Short Biography

Davis was born in Perth and had a Catholic upbringing. She was educated at Loreto Convent and graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 1977. She has been married to actor and fellow NIDA graduate Colin Friels (who was also in the film Hightide with her) since 1984. They have two children, Jack and Charlotte.

First coming to prominence for her role as Sybylla Melvyn in the coming-of-age saga My Brilliant Career (1979), for which she won BAFTA Awards for Best Actress and Best Newcomer, she also played the lead in such Australian New Wave classics as Winter of Our Dreams (1981) (as the waif-like heroin addict) and Heatwave (1982) (as the radical tenant organizer). Her first foray into international film came in 1981 when she played the younger version of Ingrid Bergman`s Golda Meir in the television docudrama A Woman Called Golda. In 1984 she was cast as Adela Quested in David Lean`s final film A Passage to India, an adaptation of E.M. Forster`s novel of the same name. Although she and Lean reportedly butted heads during the film`s production, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. She returned to Australian cinema for her next two films, Kangaroo, in which she displayed a fine affinity for accents as a German-born writer`s wife, and Hightide, in which she gave what some critics believe is her finest performance as a foot-loose mother who attempts to reunite with her teenage daughter who is being raised by the paternal grandmother. She earned Australian Film Institute Awards for both roles, and a National Society of Film Critics award for Hightide`s brief American theatrical run. In 1990 she played a brief cameo in Woody Allen`s Alice. A busy 1991 featured acclaimed supporting roles as an ill-fated Southern ghostwriter in Joel Coen`s Barton Fink, which won the Palme d`Or at the Cannes Film Festival and in David Cronenberg`s well-received adaptation of the hallucinogenic novel Naked Lunch. She won an Independent Spirit Award for her lively work as mannish authoress George Sand in Impromptu and returned to E.M. Forster territory in Where Angels Fear to Tread. Finally, she earned additional awards and recognition for her performance as real-life World War II heroine Mary Lindell in the CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation One Against the Wind. In 1992 she played a major role in Woody Allen`s Husbands and Wives as one half of a divorcing couple. For this performance she earned an array of critics` awards as well as an Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actress.

Later memorable Davis roles include the mysterious, schizophrenic mother of a teenager in boarding school in the well-made but little-seen On My Own (1993), the lifelong Australian Communist Party member reacting to the downfall of the Soviet Union in Children of the Revolution (1996), two more Allen films, Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Celebrity (1998), a high-strung White House Chief of Staff in Absolute Power (1997), a touching performance as a supportive mother in Swimming Upstream (2003) and colorful supporting roles in two 2006 films, The Break-Up and Marie-Antoinette.

Much of her recent work has been on television, where she has scooped up an impressive collection of Emmy Award nominations. She won her first Emmy for portraying the woman who gently coaxes rigid militarywoman Glenn Close out of the closet in Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story and she picked u

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