By SEAN DALY Special to the Daily Press
“I have no luck with movie husbands at all,” laughs Ashley Judd, as she sweeps into her second floor hotel suite at the Marina del Ray Ritz-Carlton sporting pink stretch pants, a pink and blue striped jacket and virtually no make-up. “Fortunately, I have better luck with real life husbands... but that's not up for discussion today.”
What a tease!
Judd, 33, who once dated Matthew McConaughey, Michael Bolton and Robert DeNiro (at different times, of course) prefers to avoid conversations about her December 2001 marriage to race car driver Dario Franchitti, 27. And don’t even try to ask when she plans to start a family. “It’s for God to know and for us to find out,” she says. “We’ll see what happens.”
Today, in between sips of bottled water, the daughter and younger sister of country singers Naomi and Wynona Judd would rather talk about her latest movie, “High Crimes,” which opened April 5. In the drama, based loosely on the Joseph Finder novel of the same title, Judd stars as Claire Heller Chapman, a San Francisco lawyer, who joins forces with a former military attorney (Morgan Freeman) to help defend her husband in military court. (He has been declared a deserter and is charged with participating in a mass killing in El Salvador).
Judd says she prepared for the role by conferring with a female attorney from northern California.
“I was real interested in the mindset of ‘I’m 32, I can conquer the world, this might be morally ambiguous, but according to the letter of the law, it’s a fact,’” she says.
“High Crimes” also has a lot to say about injustice and cover-ups within the military, the actress adds.
“But I want to be careful not to pontificate and remember that movies are entertainment and a diversion and actors aren’t necessarily great geniuses walking around with all the answers.”
That’s exactly why director Carl Franklin (”One True Thing”) made sure to have an expert military consultant on set at all times.
“I wouldn’t say we got (the proceedings) down to the punctuation mark,” Judd admits. “But we were definitely down to the letter. Authenticity is incredibly important to Carl. Obviously we are starting with a plot that is credible, but we have this issue of marriage where the husband has this secret that he is concealing.”
Which, of course, raises an interesting question: How can a woman live with her husband for so many years and not have any idea what he is up to?
“I think everyone has secrets in their hearts,” Judd laughs.
One of hers, it turns out, is that she was not entirely prepared for her signature role in the 1997 drama “Kiss The Girls.”
“I would never have admitted it at the time, but I was probably a little green,” she blushes.
That’s the movie that first paired Judd and Freeman as a detective and a young woman who escapes the clutches of a serial killer.
“Today,” she gushes, “I can loosen up around him and enjoy his Moran-esque Morganism.”
There are a few other personal tidbits Judd is willing to share as she runs her fingers through her newly-bobbed haircut. For starters, she is a big fan of running, rock climbing and mountain hiking. She has also developed a passion for yoga — “When I’m on a roll, I will do it six days a week,” she says. And you can forget those reports about Judd being a strict vegetarian.
That went out the window last New Year’s Eve, she confesses.
5BE,“I was frying everybody chicken and I decided to partake, which was bizarre. I never thought I would eat another chicken in my life. I was repulsed by chicken. But it was damn good.”
Judd was born in Granada Hills, Calif., but named after the small town of Ashland, Kentucky. She was raised in the Bluegrass State, and attended four different high schools, where she “played soccer badly, played basketball badly... but was a good cheerleader.”
While her family name is synonymous with country music, Judd says she “only sings for her nephew.” In an interview last spring, Judd said she would consider singing with her sister “if the right opportunity came up.” But now she jokes: “Somebody told me she said I was a really bad singer, so I changed my mind.”
Judd family lore tells of Ashley earning a wage of $10 per hour cleaning out the family tour bus as a teen. These days, her time is more valuable — she earned a reported $4 million for last year’s romantic comedy “Someone Like You.”
Judd has said she intends to use some of her fortune to renovate her new dream house, a 100 year-old estate in Tennessee.
“I’m modeling it after C.S. Lewis’ ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ with cubbyholes and secret passageways, old gun cabinets and medicine chests built of chestnut,” she shares. “That was the first book ever read to me as a child, and my house needs to be a magical place.”
(Sean Daly is president of Showtime Entertainment and is a Santa Monica-based writer).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 8, 2002. Read the original PDF.