Inspired by one of my favorite bloggers I've decided to christen a new regular feature, namely, celebrating the birthdays of my favorite people, notably the actresses who charm and fascinate me or drive me to consider becoming some kind of deranged stalker.
So, as 2008 unravels, I will slowly reveal my favorite actresses (or female actors, if they prefer) as the dates of their births arrive. And I cannot think of a more fitting woman to start the feature than the great Judy Davis.
A singular female presence, she is peerless at effortlessly conveying cerebral formidability, often playing the wife or lover of an almost equally scary male intellectual counterpart. She plays the wife of Kevin Spacey in The Ref. She plays the muse to not one, but two fictional alter egos of brilliant writers, the girlfriend and typist of the thinly veiled representation of William Faulkner, W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney) in Joel & Ethan Coen's Barton Fink and the wife of William S. Burroughs author surrogate, Bill Lee (Peter Weller) in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. And she played both parts in the same year. She has appeared in 3 Woody Allen films, and is especially memorable in an early scene from Deconstructing Harry, where she confronts Allen's character, her ex-boyfriend, a writer, about a book he wrote in which he mines intensely personal and embarrassing details of their relationship for story ideas:
She is brilliant at playing nervy, tightly wound, fearsome women who can summon a vicious wit when crossed or wronged. She could wither many men with a single glance. But she is simultaneously able to do so without being a hateful bitch, because beneath her contempt, is a delicate vulnerability that has been tragically wounded. My single favorite performance of hers is from Ted Demme's The Ref, an underrated comedy from 1994 where she out-acts both the great Denis Leary and the great Kevin Spacey. Here's a quite humorous clip from The Ref:
She turns 53 today.
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