Punchin’ Judy

Kevin Spacey wants to clear the air about Judy Davis, whom he regards as one of the “great actresses of our time.” The issue is her reputation for being difficult, and he addresses it in an expletive-filled tirade.

“Every single interview I did for ‘The Ref’ was about ‘So, what is she really like?’ ” says Spacey, who played Davis’ husband in that film. “And you just want to say, ‘Shut up!’ I’m tired of reading stories about her reputation. I get to a point where I think the only reason they write these things is that there’s nothing else to write. They can’t figure her out, she doesn’t do that many interviews, they don’t know a thing about her personal life, so they just make this stuff up.”

“She’s kind of fascinating, and I actually haven’t read anybody who’s quite got her yet,” says James Lapine, who directed Davis in the role of the scandalous writer George Sand in “Impromptu.” “She’s definitely not in the mold. She’s incredibly unique and makes no effort to be anything but who she is. To that degree I think she’s kind of an anomaly in the movie industry.”

Davis is certainly an anomaly in her dealings with the press. Like a lot of actors, she is shy, but instead of developing some kind of persona, a public face, she presents . . . herself. This person is intelligent, opinionated, caustic, self-deprecating, devoted to her craft and her family and incapable of currying favor.

“When I began acting I knew that the crucial thing for me to come to terms with was the trivialization of me by the press,” she says. “It took awhile, I suppose, but I think I have. For a start, I’ll make sure I don’t read anything that’s written about me. No matter how good the writer is, you can’t communicate the essence of somebody, and yet that’s the expectation.”

Davis, now 42, may not be any closer to giving journalists what they want, but for her fans this rebellious attitude is part of her appeal. In fact, as a gesture to the efforts to pigeonhole her through the years, she cut her famous red hair. Once shoulder-length and often ringleted, it is short, straight, pixieish.

“Hair is a terribly important issue to Americans, isn’t it?” she says wryly. “I think it shouldn’t be the central issue about someone.”

Davis is seated in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills, wearing a black skirt she doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with. Every five minutes or so she almost leaps off the couch to adjust it. An occasional smoker, she is not smoking now--perhaps, though she doesn’t discuss it, because she is three months pregnant.

Somewhere out there beyond the 12th-floor windows are her firstborn, Jack, and his nanny, taking in L.A. (Her husband is actor Colin Friels.) They have flown in from Sydney, in her native Australia, so that Davis can promote her latest movie, “Children of the Revolution,” her first Australian film in almost 10 years. The film opens Friday.

“Children” is a broad, quirky satire about a Communist sympathizer (Davis) whose mash notes to Joseph Stalin land her an audience with the Soviet dictator. A one-night stand with him is fateful to them both: His efforts in bed literally kill him, and she produces a son who grows up to be the spitting image of his father. Throughout the film Davis’ character is a shrill keeper of the faith, stubbornly ignoring the attentions of a spy (Sam Neill) and her own husband (Geoffrey Rush). Davis is not afraid to look bad.

“Actress,” says Spacey, almost hissing with delight when the subject of her lack of vanity comes up. “Actress.”

“I think an obvious part that appealed to Judy was the humor,” says Gillian Armstrong, who directed Davis in her breakout film, “My Brilliant Career” (1979), and in “High Tide” (1987). “I think that because she’s such a wonderful dramatic actress people forget that she’s an extraordinary comedian.”

Davis is also on view in two other recent films, Clint Eastwood’s “Absolute Power” and Bob Rafelson’s “Blood and Wine,” and she’s just completed a bit part in Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry.” Four different directors, four different acting experiences. Davis, who has often been critical of her own movies and their directors, has kind words to say about all of them--well, almost all of them.

“We had a great time working together,” says “Children” writer-director Peter Duncan, who wrote the part with Davis in mind. “We did a lot of work sitting around her kitchen table before the film started, so I felt we had a very good relationship before we actually got on the set, and we had a mutually agreed agenda in terms of what the film’s about. There was no risk of Judy performing an orange and me wanting an apple.”

“It’s particularly audacious given that it’s his first film script and his first directorial job,” Davis says.

And then there’s Woody Allen, with whom she has worked twice before, in “Alice” and “Husbands and Wives” (her role as a neurotic, newly separated wife earning her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress). For all the talk about how independent Davis is, her deference to him borders on reverential. For example, in “Deconstructing Harry,” there was a scene she and Amy Irving had blocked out together after-hours. When it came time to shoot it, Allen had blocked the action an entirely different way and Davis didn’t know which way to turn. In addition, she didn’t know why her character was saying what she was saying.

“It was a conundrum for me, but I didn’t want to bother him,” Davis says. “This is a problem because I admire him so much. It’s my job to sort it out. Take after take I was really uncomfortable. Finally I said, ‘Woody, I don’t want to bother you, but I’m not quite sure why she wants to confess this.’ And he said, ‘Oh, because she’s so happy.’ I said, ‘Happy? I thought she was guilty.’ ” Davis laughs at herself. “God, that was so classic. I read this scene absolutely as a Catholic. Guilt is what confession is all about in Catholicism. Of course, Woody’s Jewish, and I think he’s got a different take altogether. I learned an awful lot in two seconds. Which is when acting is great.”

She had a similar experience on “Absolute Power.”

“Again it was an issue of enjoyment,” Davis says. “I think Eastwood felt I wasn’t enjoying this creature’s sense of self. He kind of sidled up to me and said, ‘She likes power.’ ” Here Davis mimics a dull schoolboy. “ ‘Yes. Power. Right.’ ” She laughs. “It’s just so stupid, isn’t it? And he was right, of course.”

Davis says both Allen and Eastwood allow actors a lot of rope, although Eastwood shoots so fast she was reluctant to slow things down by offering alternative blockings. She was just trying to keep up with him.

The situation was far different on the Miami set of “Blood and Wine,” where Davis had nothing but time on her hands. In effect, her character had been written out of the script.

She says she was originally attracted to the project because her character is allowed to grow, something she is not often called on to do as an actress. This growing occurs during what she calls a lyrical interlude on the road with her son (played by Stephen Dorff) after she has a fight with her husband (Jack Nicholson). But by the time script revisions were done, the interlude was gone--as was much of what she calls the lovely relationship she had with her son.

“I’d been turned into a woman who had a limp,” Davis says. “In fact, Rafelson wanted me to wear a cast. So I said, ‘There’s a problem with this because I’m supposed to dance. How am I going to dance with a cast on my foot?’ ”

Davis leaps off the couch and starts hopping around the room in her short dress and heels and then mimics Rafelson’s growl: “ ‘Judy, that’s a good question. Let’s lose the cast. Keep the limp, lose the cast.’ I thought, ‘Christ, I was hoping we could lose the limp and then we could lose the walking stick that had suddenly made an appearance as well.’ ”

Although Davis doesn’t know why her character was turned into a woman with a limp, she says: “I always knew he was working on it, but I hadn’t realized that he had so little faith in the original conception of the woman. Things can become complicated with the female character. Sometimes you’re dealing with men’s complicated views of their own mothers.” She pauses. “That does happen with films, that you agree to do something and it ends up--I always feel betrayed. But it’s part of the system.”

Davis has not always been so sanguine about such “betrayals” or as willing to let the culprit (in this case, Rafelson) off the hook. Right from the beginning, when she was promoting “My Brilliant Career,” she spoke her mind. Consider that she did so as a 23-year-old plucked from obscurity to appear in a movie that made her an international star. (She’d been raised in Perth, in western Australia, and was six months out of drama school.)

“She never liked the part,” Armstrong says about the role of Sybylla Melvyn, a turn-of-the-century aspiring writer who flirts with and then rejects a very eligible suitor. “We had discussions over the character, but there were never any fights, no big dramas. She has this great moral sense--I’m sure that’s another thing that attracted her to ‘Children of the Revolution.’ She can’t lie. So when we started doing press with our new young talent, she would run down the film and her own performance. This really took people aback at the time, and a lot of them thought she had some sort of problem.

“But I always knew that she couldn’t help herself. It took a long time for her to learn that publicity is a game. You go out and say lovely things. She couldn’t do that, so we actually had to stop her doing publicity. Sure, it’s hurtful for a director to find your leading lady criticizing your film, but I think she’s now saying she realizes that it’s her own personal reaction to that character.”

Davis herself says her reputation for being difficult was the result of conflicts with director David Lean over her next big role, in ‘A Passage to India” (1984), which earned her a best actress Oscar nomination. At issue was the passivity of her sexually repressed character and what she saw as Lean’s inflexibility as a director. She made no attempt to gloss over their differences in the press. To many people, Lean, director of “Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia,” was a legend. Who was Judy Davis?

“I came over here to do some press, and every journalist I met had been fully briefed on the problems that Lean and I had,” she says. “I don’t know who briefed them. I can only assume it was with Lean’s blessing. I had no intention of discussing it at all with journalists. It seemed to me inappropriate.”

When it is suggested that maybe she shouldn’t have talked about it anyway, she says, echoing Spacey: “That’s because that’s what journalists put in their pieces. Why spend half of it talking about what she was saying about the current film when it’s more interesting to go on about Lean? So it’s not my choice. You end up as a subject of an interview wearing the choices that the journalist makes. I’ve got bits stuck to me of every crappy journalist I’ve ever spoken to.”

She laughs again, which takes the sting out of the statement. Nevertheless, she has a point. Bits have stuck to her through the years. Some of her colleagues continue to try to pull them off.

Duncan: “As far as I’m concerned, Judy will always listen to a reasonable, honest, intelligent, creative argument. If you can persuade her in that way, then she’ll gladly take direction or reconsider aspects of her character. I think where you have a problem with her is when she’s thought something through carefully and a director might give her direction on a visceral basis--’I just feel it should be like this.’ I think Judy is well within her rights to say, ‘Well, you’re not performing it, pal.’ ”

Lapine: “It isn’t a popularity contest, making a movie. It’s not about easy or hard; it’s about good. And the bottom line with her is that it’s always good.”

Spacey: “There’s not a director I’ve worked with worth his or her salt where you haven’t had arguments about what’s right. That’s what the creative process is supposed to be about. What’s annoying is everybody stepping back and taking its temperature and judging that process and saying, ‘That person is difficult,’ because they fight for this or that. She’s a great actress. She has a right to fight for what she believes in just like anybody else does.”

Of course, this may come at a price, especially for women. Davis has given many good--even great--performances, notably in “High Tide,” “Impromptu” and “Husbands and Wives.” But none of these films was high profile or mainstream.

“She is a person with extraordinary ethics and very strong critical tastes,” Armstrong says. “And she’s a rebel. That’s why I think she loved ‘Children of the Revolution.’ She wouldn’t want to do what’s expected, ever. She would want to go against the grain, and she would also want to choose things that she felt were personally challenging to her as a performer. So they haven’t necessarily been the most commercial films.”

Has her reputation for independence kept her from getting larger roles in bigger movies?

“I wouldn’t know,” Davis says reflectively. “And it’s not something that I choose to dwell on. In my own life there are more pressing matters. Long ago I decided it would probably be better for me not to work with somebody who would be influenced by things like that.”

One of the common observations about Davis is that Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with her. She laughingly recalls a conversation she had at a party with a Hollywood producer.

“He said, ‘Judy Davis, oh, God, I had a movie once I was so desperate for you to do. Wonderful character. She had a harelip. I just thought you’d be perfect.’ ”

This touches on the issue of the way she looks and the image she projects--even if, as she suggests, “90% of Hollywood doesn’t know who I am.”

“It’s certainly much easier to use classic-looking girls than somebody like me,” she says, the light in the hotel room now growing dim, although she’s too engrossed in what she’s saying to do anything about it. “I think young females are still used in cinema exclusively as girlfriends or sexual objects. And quite apart from looks, if you start your career playing a film that presents you as this sort of independent early feminist who spurns the handsome lover for a career, it’s not really setting you up as the next Hollywood girl.

“Because I seemed to have been defined so often in such strong terms, I really had to work out what I was. I’d better know that, because everybody seems to want to tell me. I’m probably stronger in myself now than I would have been had I taken any other route, so I don’t regret it.”

When it’s suggested that many people take the easy way out, Davis replies: “Maybe so. I guess the easy way out wouldn’t have been the easy way for me.”