Judy Davis Tests Her Wit . . .

Acclaim is a harsh companion for the gifted artist, especially in the vulnerable, volatile profession of acting. Do you ride the train of fame? Or do you maintain self-critical distance from the whole business--which means saying no to mediocre scripts and media queries? Do you risk becoming unemployable while maintaining your integrity?

The dilemma is perhaps no better embodied today than in the accomplishments of Australian actress Judy Davis, who, after a decade of acclaim, is making her U.S. stage debut in Tom Stoppard’s play about spies and sub-atomic physics, “Hapgood” (now in previews for an April 12 opening at the James Doolittle Theatre, the Center Theatre Group-Ahmanson’s temporary new quarters).

Still in her early 30s, Davis is already being compared with many of the great modern film actresses, including Vanessa Redgrave, Anna Magnani and Jeanne Moreau--as Pauline Kael noted while reviewing Davis’ performance in her most recent film, Gillian Armstrong’s “High Tide.” Kael called her “an actress . . . who’s a genius at moods . . . Davis (is) Moreau without the cultural swank, the high-fashion gloss.”

Since 1981, which saw Davis’ film debut in “My Brilliant Career,” nearly every one of her movie appearances has been greeted with an award. For that film, her first collaboration with director Armstrong, she won the British Academy Award for best actress and best newcomer. The Australian Film Institute has rewarded her four times--for leads in “Winter of Our Dreams,” “Kangaroo” and “High Tide,” and for support in “Hoodwink.” In America, she received a best actress Oscar nomination for David Lean’s “A Passage to India,” an Emmy nomination for her young Golda Meir in “A Woman Called Golda,” and, most recently, was picked as 1988’s best actress (“High Tide” again) by the National Society of Film Critics.

And yet, many argue--and Davis will suggest in conversation--that the screen has seen only a fraction of her range. “God, that piece didn’t work out nearly to my liking,” Davis says of “My Brilliant Career,” for instance.

But it is her theater work where Davis has roamed, by all accounts, magnificently free and wide: as Marilyn Monroe in the play “Insignificance” (later adapted to film by Nicholas Roeg); in the title roles of “Miss Julie,” “Piaf,” “Hedda Gabler” and “Lulu,” among others.

However, having thus far turned down every offer for major Hollywood projects, and having done so much of her work for Australian stage and film, Davis has acclaim without much public awareness. Then again, for Davis, awareness is beside the point.

“I have no wish to impress people,” she says, sitting in an Ahmanson conference room. Reddish-haired, physically petite but authoritative in presence, Davis looked at her guest intently, almost probing for a reaction.

She then adds: “I don’t mean that in an arrogant sense at all. It is just this: Actors often lose the fundamental reason why they became actors in the first place. Are they doing it for the money? Or are they doing it to fully explore their being, to find the part of themselves that can express a character who may be different from the way they are?

“That isn’t to say that you should prevent yourself from making a living. I remember when people were upset about Diana Rigg playing in some very commercial work. They said, ‘Poor Diana, she must have had to do it for the rent.’ Well, I say, ‘Lucky Diana! Lucky that she can get the work at all.’

“I mean, nine out of ten scripts will be garbage, and you’ll sweat over the tenth, because it’s likely about yet another strong female in her 30s, and the bank balance is going down. Actors do not have multiple career choices.”

They do have life choices, though, and one of Davis’ most significant was to have a child (Jack, now 18 months old) with her husband and fellow actor, Colin Friels. What would have been simply burdensome to some busy artists has been turned by Davis to her advantage in building her role for Stoppard’s play. The character she plays (about which we won’t divulge too much) has had to raise a child, Joe (one of many names and words on which Stoppard works his linguistic tricks).

“Her need to succeed is utterly overwhelming her feelings,” Davis says of her character. “She’s moving in a world where intellect is more valued than emotions.” Her code name in the play, “Mother,” also suggests she’s a lone matriarch in a male-only environment.

Hapgood’s “Mother” has a more literal, direct meaning for her.

“My own experience giving birth has absolutely affected the way I approach this role. There’s nothing more extraordinary than birth. I will probably never have such closeness to life and death as when I was delivering Jack.

“I can’t explain the emotional connections that occur between a mother and child. There I was, the morning after the birth, and I got out of my hospital bed and walked onto the balcony outside my room. As I looked out across the horizon, my eye caught a small bird in flight, landing on a tree branch. Perhaps it sounds silly, but right then I started to cry. There was something about what I had gone through, being so much in the present, it was overwhelming.”

After relating this to how women have a certain power of experience that men can’t grasp, Davis worried over how the drive for women’s liberation has dissipated in recent years.

“A lot of it has to do with how children are conditioned. In a park in Sydney near where we live, I’ll see parents coddle their girls and push their boys, like that’s expected. I’m being very careful how Jack is influenced. Too much of this stage work on the road isn’t good for him either, so I may or may not go with ‘Hapgood’ to New York, which is where Tom (Stoppard) and (director) Peter (Wood) are hoping to take it after here.”

Stoppard, according to Davis, is still rewriting into the night. “We’re treating this like a new play. Peter and he tell me that they weren’t at all pleased with the London staging, that it was stodgy and slow. But certain scenes, and various aspects of (the) character, can be given a comic slant.” In the few interviews she’s granted in the past, Davis has lamented how the movies seldom allow her to show the comedienne inside her.

“But, of course, that’s why there’s theater, isn’t it? The movie people think I’m so--oh, you know, serious-- while the serious people in theater know I’m capable of much more than that. It’s simply something one has to live with.”