JUDY ON JUDY.

IN HER FIRST GAY PRESS INTERVIEW, JUDY DAVIS TALKS ABOUT CHANNELING JUDY GARLAND'S TALENT, HER TRAGIC VULNERABILITY, AND HER SEXUAL AMBIGUITY FOR THE UPCOMING ABC MINISERIES LIFE WITH JUDY GARLAND: ME AND MY SHADOWS--AND ABOUT FINDING THE PUPPY WITHIN TO SNUGGLE UP TO GLENN CLOSE

"Oh, there you are," exhales Judy Davis as she rounds the corner of a Toronto hotel bar in a lavender sweater, near-black lipstick, and spiky eggplant-color hair that adds a wonderful menace to her moon-pale face.

It's a tense moment, since Davis is not keen on interviews--often with the excellent excuse that by the time any given film comes out, she's home in Australia with her husband and two children. Even at the time of her headline-grabbing role as the woman who kisses Glenn Close in 1995's highly rated NBC TV movie Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story, Davis wasn't readily accessible. Dig up the few U.S. interviews she's ever done, and you'll read little warnings like "Judy Davis doesn't suffer fools gladly."

In other words, she's always sounded Like a woman we'd adore.

In person, she doesn't disappoint. Although she's clearly bone-tired--she was filming till dawn on the ABC miniseries Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows--Davis is not slinging diva vibes about having to share her day off with a reporter. Her concern is that time is short, and having agreed to this exclusive interview, her first with the U.S. gay press, she's determined to give a proper one. Settling into a dark corner, her smoker's voice a husky whisper, she jumps right into a conversation that's as gracious, candid, and funny as if she weren't firing answers into a tape recorder at high speed.

"When they first approached me to play Garland," she begins, "I was flabbergasted. I didn't understand why me." Any fan of either Judy could tell you that: Just try to think of somebody else who could match Garland's legendary intensity. Besides, as Davis regales you with yarns about the film (which airs February 25 and 26 at 9 p.m., Eastern time) you catch another connection. Like Garland herself, Davis is a sparkling wit. You've seen her on-screen, telling stories just this way: eyes narrowed,, suppressing the wicked hint of a smile--as though life had just sneaked her a slug of spiked lemonade.

Davis seems genuinely surprised that lesbians know and admire her body of work: My Brilliant Career (1979), her screen debut, in which she rejected Sam Neill and a pile of money in order to labor on a memoir; A Woman Called Golda (1982), in which she rejected Leonard Nimoy and a secure life in order to go off and lead Israel; A Passage to India (1984), her Oscar-nominated breakthrough, in which she rejected an entire Kama Sutra carved on a Hindu temple wall.

Americans know Davis best for her collaborations with cinema's other great ambivalent, Woody Allen. She got a second Oscar nod, as Best Supporting Actress, for her wildly funny hysterics in Allen's Husbands and Wives (1992). Three years later Davis shifted gears for a warm, supportive, and Emmy-winning lesbian turn in Serving in Silence. Putting the come-hither moves on Col. Grethe Cammermeyer (Close), Davis's character teases her lover out from behind the rigidity of a lifetime of spit and polish.

It all adds up to a raffish sex appeal that draws other women very powerfully indeed. Not that men are immune to Davis. At least one gay man on the Shadows set embarrassedly confesses he gets completely turned on when she's near. For all these reasons, she's the right choice to play Garland.

Why did you take the part of Judy Garland?

It scared the life out of me, really. It took me a while to come to feel that it was something I really wanted to do. In fact, playing it now [that we're filming] is much more intense, much more emotional than I anticipated. She's an all-consuming woman, and I hadn't anticipated that. I'm feeling quite motherly toward Lorna [Luft, Garland's daughter], which is strange. I didn't expect that kind of thing to happen.

What did Lorna tell you about her mother that surprised you?

Lorna was quite young when her mother died, and I think that she's probably blocked out some of the memories. I talked to her a little bit about that, but I wasn't prepared to go around and poke and hurt her. I know Lorna has put herself here because she wrote the book and she's executive producer on this film, so it should be a case of "take no prisoners," but I can't do it. She's a fantastic survivor. She's great.

What did the gay men in your life think when you said you were going to play Judy?

There's an actor I know, he's gay, he was gorgeous about it. He said, "Oh, she's in you. She's in you already." Which is obviously ridiculous and untrue but a lovely thing for one actor to say to another.

The relationship she had with gay men, I believe you'll also develop after this.

Do you think? The Atlantic Monthly just published a story called "The Queen Is Dead." I don't want to misrepresent the writer, but I think he was saying that the Judy Garland cult existed for gay men at a time when it was so difficult to be gay, they so badly needed some sort of survival rope, and Garland was crucial. But for young gay men now, Judy Garland and the men who loved her represent a time that they are quite happy to leave behind. I think at that time a lot of homosexual men loved Garland because of the extremes she reached when she performed. Everything she did worked toward the most thrilling, utterly intense, overwhelming life experience.

And you feel that particularly connects to the gay personality?

In the '50s and '60s, to make that choice took such extraordinary courage. What [gay men] were walking away from was the conventional life. The house in the suburbs, the sense of life being easy and calm, a little dull but fulfilling. Garland was absolutely not that. She was such an extraordinary survivor and the most phenomenally talented woman. That potency will never go.

As for gay women, after Serving in Silence, a lot of women want to run away with you.

None of them have ever said it to me.

I can't believe no woman has come on to you.

One woman did come on to me when I was 19 or 21, when I was at the end of drama school. But I got such a terrible shock because it just came out of left field. That's the only time in my life.

There's something you project on-screen that women really love.

This may be the quality that made them want me to play Garland. Her Palace concert [in New York City] in '51 was a huge success. And then they decided to televise her. Forty million people were going to watch, and she was terrified. She came down with laryngitis, and the night before the concert she took too many sedatives. In the morning she was comatose. All day [Sid Luft, her husband] was putting coffee into her and feeding her Chinese food to soak up the medication. No one knew what was going to happen, because it was going to be live. The poor creature.

Were you able to see the performance from that night?

There's some remaining footage of this, and she looks like a deer in the headlights. Her movements are stiff; she's terrified. And then she does "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby ..." and she gets the note. In the end she does "Over the Rainbow," sitting on the side of the stage in the tramp costume, which she loved. There's a sexual ambiguity about that image that Garland projects that I find incredibly sexual. It goes beyond the boundaries of hetero or homo. It's a pure sexuality that I think is terribly seductive. When she sang "Over the Rainbow" that night, after what she'd been through, there's a certain point where she just laughed, and I would have fucked her! [Laughing] She was just so delicious in every way and just so honest and generous.

I think for women, it's not enough for women to be good-looking. There's got to be something more. A defiant spirit. A complexity--

A sexuality that's free of categories. That's what I feel in Garland anyway.

Your colleagues on this film are saying audiences are going to be surprised by your musicianship.

Most of those people only ever see me with brown [contact lenses] and a wig and the nails, and so I think for them, there's been a merging.

But Bob, your voice coach, told me the extras cheered when you went into those Palace concert songs ...

It was hysterical. It's a great song, "Rock-a-Bye." [Davis mimics Garland's famous foot-stomping finish, then sings] "A million baby kisses ... I'll deliver," and I was lip-synching while all these extras are sitting there. The minute I started, they started to roar.

I thought it had been set up, so I laughed. But it was spontaneous. How about that? The woman died in 1969, and if you evoke her for a second, they still go nuts.

Garland also had gay connections beyond her magnetic stage persona. She kept falling in love with gay men--

You know, her father was gay. That seems to be the consensus. They left Minnesota and went to California because he got caught with some boy backstage. There is a possibility that the him. He died when she was 13, and [he and Judy] adored each other. And I don't think Garland ever forgave her mother. I think the undeniable attraction Garland had toward gay men had to do with her need to be completely embraced in an unconditional way. There's a tape of her talking to [her fourth husband, actor] Mark Herron. She says, "I just need to tell you how you've hurt me. I went to bed and put on something pretty, a pretty little nightgown"--she's like 42 at this point--"and I fell asleep, and sometime later I woke up, and you still weren't--you don't--I feel I'm not wanted." Well, of course she wasn't wanted, because Mark Herron was gay. Didn't she know? She understood bisexuality, absolutely; there's enough evidence to suggest she had bisexual relationships herself [as David Shipman and Gerald Clarke do in their Garland biographies]. But it's almost as if she didn't understand the notion of homosexuality. Sexuality, for her, didn't have those divisions. It was as simple as "you just don't want me" and therefore terribly damaging to both of them.

Are you playing Garland to include any same-sex attraction?

Yeah, we did a scene like that [between the characters of Garland and singing coach Kay Thompson]. I don't know whether it will be included in the final cut, but, yeah, we did.

Is there a moment you just slide into her? What does it feel like?

There's been a couple of scenes where it's been shattering. It sounds like drivel, really, but there were couple of moments where it did shake me.

She threw things.

She had a violent life. The thing that haunted her and pained her terribly was that nobody cared about her. This was from when she was young. It was like a mantra: "They don't care about me; they only care about my voice, my talent." If you have a phenomenal talent, it overwhelms everything. It's not that people mean to not care about you. They can't get to you because of the talent.

Do you feel that people do that to you?

Oh, no. God, no. There's no comparison. She was monumentally talented. But through playing her, I kind of understood it. The contact lenses triggered it last night. I'm standing there, and they're waiting to do the shot, and I'm going, "Oh, my God, my eyes." And my makeup artist said, "I can't believe nobody ever asks you how your eyes are." I said, "It's true, nobody ever does. It would make me feel better." That's exactly what Garland's experience was. She was dying, and nobody ever asked her how she was feeling.

Garland had a special relationship with Australians.

Yes, they just about killed her. That's the special relationship there. In '64, I think it was, she went to do a concert tour. She got to the Sydney airport, and the customs officials confiscated all her medication. It was prescription medication; it was not as if it was five pounds of heroin. In Melbourne she was in no state to perform. It was terrible, terrible. At Melbourne airport hundreds of people turned up to boo her away. There's a sort of irony in getting an Australian to play her. But I've had troubles there too, so they might not mind. I've had some run-ins with Australian customs officials myself for no reason except that I was singing as I was waiting for my bags.

You're from Perth.

Yes. It's a small city way over on the western side of Australia Very isolated.

Growing up, what was your big dream place? Sydney? New York?

I don't really recall projecting those sorts of fantasies or dreams. I was just struggling to get through the day-to-day of adolescence, which I found very tough.

Why?

I probably didn't fit in physically very well in that environment. I'm very pale, and so I just seemed to be facing failure in every direction. All these beautiful brown-skinned blond girls and their bikinis. I did try [to tan] one year and got third-degree bums.

Yet you wound up in Sydney.

I did, yes. Because there's a drama school there. I actually had no money, so I couldn't possibly have afforded anything farther afield anyway. But it seemed OK. And Sydney was pretty exciting anyway, coming as I did from probably the most isolated city in the world.

Will you and your family ever live in the dreaded Los Angeles?

No. When [my son] was 1 1/2, we came over. I did a play. I was always a bit scared of America when I was younger. The very first time I came to America, I was about 23. When I got to New York, it was really a most extraordinary sight.

Beautiful, isn't it?

But shocking, like beautiful things sometimes are. And terrifying. And everybody talked so fast. These two guys that bought this film I was in--they were kind of like a double act, and I simply couldn't keep up.

What was the film?

It was My Brilliant Career. I thought it was beautifully directed, but I had a bit of trouble with myself in it.

The character in the book is a lesbian, isn't she--

Yes! [Agitated] See, this is the thing--

--because she had no motivation for anything she did unless she was gay.

Right, that's right! It was a silly script, based on a little book that this 16-year-old girl [Miles Franklin] wrote. It's virtually unreadable. It's not even a novel. I said to the director, Gillian Armstrong, "This could be really interesting because we know that Miles Franklin eventually had a long-standing homosexual relationship. It's an interesting opportunity to explore this little book that this girl wrote with all these fears and neuroses that she never ended up dealing with and ran screaming from men." But Gillian didn't want to reinforce the attitude that all career women were dykes. So I respected that. But I found it irritating to act because it was hollow. It had no truth to it.

Yet the film earned you a reputation for being intense.

No, I think it was the hair, really. Oh, dear God. I was 23, and that was my first professional job. Anybody who has curly hair knows you don't want it to be brushed out because it becomes a never-ending tangle.

When you played the character of Margarethe Cammermeyer's partner, Diane, the personality you found for her worked so well. What was she attracted to in Glenn Close's character, and how did you find that?

The actual woman was in Vancouver [Canada, during the filming], but I didn't want to meet her because I felt that it would be more appropriate for me to find the woman that Glenn Close would have been drawn to. I needed to create the reality between me and Glenn. I watched Glenn and I thought, She's military. She's a bit stiff. I think she needs a puppy. So I saw the character as a wonderful sort of puppy. That's how I tried to play her, to soften her, to get rid of the corporate, bureaucratic thing.

What about you? Are you shy?

I am a bit shy--and sometimes I'm obnoxiously forthcoming. I've avoided a lot of publicity over the years because I find it very hard to be articulate about either myself or work that I've done. I guess that has had an impact on my career, but I don't mind it. It's also allowed me freedom that, if I pursued it, I wouldn't have.

What do you struggle with as an actor? What's easy?

I've always found love scenes, that sort of thing, hard. Expressing overexplicit sexuality. I haven't really been called to do much of that in Shadows, obviously. And here [Garland] helps me a lot because I feel in some areas I'm not there acting. She's there with me.

For more on Judy Davis and Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows as well as links to past Advocatecoverage of Garland and to Garland-related Web sites, go to www.advocate.com