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Ashley Judd
Ashley Judd studied French at the University of Kentucky, where she graduated with Phi
Beta Kappa honors in 1990. After toying with the idea of becoming a Peace Corps volunteer
in Africa, she heeded her sister's advice to take Hollywood by storm. She bypassed the
traditional travails most wannabe actors encounter by brandishing her remarkably self-
assured attitude from day one: upon arriving in Los Angeles, she marched straight into an
agency and came out signed. She then marched out of her very first audition (for Christian
Slater's Kuffs) with a part, even though it wasn't the one she went in seeking. Judd refused to do the nude scene called for in the proffered role, but the producers were so taken with her
graciously worded rejection that they awarded her with the far less scandalous role of "Wife
of Paint Store Owner" so that she could obtain her Screen Actors Guild membership. After a
few TV roles, Judd appeard in Ruby in Paradise, a coming-of-age film that won the Grand
Jury Prize (along with Public Access) at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival; Judd also garnered
an Independent Spirit Award for her portrayal of the title character.
An intellectual with country-girl charm, Judd counts food, sex, books, and God (not
necessarily in that order) among her passions, and speaks in unusually grandiloquent
sentences. She commented of the autobiographical TV movie that was released in the wake
of her mother Naomi's retirement: "I was just sorry that my mother, whom I adore and
cherish, was put in the position where she had to recycle and rehash something that was very
hard for her, and that was the abdication of a career she'd struggled to attain." Judd refused to
appear opposite her mother and sister in the project, which is not surprising considering that
she has always made a point of not capitalizing on their stardom in any way. In fact, she
turned down a role in Kenny Rogers' 1993 western Rio Diablo because her mother had a
starring role in it. Judd was becoming a hot Tinseltown commodity, anyway — and all on her
own steam.
Judd has managed to build a solid reputation for herself with supporting roles in good movies
— she garnered excellent reviews for her work in Smoke (as Stockard Channing's crack-
addicted daughter), Heat (as Val Kilmer's wife), and A Time To Kill (as Matthew
McConaughey's wife). As for starring roles, she received good reviews for her performance
opposite Luke Perry in Normal Life (1996), and she scored an Emmy nomination for her
portrayal of young Marilyn Monroe in HBO's Norma Jean and Marilyn, a performance for
which she overcame her aversion to being naked in front of the camera and stripped to
reenact Monroe's career-making nude photo shoot. Judd's big-screen profile grew ever larger
in 1997, with a starring turn opposite Morgan Freeman in the thriller Kiss the Girls, and one
opposite Vince Vaughn in The Locusts. Her most recent starring vehicles have been critical
disappointments: the 1998 drama Simon Birch, a film "suggested by" the popular John Irving
novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, sank from sight quickly; and the 1999 thriller Double
Jeopardy, about a housewife framed for murder who seeks revenge on her double-crossing
husband, had reviewers rolling in the aisles with derision. The likewise derided post-noir
thriller Eye of the Beholder, released the following year, matched Judd with Ewan McGregor
in high-tech espionage.
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