Judy Davis is one of Australia’s most versatile actors. Internationally acclaimed, with a career spanning over thirty years, Judy has impacted audiences with a variety of award winning film and television performances. Graduating from drama school NIDA in 1977, Judy first came to prominence for her role as Sybylla Melvyn in the coming-of-age saga My Brilliant Career (1979), for which she won BAFTA Awards for Best Actress and Best Newcomer. Following this she played the lead in such Australian New Wave classics as Winter of Our Dreams (1981) (as the waif-like heroin addict) and Heatwave (1982) (as the radical tenant organizer).
The two-time Emmy Award winner is best known for portraying formidable real-life women on TV, including the notorious felon, Sante Kimes, in A Little Thing Called Murder and Hollywood legend, Judy Garland, in the miniseries Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. Davis made television history when ‘Life With Judy Garland’ received the most nominations for a single performance and won every award she was nominated for, including the Emmy, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and the American Film Institute Awards. Her other significant television roles include her Emmy Award winning role portraying the woman who gently coaxes rigid military woman Glenn Close out of the closet in Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story, with subsequent nominations for her repressed Australian outback mother in The Echo of Thunder, her portrayal of Lillian Hellman in Dash and Lilly, her frigid society matron in A Cooler Climate (1999) and her interpretation of Nancy Reagan in the controversial biopic The Reagans.
Davis received Academy Award® nominations for her roles in A Passage to India and Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives. Woody Allen is a great admirer of Judy’s work, and has described her as “good looking, smart and quick-witted and unpredictable”, and consequently has cast her in five films, including his current production, Bop Decameron, where she will play his onscreen wife.
Additional film credits include Marie Antoinette, The Break Up, Kangaroo, Impromptu, Naked Lunch, Barton Fink, The Ref, On My Own, Children of the Revolution, Absolute Power, Deconstructing Harry and Celebrity. Australian productions include Swimming Upstream, opposite her Eye of the Storm co-star Geoffrey Rush, and AFI award winning roles in Kangaroo and High Tide.
In theatre, Judy made her professional debut as Juliet, opposite Mel Gibson’s Romeo. She also played both Cordelia and the Fool in a 1984 staging of King Lear for the Nimrod Theatre Company. Her other credits for the company include their productions of Miss Julie / The Bear, Inside The Island, and in 1986 the title role in Hedda Gabler, a landmark performance in Australian theatre. In the early ‘80s, she 3 portrayed French chanteuse Edith Piaf in the play Piaf at the Perth Playhouse, and also starred in Visions (Paris Theatre Company). In 2004 she made a return to stage and starred in and co-directed Victory, as a Puritan woman determined to locate her husband’s dismembered corpse. Other stage directorial credits include The School For Scandal and Barrymore, all three of which were for the Sydney Theatre Company. Most recently she portrayed the role of fading actress Irina Arkadina in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre to critical acclaim and sold out audiences.
The Asia Pacific Screen Academy expresses its respect for and acknowledgement of the South East Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. We pay our respects to the Traditional Owners of country, including the custodial communities on whose land works are created and celebrated by the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. We acknowledge the continuing connection to land, waters and communities. We also pay our respects to Elders, past and emerging. We recognise the integral role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations peoples continue to play in storytelling and celebration spaces.
