ASHLEY'S ACT; THIS OTHER JUDD (WHO DOESN'T SING) LOVES BASKETBALL, KENTUCKY AND FILM WORK.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

For a study in contrasts, you can't do much better than Ashley Judd.

Well-read intellectual and rabid sports fan. Down-home country gal and French-speaking sophisticate. Articulate chatterbox but tight-lipped, visceral performer. Part-Appalachian, part-Hollywood hillbilly. Rags-to-riches poster girl. Born-again Christian with a pronounced naughty streak.

And, of course, a Judd who can't sing.

``Now that's not entirely true,'' the apple-cheeked Ashley says with a laugh, although she's often noted in the past that mom Naomi and sis Wynonna got the pipes in the family. ``I think these things just sorted themselves out when we were little. My sister expressed an interest in music from the time she was in Brownies. When we got a piano, she sat down and picked out the `Pink Panther' theme. I was in third grade and walked across a field like a character in the book I was reading.''

Another one of those contradictions, that venerable one about the steel magnolia, marked the Southland-born Southerner's pursuit of an acting career. The day she moved back to L.A. after growing up in Kentucky, she nailed an agent. Then she got a role in the first film she auditioned for, ``Kuffs'' - after refusing to take the part initially offered her, which required nudity.

That same, strong-willed confidence is more than evident in Judd's latest movie, ``Double Jeopardy,'' in which she plays a pampered young wife whose life takes a decidedly Charles Bronson turn. Wrongly convicted of killing her crooked financier husband (Bruce Greenwood), Libby Parsons learns in prison that he faked his death, took up a new identity and disappeared with their young son.

Upon her release, a toned-and-trained Libby relentlessly tracks her no-good ex to New Orleans, where she intends to kill him (the film is premised, inaccurately, on the supposition that you can't be charged twice with murdering the same person). But she's being pursued just as single-mindedly by her parole officer. He's played, intimidatingly enough, by Tommy Lee Jones, the old ``Fugitive'' chaser himself.

``I wasn't apprehensive about working with Tommy,'' Judd says of the formidable actor, who has a reputation for not suffering fools. ``I just made sure I'd remembered a lot of the dialogue from `Coal Miner's Daughter,' so I could say `Doo, you sound like an ol' bear growlin',' tease him and stuff.''

Cute. But Judd's main effort went toward ensuring that her protagonist remained tough-minded and not succumb to the weepier possibilities of the woman-in-jeopardy genre.

``When you become a little bit wiser about material, you can understand subtlety,'' Judd, 31, reckons. ``When Libby gets the bad news, I think people respond more to her tapping into grit and resilience. There were a few more dramatic scenes that were shot but not included in the final cut, I think rightly so. They didn't contribute to the momentum and the adrenaline of the ride we wanted to take the audience on, which was this righteous and - though I sort of hesitate to say it - revenge quest.''

Producer Leonard Goldberg, whose creative interest in strong women ranges from the ``Charlie's Angels'' TV series to the Julia Roberts hit ``Sleeping With the Enemy,'' had originally developed ``Double Jeopardy'' for Jodie Foster. But when that actress' pregnancy clashed with the shooting schedule, he went straight to someone he knew could deliver the goods.

``First of all, you have to love and root for this woman because she's going to carry you through the whole movie,'' Goldberg says. ``But then you have to have someone who can play this beautiful woman who looks very comfortable wearing expensive Armani outfits, is a sexy wife, and tender and loving with her child, but who then encounters a nightmare and finds the physical and inner strength that even she probably didn't know she possessed.

``And she is not going to be defeated. It required someone who could do all of those things, and I thought Ashley had it.''

Judd cautions against notions of superhuman self-assurance. She's happy to recount moments of lost control, such as the grueling scene where Libby's locked in a coffin that had her in tears all day.

``One of the things that gets me mad, or disappoints me about Hollywood, is people assuming that vulnerability is not there,'' she says. ``Just because a person is confident or well-spoken, well-rounded and interested in the world beyond their tiny little sphere, doesn't mean that I don't have that. It comes and goes, but we're all actually very fragile people; it's amazing how tenuous the art of living is.

``Maybe I just have the ability to overcome that when it counts.''

Judd's sphere of interests, not surprisingly, don't match the typical star's portfolio. Anyone who's watched a University of Kentucky basketball game knows that she's been a rabid fan since graduating a Phi Beta Kappa nominee from the school.

``Subjectively and objectively, the argument can be made that it's the program of the century,'' she says, fanatically. ``I've been known to get in the car and drive five hours to see their basketball games, then drive back that night. But I wouldn't have it any other way; I motivate myself by saying, `How will I feel at tipoff if I'm not there and have to watch this on television?' ''

That drive is from a big spread southwest of Nashville, where Ashley lives in a restored 1819 farmhouse amid acres of forest and farmland, not far from her mother and her sister's places. Staying so close to the family is important to her, as is staying far from L.A.'s intrusive media swirl.

``We don't have Spago,'' she says appreciatively. ``I think that my peace of mind and my solitude are greatly enhanced by being at home. And being close to family satisfies and nourishes something that you don't even know exists in you until it's at home getting stroked.''

The Judd women have always been close; for a long time, though, it was in far less comfortable circumstances. After divorcing marketer Michael Ciminella when Ashley was very little, Naomi moved her girls to Kentucky, where Ashley attended a dozen different schools and sometimes lived in places without electricity or running water.

The Judds' act took off as Ashley was coming into puberty; she could usually be found buried in a book while her mother and sister were singing. If she felt left out at all, that might explain some of her more attention-getting gambits later in life, such as wearing that daringly revealing slit gown at the Academy Awards ceremonies a few years back.

Judd has also been involved in some pretty high-profile romances, with singer Michael Bolton and co-stars Robert De Niro (``Heat'') and Matthew McConaughey (``A Time to Kill''). She's currently dating Scottish race car driver Dario Franchitti.

If his dangerous profession concerns her at all, she's typically good at overcoming it.

``He's been driving since he was 3 and racing since he was 13, so he's really good at what he does,'' she says. ``Though there was this one Scotsman we had dinner with recently who asked to see his hands and said, `They're so small, and they're all that stands between death and you.' But I don't worry. It's easy to trust him, even when he drives fast with me in the car.''

Judd co-stars with a different Scot, ``Star Wars' '' superhot Ewan McGregor, in her next feature release, ``Eye of the Beholder.'' In that film she plays a serial killer obsessed over, and protected by, a troubled detective.

It's exactly the kind of thing Naomi Judd, who has recently added her voice to the chorus of complaint against violent and sexually themed entertainment, probably wouldn't approve of. But Ashley sees little conflict between her work and her own strong, if not rigid, beliefs.

``I think it helps me to define a movie,'' she says of her faith. ``Because, as in literature, you can basically reduce a character and a story to some kind of a search. Like the classic story elements that we're taught in high school - humanity vs. nature, vs. itself, vs. animal - a person either has the love of God or they don't. And that's a great point of departure in figuring out how to feel when you're playing something.''

And Judd has to admit that there's nothing contradictory about her love for the journeys that grow from that starting point.

Even if they do require some hard traveling.

``I love it, I love acting, I can't imagine not doing it,'' she says. ``And I'm at a point where I've done enough movies that the way I approach the work has become second nature. So I want to make sure that I've got a little, internal barometer that doesn't let me get lazy or take something for granted or assume I know how to play something. I need a chance to inject it with a a new kind of creativity or an atypical approach.''

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PHOTO (1 -- 2 -- cover -- color) Actress shows multiple sides in new movie `Double Jeopardy.'

(3) no caption (Ashley Judd).