The fabulous Judd no one knows
She’s gone from being the other one in a famous family to being a Hollywood success story. Now Ashley Judd talks about her painful childhood, her recent depression, and the one (very special, very famous) man who saw her through it.
ASHLEY JUDD BITES HUNGRILY INTO AN APPLE. She’s curled up on a chair in a corner cabana beside the rooftop pool of a Beverly Hills hotel. The late afternoon sun shimmers over her hair, still drenched from a swim. A few moments ago, Judd finished up a phone conversation with her mother, Naomi Judd, the singer and author, who is at her home outside of Nashville. Her older sister, Wynonna Judd, 33, the famous country singer, has just left the pool with her husband and their two children.
“All three of us are so knit together, emotionally and historically, it’s something you can almost touch,” says Judd, now sipping a glass of iced coffee. “I’m the youngest, so I have the benefit of what we have gone through individually and collectively. I’m like this repository of everyone’s experiences.”
At 29, Ashley Judd has quite a repository of experiences. She grew up. sometimes poor, sometimes lonely, as the sister and daughter of the singing Judds? whose early years were marked by hardship. She went on, however, to carve out a successful career as an actress in films like Ruby in Paradise (1993), Heat (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), and now Kiss the Girls. And on a personal level, she’s enjoyed highly publicized relationships with actor Matthew McConaughey and pop singer Michael Bolton.
Today, Judd’s life seems golden: The scripts are pouring in and she’s deciding on her next film. She’s just returned from a trip to Italy, courtesy of designer Giorgio Armani, who sent her two first-class airline tickets to Milan simply to show up at the glittering presentation of his fall collection. She’s restoring a 180-year-old farmhouse on the 1,000-acre plot of land outside Nashville where her mother and sister have homes. She’s brainy and beautiful, and her love life is pretty good too.
And yet…
Dealing with the Pain
Last year Judd had just returned to Nashville after finishing six movies when she got a cold that she just couldn’t shake. Day after day, she found herself crying and nursing sensitive feelings that would get hurt way too easily. “I was real raw and tender.” she says quietly. “I felt pretty ravaged and I said no to people, no to jobs, no to my dad, who wanted me to come to Louisville a lot and see him. I said no to everybody. And one day I was a little bit weepy, and all of a sudden I thought. Oh my God, I think I’m depressed. This is what people do when they’re depressed. The sickness was brought on by emotions, and I realized that my body was not going to get better until I looked at my emotions.”
Doing so forced Judd for the first time to confront her past–and the realization that it wasn’t quite as sunny as she had wanted to remember. Indeed, growing up in an all-female household had a powerful impact, positive and negative, that she’s still trying to understand.
As a child, Judd watched her mother struggle to deal with a broken marriage, poverty, abuse, and an almost desperate hunger to succeed as a country singer. While the Judds rose to worldwide fame in the eighties, Ashley was only a teenager, and often seemed to fade into the background.
“Ashley had been hearing us on the radio, seeing us on TV, reading about us in magazines, just like everyone else in America,” says Naomi. “Any kid who was less secure, less sure of herself than Ashley would not have handled it so well.”
But in fact. the price for that facade of security would come later–when it was least expected.
In October 1996, at the Country Music Association Awards in Nashville, Judd was introduced to Michael Bolton by her sister, who was singing a duet with him for the show. When Ashley appeared backstage at Wynonna’s urging, well, sparks flew.
Ironically, it was the happiness of her new love with Bolton and the security she derived from that relationship that, Judd says, gave her the strength to recognize her own pain in the midst of her illness. “Michael was loving me in such a way that I felt safe enough to express my depression,” she says. “I felt so completely and deeply loved that whatever I was and whatever I needed to feel was okay. And it just came out.”
For a few months last winter, Judd virtually secluded herself at her cottage outside Nashville. She underwent intensive therapy to deal with her complicated relationships with her mother and her sister, as well as the resentments, loneliness, and anger that Judd had harbored since childhood.
“At some point everything comes up in your life and you can either layer upon layer your evasion or you can be brought to your knees and deal with it.” she says. “It turns out I had never really grieved for a lot of stuff. It was not ideal growing up, but that’s not to say we didn’t have love. It’s just that having love and having trauma are not mutually exclusive. I saw and felt a lot of things that broke me. And I had never let myself be broken.”
Born in California, Judd spent her childhood all over the map from the West Coast to Kentucky and Tennessee. Naomi’s divorce from the girls’ father, Michael Ciminella, whom she married as a pregnant teenager, left her virtually penniless. “I was barely able to keep a jar of peanut butter on the table,” Naomi says. The two small girls and their mother shared a bed and moved around a lot. Ashley has joked, “We grew up in the back of a car asking. `Where are we going now?”‘ She attended 12 schools in 13 years. And she saw more than a child should.
One night is most memorable to Naomi: “I had been in a very unfortunate relationship with a boyfriend,” she remembers. “He beat me one night. I had a busted face. And I took my two kids, in pj’s, to a motel. I was totally broke. The night clerk took pity on us and gave us a room. Ashley was exposed to these very dramatic events, the divorce, the bad people I brought around when I was trying to find myself–I’m sure it had a tremendous impact on her.”
Judd’s bout with depression stunned her mother. “It shook me to my core to see Ashley in that condition,” says Naomi. However, Judd seemed to tackle her depression with the same determination that she attacks acting. “When she was going through this she was either at the therapist’s office or by the fireplace reading self-help books or taking walks in the woods,” says Naomi, whose own determination led her from single welfare mother to country music star. “In life you’re either inactive, reactive, or proactive, and Ashley Judd is one of the most proactive people I’ve ever met.”
Judd’s depression ultimately eased, but only after she confronted her mother and sister about past hurts. “I was looking at old stuff,” she says. “And the fact is, I really encourage people to look at it, because it doesn’t break you. It actually heals you.”
Looking back, both mother and daughter say the experiences of the family led to an unbreakable bond–and a powerful sense of strength between the women. “We trusted each other with our lives,” says Naomi. “We knew back then that the source of our identity and love was so impenetrable, we felt bulletproof.” Judd says simply, “The way I live my life is my tribute to my mother. My hard work, my grit, my can-do attitude definitely come from her.”
Becoming Her Own Judd
Even as a child, Judd clearly viewed herself as entirely different from the two most important women in her life. She never had the inspiration to sing that her mother and sister did, nor did she feel the need to join the act. “We were worshiping different gods,” she has said. “With Wy it was music. I just always read.”
While in middle school, Judd recalls she had an experience that probably altered her life–and led her into acting. She remembers watching Jane Fonda on television in The Dollmaker, in a scene where Fonda is running to save a baby who is about to be hit by a train. The scene was so powerful that Naomi leapt up across the kitchen and grabbed Ashley and Wynonna to comfort them. Judd says, “I thought, That’s what I want to do. I wanted to be the girl in the movie who rocked your world, who had that kind of emotional power.”
It seemed only natural, therefore, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Kentucky with a degree in French, that she pack a U-Haul on the back of her BMW and head for Hollywood. (She had been accepted by the Peace Corps to work in West Africa, but was determined to give acting a shot.)
Arriving in Los Angeles, Judd took acting classes and worked as a restaurant hostess. She turned down an audition for the female lead in the 1992 Christian Slater film Kuffs rather than do a topless screen test. She told the producers, “My mother worked too hard for me to take off my clothes in my first movie.”
Judd did take a smaller, fully clothed part in Kuffs, then won a recurring role as Ensign Lefler in the syndicated Star Trek. The Next Generation, which provided Naomi with the first glimpse of her daughter on screen. “Perhaps the first time in history someone has wept their way through Star Trek,” Judd has said. From there, she went on to the series Sisters. This led to roles in films like Ruby in Paradise (1993), Smoke (1995), and critical acclaim for Michael Mann’s Heat, opposite Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Val Kilmer.
Then she received an Emmy nomination in 1996 for HBO’s Norma Jean and Marilyn, followed by Joel Schumacher’s A Time to Kill, in which she played Matthew McConaughey’s wife.
In her new film, Kiss the Girls, a psychological suspense thriller, Judd stars opposite Morgan Freeman. Another film, The Locusts, in which she costars with Vince Vaughn, is also out this fall.
Who Was the Mystery Lover?
If Judd’s career has been gliding along at a fever pitch, so has her high-profile personal life. This past summer she ran into former boyfriend and costar Matthew McConaughey at an after-party for the MTV Movie Awards. The two had a steamy affair after meeting on the set of A Time to Kill. They broke it off after the movie wrapped, but their latest encounter put the rumor mill in motion again. (Judd insists they’re just friends.)
Although Judd tries to keep her personal life quiet, she can’t help but praise McConaughey. “I have the highest regard and fondness and love for him. I mean, I can say that. I love Matthew. He’ll always be my friend. We share something very special. We have a common spirituality, and a practice of faith in common. That gives us an extremely special connection. And we were there for each other at an exquisite time of life for both of us.”
At the same party, she laughed with McConaughey about a recent article’s exaggeration that she dates all of her male costars. Judd explains, “Matthew said he loved my answer and cut it out to put in his trailer while he was making Contact. I had said, `I’ve been involved with precisely two of my costars in ten professional outings, and I believe 20 percent is far below the national average.’ And the other person [besides McConaughey] people would like to think is Robert De Niro, but it’s not. I think more happens at the water cooler than has happened with me and my costars.” (She has never divulged who the other fling was with.)
After Judd and McConaughey ended their relationship, Bolton came along. Although Judd and Bolton split up after a few months, the two remain close friends. Judd has a special attachment to him for helping her through her depression. As she says, “I’m just…I’m really lucky, I’m really, really lucky.” Judd catches herself before she says too much, but in keeping her feelings private, her evasiveness almost says more. “I just don’t want to say anything specific, because it doesn’t do it justice. Michael’s special beyond description and terribly, terribly important to me.”
By now the late afternoon sun has faded and the pool and cabanas are near-empty. Looking ahead, Judd says she has no immediate plans for children of her own. She shrugs. “Someday, yeah, but I never thought about it until my sister had hers. Her children give me little introductory lessons.”
The light catches her right hand, where she wears a simple gold wedding band once worn by her great-grandmother. It’s not only a cherished memento, Judd says, but a link that binds her to her family. Her other hand bears no ring. Asked if her mother has given her any advice about men, Judd smiles. “I know what she wants for me,” she says. “She wants someone to think I’m as exquisite and extraordinary as she does. She wants someone to hold me in the same precious regard as she does.” Judd seems deep in thought. “What more can you ask from your mother?”
Redbook – 1997
