An early starring role alongside Paul Rudd. A final college course that took more than
a decade to complete. A life-threatening injury thousands of miles away from home. Ashley Judd's
lifelong transformation has been filled with adventure, tragedy, and plenty of headlines.
Born in 1968 in Los Angeles, Ashley Judd's origin story isn't a particularly glamorous one.
As she revealed in her memoir All That Is Bitter and Sweet, her childhood was lonely and dotted
with incidences of sexual abuse after her mother and sister hit it big in the country music scene.
She repressed a lot of what happened to her, only unpacking the trauma after she began therapy
in 2006. But she's also acknowledged that each member of her family has their own
memories that could contradict her own. As she explained while speaking to Today,
"The book is very honest [but] it's not necessarily accurate, because everyone in
my family has their own perspective and their own experiences. But it's very true for me."
Judd's childhood also involved moving around a lot. She reportedly attended 12 different schools
before she finally graduated from high school. And at various points, she lived in different homes,
whether with her grandparents, her father Michael, or her mother Naomi . This left
young Ashley vulnerable to people who didn't have her best interests in mind,
as was clear when she was sexually assaulted by a family member. As she explained to Today,
"We came from a dysfunctional family system that didn't work very well.
So the kinds of things that happened to me are very typical and standard and indicative
of a family system that doesn't work very well."
After finishing high school, Judd headed to the University of Kentucky and majored in French.
She ultimately ended up dropping out, even though she was an honors student who was also accepted
into the Peace Corps. But instead of heading overseas on a humanitarian or diplomatic mission,
she moved to Hollywood in pursuit of an acting career.
With her mother Naomi and sister Wynonna's music career, showbiz was certainly already part of her
family, but Ashley was the first to try acting professionally. She ended up following a similar
path as many Hollywood hopefuls, as she worked as a hostess at the Ivy restaurant and as a
receptionist at a creative arts agency while going to auditions. Eventually, she made her way back to
the Peace Corps, as she took a break from acting and volunteered for the organization in 1999.
In 1991, Ashley Judd was cast on the NBC drama series Sisters.
The experience brought her into close contact with another future star, Paul Rudd, who also
counts the show as his first professional acting role, as Rudd's character Kirby ends
up dating and then marrying Ashley's character Reed. Alas, the union eventually turns sour,
but off screen, Judd's career was moving along in much happier directions.
In 1993, Judd landed her first starring film role, in Ruby in Paradise. She played a woman
named Ruby Lee Gissing who moves from Tennessee to Florida after the death of her mother.
Judd garnered some significant critical praise, with Entertainment Weekly fore one declaring,
"Judd conveys such a quiet war of emotions -- a need for security coupled
with a yearning for identity -- that Ruby's very tentativeness comes to seem a sign of strength."
"Yeah, I guess that's it."
It was a hectic audition process for Judd. Ruby in Paradise was in fact her fourth audition of
the day, and she was frantic by the time she arrived. She was struggling to find her scenes
in the script when she was spotted, and as she explained during an interview with Roger Ebert,
"The casting director sees this and she says to me, 'Take your time,
go home. Come back when you're ready. He'll want to talk to you about character.'"
Judd followed that advice and then ended up coming back and landing the role,
and thus her career trajectory was really rolling along.
After Ruby in Paradise, it seemed like Ashley Judd was pretty much everywhere. Her career
was really cooking throughout the rest of the decade, as she starred in a succession of films
that helped her make a name for herself. One of them was the 1996 TV movie Norma Jean & Marilyn,
in which she played Norma Jean. As fans of legendary movie star Marilyn Monroe surely know,
her birth name was Norma Jean Mortenson, and so this film portrays two different versions of the
same woman. Britt Hayes of The Austin Chronicle praised Judd's performance, as she noted,
"Judd's Norma Jean is tenacious and resilient, having endured [...] repeated physical and
emotional trauma at the hands of various men throughout her life."
While Judd was enjoying enormous professional success at this time,
her personal life was a bit of a mess. And quite frankly, she was tired of answering
questions about her private life. As she put it during an interview in 1999,
"If you don't protect yourself you're not going to have anything left."
In 2004, Ashley Judd combined her acting skills and her unsurprisingly enormous singing ability
when she co-starred in the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely alongside Kevin Kline.
He played the famous composer-slash-singer, while she played his wife Linda.
Choosing to sing in the movie wasn't really an issue for Judd, at least not at first.
But when it came time to actually do it, she found herself hesitant. As she admitted to Lawrence.com,
"I have a healthy enough ego to think I have a reasonable, if not outright pleasant, voice.
However, when it came time to sing I had a real crisis of confidence."
Alas, both Judd and her then-husband Dario Franchitti weren't entirely happy
about how she sounded in the movie. He encouraged her to go back and try again,
but she accepted the results as they were. And ultimately, it worked out for her,
as she garnered plenty of praise, including a Golden Globe nomination.
"I have spoiled you. I have indulged you."
In 1999, Judd met British race car driver Dario Franchitti at a wedding reception.
The pair were set up by friends, and Franchitti didn't know anything about Judd and her famous
family when they met. They married two years later in 2001 in his native Scotland,
with Judd's sister, Wynonna, serving as her maid of honor.
During their time together, Judd became quite the expert on auto racing,
often showing up at the track to cheer her husband on. Alas, their union didn't last forever,
as they ended up divorcing in 2013. As they announced in a statement to People Magazine,
"We have mutually decided to end our marriage. We'll always be family and continue to cherish
our relationship based on the special love, integrity, and respect we have always enjoyed."
Ashley Judd was visiting her sister Wynonna at the Shades of Hope Treatment Center when
she began to realize that she might have issues of her own to confront.
Counselors at the center agreed and told her that she could also stay at the center for treatment,
so she did. As she explained to Glamour in 2006,
"One of the things families are asked to do is allow the person in treatment
to talk about their perception of their lives without interruption.
I found I was having traumatic responses to what I was hearing: I would get light-headed
and almost pass out. And what I realized is that I wanted this opportunity for myself."
According to Judd, her addictions were behavioral, as opposed to chemical, so it wasn't something
that she would've sought help for on her own. Ultimately, she was able to walk away from the
experience a stronger person, as she learned how to be the best version of herself. As she put it,
"I have to feel all my feelings instead of numbing myself to them — and actually,
when I allow myself to do that, they pass more quickly."
"A lot of y'all know I'm a strong, powerful woman in recovery,
and recovery takes a tune-up from time to time."
When Ashley Judd dropped out of the University of Kentucky to pursue a career in Hollywood,
she had only one course left to finish. Despite the professional success she went on to enjoy,
she always wanted to finish up her degree at her original school.
So in 2007, she did just that when she graduated with her Bachelor's in French.
Judd credits her professors at Kentucky for inspiring her to believe in herself enough to take
that step. In an interview the year before she graduated, she told the Lexington Herald-Leader,
"I had the most extraordinary professors who encouraged me, believed in me — I can feel
myself start to cry — and nurtured my gifts. It was the most pivotal, seminal moment of my life."
In 2011, Ashley Judd added "published author" to her resume when she released her memoir
All That Is Bitter and Sweet. She didn't hold back while describing her troubled childhood,
and her mother Naomi stepped back and allowed her daughter to tell her story as she understood it.
That couldn't have been easy, especially considering the accusation from Ashley that
her stepfather and mother had committed, as she put it, "covert sexual abuse," by having
a significant amount of loud sex in a house that had thin walls. But as Naomi told Today,
"I love my daughter. I hope her book does well."
Ashley appreciated her mother's response, as she explained,
"I'm very grateful for my mother's exquisitely
gracious attitude toward my right to share my narrative."
"I grew up in some really extreme situations."
Also noteworthy about the memoir was what wasn't included. As the Washington Post noted in its
review, for example, Judd's ex-husband Dario Franchitti is hardly mentioned and appears to be
less important than her pets. We imagine that any animal lover can understand that one, at least!
In 2021, Ashley Judd was on a humanitarian trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo
when she suffered a fall that resulted in a very scary injury. She shattered her leg
and then had to undergo a 55-hour rescue effort that was only possible thanks to the people who
were nearby to help her. She wrote about the injury on her Instagram, as she revealed how
serious the situation was when she finally made it to the hospital. As she put it,
"I arrived [...] from DRC in terrible shape and my leg had no pulse. I desperately needed
a blood transfusion. Their sisters (nurses) are exemplary, technically top notch,
and they cared for the trauma in my body as well as my soul with equal proficiency."
Judd's father was also able to help her recover,
as he flew to Johannesburg, South Africa to meet her. As she detailed on Instagram,
"I'm very thankful to all of the experts, including [...] my Pop, who is rubbing my
foot to remind my foot while it still cannot move that it is connected to my body."
Ultimately, Judd recovered from her injury and in January 2022
celebrated the fact that she was able to hike 25 miles.
"I'm in a lot of love. I'm in a lot of compassion, and I'm in a lot of gratitude."
Country music fans around the world were stunned
by the news that Naomi Judd passed away on April 30, 2022. Of course,
no one was more devastated than her daughters Ashley and Wynonna. In the weeks that followed,
Ashley became the de facto spokesperson for all things related to Naomi's death.
A few weeks later, Ashley sat down for an interview with Diane Sawyer on Good
Morning America and revealed that Naomi had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
After explaining that the family wasn't sure if they wanted to release that information at all,
Ashley went on to speak about the severity of her mother's mental illness
and how she had spent her last day. As she revealed,
"I visit with my mom and pop every day when I'm home in Tennessee, so I was at the house visiting
as I am every day. Mom said to me, 'Will you stay with me?' and I said, 'Of course I will.'"
When Ashley went upstairs to let her mother know that a friend had arrived to see her,
she discovered her mother's body.
"I have both grief and trauma from, um, from discovering her."
After all that Ashley Judd and her family have been throughout their lives,
our hearts are with them during this difficult time.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.