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Thursday, 5/1/97 Latest Aussie film showcases Judy Davis' many talents Down-Under diva discusses her latest film, distinctive style of acting

By Brandon Wilson Daily Bruin Staff For the most part, the world is on to Judy Davis. Whereas many actresses, like the incomparable Gena Rowlands, must toil in relative obscurity, inspiring a devoted following of critics and cineastes, Davis is already known as one of cinema's finest, most skilled actors. Accomplished directors, from David Cronenberg to Woody Allen, have lavished praise on her, the latter calling her "probably the best movie actress in the world today." Allen's statement stems from the fact that Judy Davis is one of those actors for whom no millisecond on screen is spent idly. She can communicate more of her character's state of mind with her eyes or her manner than words or lines can do justice. And though she's worked with some of film's most unique and lauded visionaries (like the Coen brothers, Michael Tolkin, Gillian Armstrong, David Lean, and the aforementioned Cronenberg and Allen), she's not one to sidestep the challenge of working with a freshman director in a most extraordinary project. Aussie Peter Duncan directs Davis, and a cast of Down Under's finest (including Sam Neill, Oscar- winner Geoffrey Rush, and Rachel Griffiths) in his new comedy "Children of the Revolution." Davis portrays a fire-engine-red Marxist in Australia, tracing her life from the dawn to the end of the Cold War. Highlights of her life include an audience with Josef Stalin (played by F. Murray Abraham) after the dictator reads the succession of love letters Davis' Joan has written him. Though their meeting is magical, it lasts but a night, leaving Stalin dead from excitement and Joan pregnant. And this is only act one. This is the first Australian film Davis has done in a decade, but don't think she got a vacation from her famous facility with accents because she was on home soil. "I did have to put an accent on to play Joan," says Davis, whose low voice has a near-British variety of Aussie accent. That broad Australian accent is one of the most difficult to do. With Joan I had to do a lot of work getting her to sound like I wanted her to." "Joan is a zealot," says Davis of her latest role. "An old-fashioned zealot. Because of that she's a dangerous woman. And because of that and her incapability of changing, she has put herself in a perilous position. In order to survive in life, one has to be adaptable, and a character like Joan isn't, like, any sort of extremist." For Davis, whose lack of vanity can be witnessed in her last screen appearance as a convalescing wife in "Blood and Wine," her role in "Children of the Revolution" offered her the chance to play a wide age-range and abandon any thought of stanching the aging process. "That was great fun." she says of playing the many ages of Joan. "It's tremendously freeing; I sometimes watch films and even with actresses in their seventies, you can see they've been hauled into the makeup barn, and they've had these bloody people diddling with them and trying to make them look pretty, and I thought, isn't there any point in a female's life (when) that doesn't matter? Is there any point in a woman's life (when she) won't be judged by how sexy (she) looks? "So in this particular film, with Joan being a Marxist as well, it really didn't matter, it was wonderful, wearing those elastic-waist trousers, cardigans, it was great. I loved it!" Raised in western Australia, Davis came to international prominence at the ripe old age of 23 with her lead role in director Gillian Armstrong's "My Brilliant Career." Her next big splash came five years later in director Sir David Lean's (if his name sounds familiar, he's the one who did a pair of little films called "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago") final film "A Passage to India" (1984). But her none-too-private clash with Lean regarding her character's development landed her the reputation for being difficult (a word that's followed nearly all actresses of caliber since Bette Davis) and stunned many who thought a cheeky upstart actress had no place challenging one of British cinema's sacred cows. Branching out to play in non-Australian projects meant learning near-chameleonic skills of changing her speech patterns and manner. And while the accent is key to that, Davis also sees it as a trap an actor will occasionally succumb to. "The normal rule is you must never play an accent," says Davis. "If you play an accent, that's the cheapest possible form of acting, it's like being a bad politician. But having said that, the way people speak reveals so much about them; it's a cliche, but it's true, we reveal almost everything about ourselves by the way we speak. The (character's) particular dialect is only one part of that." The role which garnered Davis a Best Supporting Oscar nomination (which, rumor once held, she lost only thanks to a misreading presenter) in Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives" showcases all Davis' skills at perhaps their sharpest. Nailing the tics and clipped speech of an upper-crust northeastern American woman, Davis found the role of uber-neurotic Sally meaty enough to sink her teeth into and skewed enough to have a ball with. "With Woody's film I was in New York," says Davis. "That's where it was based, so it was perfect; I hung around Park Avenue which wasn't hard to do and watched some of those women. Initially she was described as 'one of those Radcliffe girls.' Well I didn't know what Radcliffe was about. Finally it was the costume designer who told me. Then there was the process of trying to figure out how she moved, how she flicked her hair, how neurotic she really was, and in what ways would her self-absorption reveal itself. But of course not all the characters I get to play are all that complex or deliciously amusing, some of them are quite boring, you have to deal with that too; try and find out what makes them unique or human." To prep for the part of Joan, Davis sought out writing on the subject of the now defunct "worker's state" as well as seeking a meeting with a real-life counterpart of Joan. "It was really a case of where do you start," says Davis. "I wasn't going to pretend to become an expert on Marxist-Leninist philosophy; over six months I gradually prepared for it, I read some books on Russian history, contemporary views of Soviet Russia. There's just so much material on the subject. There's a female playwright named Dorothy Hewitt, in her 60s now, who was a Stalinist for much of her life. The reason she isn't any longer is that she was denounced in the late '50s for questioning the central committee for censoring Khrushchev's statement on Stalin's crimes, and she got expelled from the party. Pretty rugged stuff." Next up, Davis will appear in the forthcoming Woody Allen project, and she says she hopes someday to reprise her partnership with two-time screen husband Peter Weller (in Cronenberg's "Naked Lunch" and Tolkin's "The New Age"). As for what she wants out of her directors, Davis' answers are simple, calling her reputation for difficulty into question. "It's always nice if the director has an intelligent take on the script and the characters so that they can be helpful, but that's not essential, because really I see that as my job to develop the character. (The director's) got plenty of other things to worry about on the set. But it's great if they can help. I expect directors to be tolerant of mistakes, I'm not a believer in instant acting. I expect a director to be relatively patient with a process that might take some time. Obviously there are limits, but I expect a kind of understanding of actors and the acting process." FILM: "Children of the Revolution" will be released this Friday, May 2. Related Links: The Offical "Children of the Revolution" Site Related Daily Bruin Stories: Close breaks military bounds of 'silence': Close, Davis show strength as actors in difficult roles" 02/06/95