Ashley Judd

Ashley Judd (born Ashley Tyler Ciminella; April 19, 1968) is an American actress.

She grew up in a family of performing artists, the daughter of country music singer Naomi Judd and the half-sister of country music singer Wynonna Judd.

Her acting career has spanned more than three decades, and she has become heavily involved in global humanitarian efforts and political activism.

Judd was born in 1968 in Granada Hills, Los Angeles.

Her parents are Naomi Judd, who later became a country music singer and motivational speaker, and Michael Charles Ciminella, a marketing analyst for the horse racing industry.

Ashley's elder half-sister, Wynonna Judd, is also a country music singer.

Ashley's paternal grandfather was of Sicilian (Italian) descent, and her paternal grandmother was a distant descendant of Mayflower pilgrim William Brewster.

Judd's parents divorced in 1972 when she was four.

The following year, Judd's mother Naomi returned with Ashley to Kentucky, where Judd lived for most of her childhood.

Judd attended 13 schools before college, including the Sayre School (Lexington, Kentucky), Paul G. Blazer High School (Ashland, Kentucky), and Franklin High School in Tennessee.

She briefly tried modeling in Japan during a school break.

At the University of Kentucky, she majored in French and minored in anthropology, art history, theater, and women's studies.

She joined the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma.

Judd spent a semester studying in France as part of her major.

She graduated from the University of Kentucky Honors Program and was nominated to Phi Beta Kappa.

After college Judd moved to Hollywood, where she studied with acting teacher Robert Carnegie at Playhouse West.

During this time, she worked as a hostess at The Ivy restaurant and lived in a Malibu rental house.

Around that time, she returned East to Williamson County, Tennessee, where she lived near her mother and sister.

When Judd was born, her mother was a homemaker (Naomi did not achieve fame as a singer until the early 1980s).

By the end of the 1990s, Judd had achieved considerable success as a leading actress, having lead roles in additional thrillers that performed well at the box office, including Kiss the Girls (1997) and Double Jeopardy (1999).

Starting in 1991, Judd appeared as Ensign Robin Lefler, a Starfleet officer, in two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Darmok" and "The Game".

From 1991 to 1994, she had a recurring role as Reed, the daughter of Alex (Swoosie Kurtz), on the NBC drama Sisters.

She made her feature film debut with a small role in 1992's Kuffs.

Judd has starred in films that have been well received, and that have been box office successes, including Ruby in Paradise (1993), Heat (1995), Smoke (1995), Norma Jean & Marilyn (1996), A Time to Kill (1996), Kiss the Girls (1997), Double Jeopardy (1999), Where the Heart Is (2000), Frida (2002), High Crimes (2002), Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), De-Lovely (2004), Twisted (2004), Bug (2006), Dolphin Tale (2011), Olympus Has Fallen (2013), Divergent (2014), Dolphin Tale 2 (2014), Big Stone Gap (2014), Barry (2016) and A Dog's Way Home (2019).

In 1993, she was cast in her first starring role playing the title character in Victor Nuñez's Ruby in Paradise.

This won the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize.

Believing that this role would shape the rest of her career, Judd was extremely nervous before the audition, nearly getting into a car accident en route.

"From the first three sentences, I knew it was written for me", she told the San Jose Mercury News.

She received rave reviews in her role as Ruby Lee Gissing, a young woman trying to make a new life for herself.

Nuñez told biographer James L. Dickerson that Judd created the resonance of this character: "The resonance, those moments, was not contrived. It was just a matter of creating the scene and trusting that it was worth telling."

Oliver Stone, who had seen Judd in Nuñez's film, cast her in Natural Born Killers, but her scenes were cut from the version of the film released theatrically.

The following year, she gained critical acclaim for her role as Harvey Keitel's estranged daughter in Wayne Wang's Smoke and as Val Kilmer's wife in Michael Mann's Heat.

That same year she played the role of Callie in Philip Ridley's dark adult fairy tale The Passion of Darkly Noon.

In 1996, she co-starred with Mira Sorvino as Marilyn Monroe in Norma Jean and Marilyn, where she recreated the photo shoot for the centerfold for the first issue of Playboy.

The same year she had a supporting role in the thriller film A Time to Kill.

It received positive reviews and was a major box office success.

In the early 2000s she starred in Where the Heart Is (2000), Someone Like You (2001), and High Crimes (2002).

These were moderate box office successes.

Her film Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002) performed well.

She starred as Rebecca Winstone in the 2012 television series Missing, for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie.