This Side of Paradise
Ashley Judd is in full bloom with a new movie and a new fiance’. But, as Zoe Heller discovers, the actress would rather talk about religion, poetry, abortion, her favorite designers, and her e-mail relationship with Gloria Steinem.
While she’s working on her latest movie, Ashley Judd has been renting a rather spectacular house in the Hollywood Hills. her real home may be in a Tennessee holler, just down the road from the houses of her famous mother and sister, but she takes the the slightly spartan luce of the west coast style like a natural. When I arrived for our meeting, she had just finished a private yoga session with an instructor and was fresh out of the shower. Sitting on a sofa, with wet hair and bare feet, and a pair of black velvet pants and a string of her grandmother’s pearls, she proceeded to eat an irreproachable post exercise snack of papaya orange, washed down with green tea in a clay cup. Not mush here of Naomi and Wynonna’s spangles Southern Gothic. “From a very young age,” Judd noted demurely, “I despised artifice.”
Judd’s ascent to stardom has been a stelthy one. Since her 1993 debut in the independent feature Ruby in Paradise, she has made no fewer than 13 movies. But it was only with the 11th–1999′s surprise hit Double Jeopardy– that she was confirmed as a box-office draw. That movie ended up grossing $116 million. As a result, 2001 is proving to be what she calls a “good work year.” She is now starring in her first romantic comedy, Someone Like You, based on the Laura Zigman’s best selling novel Animal Husbandry. She is finishing up work on the courtroom drama High Crimes with Morgan Freeman, and at some point later this year, she will also make a cameo appearance as teh photographer Tina Modotti in Frida, a movie about the life of Frida Khalo, starring her good friend Salma Hayek. In between times, Judd is making (discreet) plans for her wedding to Scottish race-car driver Dario Franchitti and maintaining a scrupulously clean house. On the Sunday we met, in fact, she had been up at 5:30 A.M., scrubbing and polishing. “My envirionment,” she explained, “is very important to me.”
Such remarks support Judd’s reputation as a supercapable, somewhat fastidious personality. in addition to her acting career, her Phi Beta Kappa key and degreee in French, her aggressive sportiness (hiking, yoga, tennis, et cetera), her large , rather otiose vocabulary, and her extensive knowledge of literature (she’ll quote you Pope or Dickenson at the drop of a het), Judd boasts a terrifying command of the domestic arts. She bakes; she gardens. she regularly shampoos her own dogs, she told me, with an organic citrus shampoo from a company called Four Paws. Sheesh. If you had to get stuck in the jungle with a movie star, Judd would probably be the one to choose. She’d be a little intimidating, perhaps. but it’s a sure thing that within a few hours, she would have improvised a glamorous sarong, built a fire, run up some rope hammocks–and done it all reciting Rilke and Gloria Steinem.
Someone Like You is your first stab at romantic comedy. Were you anxious about that?
I was. Not having done a comedy before, but believing that I had funniness in me, I was a complete neophyte. I remember e-mailing a girlfriend of mine from college, saying, “I don’t know if I’m funny.”
