Judith Davis (born 23 April 1955) is an Australian actress in film, television, and on stage. With a career spanning over 40 years, she has been commended for her versatility and regarded as one of the finest actresses of her generation. Frequent collaborator Woody Allen described her as, "one of the most exciting actresses in the world". She is the most awarded recipient for the AACTA Award with nine accolades and has received numerous accolades, including three Emmy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards, and two nominations for Academy Awards.
Davis is a 1977 graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art, where she starred opposite Mel Gibson in Romeo and Juliet. Most of Davis's stage work has been in Australia, including Visions (1979), Piaf (1980), Miss Julie (1983), King Lear (1984), Hedda Gabler (1986), Victory (2004) and The Seagull (2011). She earned a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress nomination for the 1982 London production of Insignificance. She returned to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 2017 to direct the play Love and Money.
She has won BAFTA Awards for both Best Actress and Most Promising Newcomer for the film My Brilliant Career (1979), two Australian Film Institute Awards as Best Actress for Winter of Our Dreams (1981) and Supporting Actress for Hoodwink (1981), and later received Academy Award nominations for A Passage to India (1984) and Husbands and Wives (1992). This made her the first Australian to receive nominations in both categories and the fourth Australian actress to receive an Academy Award nomination.
Her other film roles include High Rolling (1977), Who Dares Wins (1982), Heatwave (1983), High Tide (1987), Georgia (1988), Alice (1990), Impromptu (1991), Barton Fink (1991), Dark Blood (1993), Absolute Power (1997), Deconstructing Harry (1997), Celebrity (1998), The Man Who Sued God (2001), The Break-up (2006), Marie Antoinette (2006), The Eye of the Storm (2011), To Rome with Love (2012), and The Dressmaker (2015).
For her work on television, Davis won Primetime Emmy Awards for Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995), for playing Judy Garland in Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001) and The Starter Wife (2007) and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film for Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows and One Against the Wind (1991). Other television roles include Water Under the Bridge (1980), A Woman Called Golda (1982), A Cooler Climate (1999), The Reagans (2003), Coast to Coast (2003), A Little Thing Called Murder (2006), Page Eight (2011), Hedda Hopper in Feud: Bette and Joan (2017), and Ratched (2020).
Source: Wikidata , August 2023
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