenge. A big hit in the US, and Judd’s success has inspired “next Julia Roberts” comments.
Double Jeopardy opens in South Africa on February 4