Ashley Judd

Biography of Ashley Judd

She is the daughter of Naomi Judd, a country music singer, and Michael Charles Ciminella, a marketing analyst. Her older sister, Wynonna, was also a country singer. Her paternal grandfather was of Sicilian descent, and her paternal grandmother was a descendant of Mayflower pilgrim William Brewster.

Her parents divorced her in 1972. The following year, she moved with her mother to Kentucky, where she spent most of her childhood. She also lived in Marin County, California for two years.

She attended thirteen schools before entering college. She was a student of the Kappa Gamma sorority at the University of Kentucky, where she studied French with minors in anthropology, art history, and theater. She spent a semester studying in France.

After college she moved to Hollywood, where she studied acting with Robert Carnegie at Playhouse West. During this time she worked in a restaurant and lived in a rental house in Malibu that burned down in 1993.

She rented a historic farmhouse and 10 acres of land in Williamson County, Tennessee, where she moved to live near her mother and her sister.

Ashley Judd participated in a couple of episodes of Star Trek, the New Generation.

Thanks to the independent film Ruby in Paradise, where she had the main role, she began to be taken into account by the big studios.

She subsequently participates in Natural Born Killers, and Time to Kill.

In The Kiss of Death (1997), a thriller with Morgan Freeman, she showed an image of a strong and self-sufficient woman.

She works in The collector of lovers in 1997 and two years later she co-starred with Tommy Lee Jones in the thriller Double cross. In 2002 she plays Tina Modotti in the movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek and she is the protagonist of Clan ya-ya with Sandra Bullock.

Her film career with titles as popular as Heat (1995), went into the background since in 2002 she decided to get involved in humanitarian work. She worked in defense of abandoned women and children in poor countries, among other causes.

In 2004, she took part in De-lovely, a Cole Porter biopic for which she received her second Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. In the same year she stars in Unexpected Turn with Samuel L. Jackson and Andy Garcia.

One of the most recognized interpretations of her was in the film Bug (2006) by William Friedkin. She works during 2009 in Crossing Over with Harrison Ford and Ray Liotta.

In 2010, she starred in the comedy Toothbreaker alongside Julie Andrews.

She played Rebecca Winstone in the television series The Missing (2012), for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie.In 2015, she appeared as Natalie Prior in The Divergent.

The actress was treated for depression in 2006. She revealed in her memoir, All That Is Bitter & Sweet, that she suffered sexual abuse as a child and that she grew up in an environment where drug use was commonplace.

In December 1999, she became engaged to Scottish driver Dario Franchitti, who has raced in the Champ Car World Series, IndyCar and NASCAR. They were married in December 2001 and had no children. The couple divorced in 2013.