COVER STORY : The Sudden Spotlight : Judy Davis has delivered great performances in mostly small films, but now finds herself in the year’s most talked-about movie

NEW YORK —  Before her lips part to let forth the sound of Australia ascendant, Judy Davis casts a cold blue eye on a waiter, thinking to herself what strange expressions Americans sometimes use.

“Are you still working on that?” is what the waiter has just asked, glancing down at her unfinished plate of scrambled eggs. When he is gone, she repeats the curious phrase aloud, measuring it for logic and vulgarity. “We don’t say that in Australia. It’s such a physical description of what you do when you eat: working on it. You think of sweating bodies shoveling food into themselves.”

Indeed! And this is exactly the sort of thing Judy Davis says all the time, which could be one of the reasons she has occasionally bumped egos with directors of varying nationalities who may not be accustomed to a film actress in 1992 who cares this much about language, not to mention the cargo of ideas being shipped ‘round the world in her movies.

“It just seemed a bit oversimplistic,” she said a few minutes earlier, thinking back with unfashionable honesty on “My Brilliant Career,” the much-loved 1978 Australian film that introduced her to the world at age 24 as its turn-of-the-century feminist heroine. “I think it would be apparent now if anybody bothers to watch it. But in ’78 it was seen as a valid comment on young women’s choices. And maybe it was. But I had lived such a secluded life really. I had never been out in the work force. I had never come up against major difficulties being a woman. It didn’t strike any deep chords in me at that point in my life.”

It is midsummer, fully a month before the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow contretemps would hit the newsstands with headline force and hurl “Husbands and Wives,” Allen’s new movie, into a maelstrom of scandal-sharpened scrutiny. Davis has a good and funny role in the film, which opens Friday. She plays a high-strung suburban housewife who finds herself unsuited to divorce from longtime husband Sydney Pollack. But initial press attention would focus on the similarity of one of the film’s plot lines to Allen’s real-life scenario of the past year in which his relationship with Farrow ended and he fell in love with her twentyish adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

For Davis, the attention would extend to her being “linked,” however improbably, by a gossip columnist to the director, even though, as Allen has stated publicly, his romantic interest in Previn began as early as last fall when “Husbands and Wives” was in production in New York.

Davis would have something to say about all this some weeks later, including the statement “I don’t know Woody Allen personally,” but on this day she would go walking across Central Park with a reporter while talking about her childhood, fame, beauty, “Basic Instinct,” a few of her movies, David Lean, feminism and her difficult relationship with her mother country, where she still makes her home.

Despite what she said about “My Brilliant Career,” her own career has been marked by much the same idealism and uncompromising spunk that audiences cheered in the character of Sybylla Melvyn, the disaffected young woman of the outback who Davis brought to life in long, high-necked muslin dresses for first-time director Gillian Armstrong. Although plainly one of the most interesting and gifted actresses of her generation, at age 37 she has yet to have a big role in a big film, unless you count her 1984 Oscar-nominated portrayal of the pale-tempered Adella Quested, the English gentlewoman awakened to passion on the subcontinent in director David Lean’s stately “A Passage to India.”

In contrast to her Sydney drama school classmate Mel Gibson (they played in “Romeo and Juliet” together), Davis has taken the high road in her profession, giving quietly spectacular performances in small and serious films--most recently “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” “Naked Lunch” and “Barton Fink,” and before that, “Impromptu,” “High Tide” and “Kangaroo”--most of them films with strong literary associations. In person, she seems more of a literary creation come to life than a wide-screen siren or star. Walking across the width of the park on this breezy, sunny afternoon wearing a loose, sleeveless black dress and small, Ben Franklin sunglasses, she is only once recognized and saluted by a passer-by.

By the time we reach the Tavern on the Green on the west side of the park, Davis confides that she’s “flagging a bit,” still recovering from the 20 hours in the air required to get from Sydney to Manhattan. After sitting down at an outdoor table, she orders a whiskey and soda and lights a cigarette.

We begin to talk about Australia, that distant mirror of America that never quite severed its ties with Great Britain and still exports many of its most talented artists overseas. Her national allegiance begins to flag a bit.

“Australians are much prouder of Peter Weir having gone away than if he’d stayed in Australia. He’d probably be undervalued if he’d done that. It’s disturbing, but that’s just the way the country is.

“It’s not a country of articulate people, sophisticated people. There’s too little subtlety. . . . Men and women don’t enjoy each other very much in Australia. I don’t find very many men sexy in Australia. Of course, I’m married and out of it, but still. . . .”

No sooner are these words out of her mouth than she realizes that, while she is speaking her mind as usual, there are politics to consider. “Maybe you shouldn’t write about any of this because I can see the headlines back home: ‘Davis Bags Aussies Again.’ Look, I live there, but I’m remote from the culture now. I shouldn’t be taken as a spokesperson for Australia. I don’t read the newspapers in Sydney. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Somewhere across Central Park, Woody Allen was doing . . . what?

*

Now it is September in Los Angeles, six weeks after our earlier conversation, and Davis is back from Sydney again, in town for the Emmy Awards. She was nominated for her appearance in a Hallmark Hall of Fame drama called “One Against the Wind,” a show that she neglected to mention in New York and that she doesn’t seem to want to talk about now. (She didn’t win.)

“Husbands and Wives” is getting more advance hype than any Woody Allen picture ever and Allen’s new studio, TriStar, hasn’t had to pay a cent for it. Instead, the unraveling details of Allen’s Charlie Chaplin-like affair with Farrow’s daughter have filled news and gossip columns for weeks, often tagged to the provocative bulletin that in his upcoming movie Allen’s character leaves his marriage to Mia Farrow’s character for a Columbia University student, played by Juliette Lewis.

“Have I talked to him?” Davis says quizzically, repeating the question she has just been asked. A waiter, perhaps a more civilized one than the last, has just poured her coffee at the Hotel Bel-Air. “Why would I talk to him? I don’t know him socially. We’re not friends in that sense. I think he’s great. We had a good working relationship. Why would I call him? It’s just not my business. Why bother him, poor guy? He’s been bothered enough.”

The gossip column item claiming she was also involved with the Woodman is mentioned and she only smiles. “Yes, I heard about it back in Australia. I don’t know how these things get started, I really don’t. I mean, I guess it’s flattering, but it’s completely untrue. I never even saw him off the set. We were like social bricks. We talked about the scenes, but that was it. I don’t think he likes to socialize with his actors.”

In a parallel plot line to the Allen-Farrow marriage and breakup in “Husbands and Wives,” Davis and Pollack separate amicably onscreen, but she has a much more difficult time than her husband getting back into the dating game, even when her first suitor is Liam Neeson. Davis manages to make her character’s bumpy return voyage into the world of men both hilarious and painful, which is her gift. She puts on a Scarsdale accent as flawlessly as she managed the flavor of Southern belledom in “Barton Fink,” playing the lover-secretary of John Mahoney’s William Faulkner-like writer.

“I really like playing Americans. The very first time I did it was on ‘Alice,’ ” the 1989 Allen movie in which she had a cameo as Joe Mantegna’s ex-wife. “It’s a very enjoyable dialect to talk in. And jokes sound better if you use an American accent. Don’t know why that is.

“This was a great part,” she says, “and a lot of fun, partly because of how good the writing was. Often with films I’ve done the essential problem has been the script, just trying to get these words to sound real and to find some good reason for saying them.

“But the degree of trust (Allen) extended to me and to everybody in the cast. . . . He was more than keen to share the creative process, as long as it made it sound more real, more lifelike, anything you wanted to throw in--well, not anything. But he demands improvisation. I suppose it was the freest I’d felt since ‘High Tide,’ where I actually helped create some of the scenes.”

Has she thought about the extra baggage audiences will bring to the movie now, maybe squirming a little during the breakup scenes between Allen and Farrow? Didn’t she find these painful to watch?

“Yes, it was. I suppose you just couldn’t help but view it differently. But one must remember that it was fiction. Audiences may refuse to see it that way, but when it was written it was a work of fiction.”

“Is she still wearing that white makeup that makes her look dead?” asked someone from Los Angeles’ Doolittle Theater who remembers Davis from the ill-fated run of Tom Stoppard’s mystifying espionage drama “Hapgood” in 1989.

She did not look dead by any means during our walk across the park, but her complexion does seem to belong to the 19th Century, when women still carried parasols to protect their pallor. Her hair is reddish brown, worn shoulder-length and straight with sharply permed strands and ringlets dribbling down each side of her forehead. Her lips, painted the same color as her hair, are lined with tiny ridges and look like small pillows that have just been puffed by the maid.

Up close, there is a residue of petulance about her and the face of a not-quite-modern woman--civilized but ornery, polite but untamed. Yet somehow missing is the arrogance of a true prima donna.

“Mostly they’ve been well-intentioned and have a moral theme,” she says, searching for a unifying element in her movies. “They’ve tried to capture something truthful. I think I’ve only made one film that I’ve found morally objectionable and that was a terrible mistake.” The film was “Who Dares Wins,” made in England in 1982 and retitled “The Final Option.” “I just misread the entire situation.”

In conversation, Davis listens closely when she’s not talking and then asks her own questions about what’s been said. As we walked along in New York, she asked: “What did you think of ‘Basic Instinct’?” She has been asking everyone she meets this question, using it as a litmus test to determine whether she wants to talk to the person any further. “It’s kind of a very unfair thing to do, but I can’t help myself. I did find it erotic,” she said about the movie, “but morally offensive. There is still a bit of a Catholic in me.”

She grew up in Perth, the main city on Australia’s distant west coast. Her family can be traced back to the original British settlement there in 1831.

She attended an all-girls’ Catholic convent school where “the girls who had the most status were the ones who were best at chemistry and trigonometry. Needless to say I was not any good at chemistry and trigonometry.

“I had quite a repressed childhood. I was born in ’55 and by the mid-’60s it was still very much a sort of ‘50s mentality there, being so remote. I just found it stifling. And at some point--I think I was about 12--I came to the conclusion that it was going to be difficult to survive that little society somehow intact.”

She says her parents were “people that didn’t want any social trouble at all, who wanted to behave in the way that was expected. Their great misfortune was having me for a daughter because it’s never been part of my nature, that. My tendency when I see a set of rules being made, my instinct is to break them--social rules, I mean. I’m not talking about robbing banks.”

At 17 she escaped from the isolation of Perth to the cultural capital of Sydney, where she entered the National Institute of Dramatic Art and learned her trade alongside the young man who would later hurtle to fame in “The Road Warrior.”

“I didn’t know Mel intimately. We did ‘Romeo and Juliet’ together. He was very good, too. Very romantic. He’s very sweet. He’s always had an incredible effect on audiences--male and female. He did, of course, a lot of plays at drama school, and every time without fail that he walked onstage, a ripple would run through the audience. This is when he was a kid of 18. It was quite odd. I always wanted to know how he did it: How does he do that ripple thing?”

Gillian Armstrong picked her for the lead in “My Brilliant Career” after seeing her onstage. “A young, brash anti-heroine--a ghastly little creature she was,” is how Davis describes Sybylla now. “In a high moral world, I wouldn’t have done it because I had problems with it, but I did do it. Then I tried to change Gillian’s mind about the sort of film she wanted to make.

“I think I asked her unnerving questions like, ‘I just don’t know why she would kiss him here?’ and Gillian would get this look on her face. And Sam Neill, who was the one who had to kiss me, was thinking, ‘Get me out of this nightmare.’ But I believed what I was saying: This girl was far too neurotic to ever make the first move.”

When “My Brilliant Career” came out, it was hailed by critics in Europe and America as one of the major events of the Australian New Wave, and Davis suddenly found herself the toast of the nation. She was not comfortable with the fame and attempts by some in Australia to enshrine her immediately as a national treasure.

“I was just a year out of drama school and all this focus was suddenly on me. It was absurd. I didn’t deal with it very well. I mean, it can happen to anyone who gets a lot of attention very early. It can be destructive. I just wanted to be left alone to become an actress. I’ve never really pursued stardom. But I have actively pursued the craft of acting. And I felt when I was young I had to really struggle to be given that right--the right to fail and do little things, to work in the theater and not have every fingernail analyzed.

“I didn’t go to Hollywood because I don’t know that it would have got me very far anyway. I certainly wasn’t ready. I say I didn’t go, but if I’d been offered something that was challenging and good, I would have come. But I wasn’t offered anything.”

She accepted David Lean’s offer to play Adella in “A Passage to India,” which turned out to be the 76-year-old director’s swan song and an experience she does not remember fondly. The two did not get along, she says, because “he decided that the character that I was playing was almost a blank until the incident that unleashes her sensuality. I had a problem with that because I didn’t see her as a blank. I don’t know how to play a blank. He kept telling me to do nothing.

“He was very old-fashioned and uncomfortable discussing things with actors. He didn’t like to be asked questions. If you mentioned anything about the book, he’d say . . .”--and now, suddenly, Davis is doing a very amusing impersonation of the great David Lean, making the wheezing, whooshing sound of an old man railing at the gods--” ’Oh, that book ! I wish you’d never read it! I wish none of you had ever read it!’ ”

She returned to Australia to do a movie with her husband, actor Colin Friels. “Kangaroo” was an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s autobiographical and political novel about the year he spent in Sydney searching for a new society after World War I.

Then she reunited with Armstrong to make the 1988 film in which some believe she has given her greatest performance--”High Tide,” about a troubled young mother’s unexpected reunion with the teen-age daughter she abandoned for reasons the movie takes pains to reveal. Written by Laura Jones, it is a terse, poignant mother-daughter story that builds to a surprising emotional climax and offers the bonus of some nicely observed scenes of Davis working as a jaded backup singer to an Australian Elvis impersonator. It also features Friels as a passing love interest.

Distributed erratically in the United States by Hemdale, the film won critical acclaim but was not widely seen in its initial release. Davis, who is nothing if not critical of her own movies, says, “I don’t think ‘High Tide’ is a great film, but it has great intentions and at times I think a wonderful honesty. When I say it’s not a great film, there are not many great films.”

The New Wave that first carried Davis to prominence ebbed prematurely, in part because of cutbacks in government financing of films and new tax laws. She has not worked in Australia in five years, though she plans to continue to live there and commute across the oceans for pictures. Despite her ambivalence about the country, she wants her 5-year-old son to grow up in Sydney.

“If I didn’t have a child I might well be living in New York or Los Angeles because (the United States) is the absolute center now for work. Most of the other film industries have dried up. But I don’t want my son to be a migrant. He may choose to later in life--probably, you know, get the first plane to L.A., I can just see it now. But for the time being, the soil that he’s standing on, nobody can question his right to that. Does this sound stupidly sentimental? I think it means something. A sense of history.”

*

Considering what she has said about some of her other films, her review of “Husbands and Wives,” which she has seen now twice, would have to qualify as a rave. And since she has already made it clear she is not after stardom, the fact that it may be her best role yet in an American film evidently is not the issue.

“I really feel it has a level of honesty that I may not have seen in (Allen’s) films before. I know ‘Manhattan’ had a wonderful zing to it. You know at the end when he’s with the girl and he says, ‘You’ll only be gone for three months.’ But you don’t entirely believe it.

“I really think Woody Allen’s and Mia Farrow’s performances are both quite beautiful. I thought that even when I first saw it, and none of this business had come out yet.”

She brings up a scene from the film where Allen, playing a Columbia English professor, has gone to a birthday party for Lewis, his student, and when they are alone in the kitchen, she asks him for a birthday kiss.

“He looked so vulnerable there. I’ve never ever seen him achieve a level of performance like that.”

Soon, she falls silent, as though she has made the final point to be made about the movie and all the rest of it. The soft morning hubbub of the dining room at the Bel-Air provides a comforting murmur in the background.

A hotel employee appears at the edge of the table and says, “Miss Davis, your car is here.”

We talk just a few minutes more and she says something about how much of what she does is learned and how much was given to her at birth.

“To a degree, despite themselves, actors reveal what they are. To some degree. Our faces do communicate things whether we like it or not.”

One thinks of the line in “My Brilliant Career” when Sybylla Melvyn is told by her aunt that she possesses “a wildness of spirit that’s going to get you in trouble all your life.” Looking at Davis now as she tilts her head down and stares upward with a look of refinement gone awry, you realize it’s no wonder audiences found the line easy enough to believe.

“I think when I was a kid, really little,” she says, remembering when she first became aware of what it was she was born to do, “I remember showing off monstrously at a mass, not because I was an obnoxious child, but just because I thought it would be really funny. A lot of people around me thought it was funny, too, for a little while. I remember my mother gave me a whack.

“I think if I got a series of appalling reviews for something, I could very easily be convinced that I have no talent at all. I think we’re all like that. You know it’s quite hard being an actor. It’s very insecure. For me it’s been a process of accepting the fact that finally you can’t hide these pieces of yourself. That if you are going to continue acting you have to be prepared for everything that’s possible to be revealed. And that’s very difficult to learn. I certainly didn’t realize when I began that it would be that confronting. And I’m always surprised when I meet someone who’s not an actor (and) the levels of insecurity they haven’t even begun to deal with.”