Except where it matters, of course. Davis, 45, is smashing in “Life With Judy,” a loving yet turbulent treatment of one of Hollywood’s true and tragic divas. “Life With Judy” follows Garland from her unhappy childhood in vaudeville to her untimely death by overdose in a London bathroom. (Tammy Blanchard plays the young Judy. She’s positively spooky in the “Wizard of Oz” scenes.) The movie is based on the warts-and-all autobiography of daughter Lorna Luft, and frankly it could have used fewer warts. The need to be adored, the epic battles with drugs and her weight, the dastardly deeds of the movie studios–we get the point pretty quickly. But while the mini-series can sometimes turn heavy-handed, Davis is always a remarkable mixture of subtlety and passion. Watch her do “Over the Rainbow” at one of the famous 1951 Palace Theatre concerts. She may be wearing dark contact lenses and lip-syncing over Garland, but everything else–the squint in her eye, the pathetic smile, the bruised aura–comes from somewhere deep inside Davis. She nails Garland so thoroughly it hurts.
At least that’s our opinion. Davis isn’t so sure. “There are moments when I think I’m pretty good,” she says with a deep, almost hypnotic Australian accent, “little moments maybe nobody else will notice where I think, I’ve got her there. For that split second, I got some essence.” Davis is a notoriously tough customer. She earned that reputation years ago for criticizing the revered David Lean, even though his direction of “A Passage to India” earned her a 1984 Oscar nomination. “My early, early years were spent in Catholic school, hearing those huge women in black say, ‘You must not lie!’ It’s gone right down my subconscious,” she says. Davis is still refreshingly no-nonsense. She’s wearing jeans and a leather jacket with a tiny strand of pearls. Even her eyebrows are absolutely straight. Not surprisingly, she’s best-known for her intense, even severe, characters, which may explain why she’s made four Woody Allen films. She especially likes playing Americans. “It’s an easier dialect to work with. It’s more dynamic,” says Davis, who lives in Australia with her two children and actor-husband, Colin Friels. “I’ll probably get shot now when I reach Sydney airport.”
There were times when folks working on “Life With Judy” wanted to shoot her, too. The most notorious episode came during a scene that required Garland to be barefoot. They were filming at 3 a.m., but that didn’t stop Davis from summoning Luft to ask the burning question: did Garland wear toenail polish? “She nearly fell over, she was so shocked. Then she found it very funny,” Davis says. In fact, Luft, who also coproduced the mini-series, quickly came to welcome Davis’s obsession with accuracy. “When you’re making a film about someone who was bigger than life, you have to be really, really careful. There are certain people who know every gesture, every eyelash blink,” says Luft. Rest assured, friends of Dorothy. In “Life With Judy Garland,” even the fake eyelashes are for real.
