(pic (c) Wenn)

Recent pictures of Geena, having fun with the kids, and of her and Reza at the Tribeca Film Festival:

(pics (c) bigpicturesphoto.com)

(pic by David Shankbone)

Although not much is happening on this site lately, the lack of decent fansites or even an official site has made me decide to keep it online. When time allows, I will also keep working on the fact sections – the filmography especially. Returning visitors may have noticed that the gallery is gone; this is partly due to vulnerabilities with the script. I am looking into ways of restoring it in some form or another. The forum has also gone into hiatus, I couldn’t justify the amount of time spent to keep out spammers compared to the small amount of genuine traffic on there. For now, the possibility to comment on blog / news posts will have to do! Please, keep sending me links and news if you come across any, and together we’ll keep geena-davis.net a resource for fans for yet another year. Thank you!

All the best to you and your family, I hope you are being spoiled today! For the fun of it, here’s Geena’s astrology map.

See the animated 360° video of the figure below, see more pictures here.

While awaiting word on when she’ll return to the Oval Office in the “Commander in Chief” telepic planned for fall production, Geena Davis plans to spend the summer “just taking it easy and hanging out with the kids.” The actress, who has a 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old fraternal twin sons with her husband, Dr. Reza Jarrahy, adds, “I’m always completely fine not working, unless something incredible comes along.”

Geena spent this weekend in Kentucky, accompanying her father to a school reunion at Berea College, which both he and Geena’s late mother attended. The following is an excerpt from a story in today’s Richmond Register.

In 1936, William Davis graduated from Berea College. In 1956 he and his late wife Lucille, who also attended Berea, had a daughter they named Geena.

While many proud parents can envision their new-born growing up to become president someday, the Davis’ little girl grew up to play a president on TV. At age 49, Geena Davis, who won an Oscar for role in the 1988 film “The Accidental Tourist,” became the star of “Commander in Chief,” playing the role of America’s first woman president. She garnered a Golden Globe for this most recent role.

When Commander in Chief first appeared on Sept. 27 last year, it had the highest viewership for any TV show to debut on a Tuesday night, according to Wikipedia.com. It remained the top-rated Tuesday night show until “American Idol” bumped it from the top spot.

Davis, who had previously attended alumni events with her parents, tried to shun the limelight during her Berea visit. That’s a bit difficult for a celebrity who stands six feet tall when she visits a small town.

Wearing a baseball cap, large sunglasses and a casual white pants outfit, Davis asked not to be photographed Saturday afternoon as she and her father toured a display of antique tools in the Berea College industrial technology building. One does not disobey the Commander in Chief, even if she only plays one on TV.

Saturday evening, Davis was elegantly outfitted in a white summer dress and smiled graciously as she accompanied her father to Berea’s alumni awards banquet in the old Seabury Gymnasium.

In addition to her visits to Berea, Davis spent some time in Kentucky when she filmed the 1992 movie “A League of Their Own.”

I just came across this portrait interview in UK newspaper Times, made for the debut of CinC on UK Television. It is an indepth and fairly personal interview, touching Geena’s view on men and relationships, her choice of roles, about getting help and input from therapists, what it’s like becoming a mother – and of course there’s a bit about Commander in Chief.

Geena Davis on love, four marriages and having twins at 48: ‘It was a long slog’

Elegantly draped over a sofa in the residential quarter of the White House, America’s first woman president declines to remove her shoes at the suggestion of the Times photographer. “Not in my current state of pedicure,” she warns. So her high heels stay on, adding, as I point out to her, those all important extra inches. “Right, ” agrees Geena Davis, among a crowd of whose unlikely statistics – 50 years old, mother of 22-month-old twins, married four times, IQ of 140, 22nd best female archer in the United States – soars the unignorable fact that she is 6ft tall.

Ten years ago, we agree, a TV series predicated on a young mother becoming the US President would have been a sitcom. Commander in Chief, however, which made its debut to huge ratings in America in the autumn and gets its first British airing tonight, is a fully fledged political drama, starring not only Davis as President Mackenzie Allen, but also another heavyweight, Donald Sutherland, as her enemy, the Republican Speaker of the House. As The West Wing reaches the end of its term, Commander is positioned to inherit its sacred mission to present America with a fantastic alternative vision of an executive branch – one that is liberal, idealistic and very good-looking.

Davis, a stunning woman whose chestnut hair today falls on to an oatmeal sweater, is, you understand, talking to me not so much in Pennsylvania Avenue as in a back lot off Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, where Commander is filmed. I wonder if she thinks her President Allen will smooth the way for a second President Clinton. “That was certainly not the intention,” she replies. “The pure, undiluted intention of the show was entertainment. On the other hand, one can’t help but speculate that seeing a woman in this office, sitting behind that desk and being called ‘Madam President’ may, on some unconscious level, get American voters used to the idea. Which is all to the good.” Would she like to see Hillary in the White House? “I would like to see a woman in the White House,” the registered Democrat says carefully. “My view is that we should have done this a long time ago, and it is just disgraceful that we haven’t.”

If one could only believe that lives in showbiz are remotely capable of being planned, playing America’s Commander in Chief might seem the logical conclusion of Davis’s entire career. It began in 1982, when she appeared with Dustin Hoffman in the transvestite love story Tootsie. If the role required her to work extensively in a bra and knickers, the movie at least touched on the subject of society’s blindness towards plain, middle-aged women. It is true that afterwards she played her future husband Jeff Goldblum’s bed partner in The Fly, an earth girl in Earth Girls Are Easy and won an Oscar as William Hurt’s “kooky” girlfriend in The Accidental Tourist, but in Thelma & Louise in 1991 and A League of Their Own the following year, Davis made, by Hollywood standards, two big feminist statements. The first was a distaff Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the second a film in which women’s bodies were valued for their athleticism, not their contours. “Even Cutthroat Island was part of that trajectory,” says Davis. “It doesn’t matter so much that it wasn’ t a financial success. It totally made sense to me. Who else has been a female pirate?” Cutthroat, the prize Hollywood turkey of 1995, and the better, although also money-losing, The Long Kiss Goodnight, in which she played an action heroine, were both made by Renny Harlin, her third husband. At the time he was accused of traducing her career. In retrospect, the Finnish director did no more than traduce her. She filed for divorce in August 1997, the month that his personal assistant, Tiffany Bowne, gave birth to his son. I suggest that Davis must have become thoroughly furious with the male sex. She protests with a spirited: “Men are wonderful!” But why did such a progressive-minded woman want to marry four times? “I clearly craved that commitment and arrangement. I kept trying, and wasn’t going to give up. I wanted it to work. It is just so funny now. It doesn’t even sound like me. You were married four times? But I guess I did that.” Back in 1992, two years after her divorce from Goldblum (her first marriage, to a restaurant manager, in 1983 lasted a scant 18 months), she said rather sweetly that from every marriage she tried to take a grain of wisdom for use in the next.

“Oh, God yes. If I didn’t learn something, it would just be tragedy to keep trying without having got somewhere. Was it Einstein who said that to keep on doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result is the definition of insanity?” So how come, with husband No 4, Dr Reza Jarrahy, she got a different result? “I guess I didn’t do the same thing. I had to change.

A lot. Who am I to give advice, but you can’t hope to change your life by marrying someone that is different – ‘I’ll look for a different type and then I’ll have a different life’. It is much harder than that. You have to change yourself. And it is very hard. Very hard. It was a long slog.” She laughs throatily, as she often does when she is being serious. So what was wrong with her? She ums. She ahs. She pretends to be distracted by a technician wandering behind us. “Um. Tch. Huh. It is hard to sum it up. I feel a lot of it was low self-esteem, which people always think is hilarious. ‘Successful people? They feel bad about themselves?’ But I think that is a part of a lot of actors: ‘Maybe if I can get a lot of people to approve of me, maybe I’ll feel better’. At least it starts out that way, sometimes: trying to find approval from others.”

I had read that growing up in Massachusetts – the daughter of a civil engineer and his wife, a teacher’s assistant – she had not found childhood easy. “I didn’t have a horrible childhood by any means, but I felt awkward, uncomfortable and uncoordinated. I was always the tallest kid in class.” Throughout her twenties, thirties and forties, she saw therapists of various disciplines. Her current one is a Jungian. “I was hammering away at it because to change truly is really hard. You are so hard-wired to be the way you are, but I really wanted to change. I have to say archery, playing sport, really helped. It was something I was doing that I was good at and could be measured. It wasn’t about critics’ opinions or looking good. I could either do it or not.” And she could. Having taken up the sport in 1996, she came close to qualifying for the 2000 Olympics.

So how did she met Jarrahy, the surgeon of Iranian descent, 15 years her junior, whom she married in 2001? “My dog bit his ass.” She was staying at a friend’s in Venice, Los Angeles, and they had gone to the beach. Jarrahy, a neighbour, came in looking for him and made the mistake of trying to befriend Davis’s Irish water spaniel. “As he was jumping over the fence, she bit his ass.” Davis expected a lawsuit; instead they began dating. Jarrahy is an “incredibly well-rounded and compassionate person with a big heart”, nothing like the traditional image of the callous sawbones.

Does it make any odds that he is so much younger? “It sort of doesn’t because we don’t notice any more. But, and this is just a theory, it might be that men who are attracted to an older woman know that the woman is not going to be arm candy, at their feet, worshipping them. An older woman is going to have a career, to know who she is and be an equal partner.” Does she mind being 50? “Not at all,” she says in a big, warm voice.

Although there are hairline cracks around her eyes and her dimples have become more deeply etched, Davis is one of those fair-skinned, prominently cheek-boned women who will probably never look their age. She feels plastic surgery would be “sad”.

“I wouldn’t feel good. I have such a great role model in Susan (Sarandon, Louise to her Thelma, whose own husband, Tim Robbins, is a dozen years younger than she is). She is ten years older than me and ever since I met her — and we are still really good friends — she has been like my mirror to the future. She looks so great and natural and wonderful. I keep trying to follow her example.”

Four years ago, at the age of 46, Davis became a mother for the first time. In April 2004, daughter Alizeh was joined by twin brothers, Kaiis and Kian. Even for a woman who gave birth to a giant maggot (in The Fly) and adopted a mouse (in Stuart Little), this must have been a surprise. “Oh, it is just wonderful. I am thrilled. The kids are great. It is just so much fun being a mother. I am so lucky, so fortunate.” And no fertility treatment even? “Well, I don’t like to get too gynaecological about it. I am just so blessed.” How on earth does she cope with raising children when she is working all hours? “It is like the President on the show: you just have to. In fact the kids come in a lot. The boys usually come visit around four o’clock each afternoon, and I fool around with them.”

Did she think there would ever be children in her life? “I sort of did. I felt that in the same way that, as a kid, I was so utterly confident I would be in movies, which is idiotic because the odds are so stacked against you.” The odds are still stacked in that direction. Thelma & Louise did not change women’s lives in Hollywood. “We can’t seem to catch momentum,” she complains. “After Thelma & Louise everyone said that there would be a whole bunch of female buddy movies. There weren’t. A League of Their Own was a giant hit, so there were going to be so many female sports movies. There wasn’t one until Bend It Like Beckham and that wasn’t even an American movie and it was ten years later.

“And it keeps happening that way. When First Wives Club came out they said, ‘Now we have proved women over 50 can carry a movie. It will be just smooth sailing’. And nothing.” The offers slowed even for her after she turned 40. There were the two Stuart Little movies and then, in 2001, The Geena Davis Show, the third sitcom of her career and the least of them. “I wasn’t depressed that it got cancelled because everything works out for the best, but, yes, I did feel some (career) frustration. I would like to be the one deciding whether I am working or not.” She owns a website, SeeJane.org, which campaigns against the under-representation of women in film. One of its studies recently revealed that in family films male characters outnumber female by three to one. “I figured that it had to be sending some kind of message to boys and girls that girls are not as important.” Her private research, incidentally, indicates that boys are no more aggressive or less affectionate than girls. “When I was expecting boys everyone said, ‘Just you wait. It’s going to be crazy’ . And they’re so sweet and so not crazy.”

If movie culture needs fixing, at least television, which from the days of Lucille Ball has entrusted female talent to hold down a show, continues to open some doors. Hollywood actresses are said to pass through three ages: romantic lead, district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy. With Commander in Chief, Davis has substituted DC for DA. Sadly, however, the series has had a rough birth. After its strong start, it lost both viewers and its creator, Rod Lurie. Steven Bochco, the legend behind NYPD Blue, was drafted in, declared the drama “a little too broad” and fired writers. He has just been replaced himself. Davis, so open about herself, and so savvy about her industry, does a good job of shutting down this topic when I raise it.

“Maybe it is just the nature of the beast that it is so high stakes and so many things have to work right at the same time that it just takes a period to figure it out. But I really feel we have now.” Whatever its ultimate fate, and however tough its schedule makes her life while she juggles her young family, Commander has revitalised Davis’s career. In January she won a Golden Globe for Best Television Actress. At the ceremony she told an eye-moistening, SeeJane-friendly story about a little girl who had told her on the way to the auditorium that she now wanted to be president. Davis paused: “Well, that didn’t actually happen — but it could have.” As this natural comedienne says, if the show tanks, perhaps she’ll redo it as a sitcom and reclaim her weekends. But there should be no need for her to risk setting back the female cause. If Geena Davis can fix Geena Davis, fixing Commander in Chief should be a breeze.

My friend Jen has provided me with scans of the article found in the March issue of Good Housekeeping; some of the scans are added to the gallery – below you cand find a transcript of the article!

She’s got a hunky younger husband, thee small kids, and a hit TV show. How the star of Commander in Chief turned her life around.

Geena Davis is running behind schedule. She was detained at a gown fitting, and now the rest of her jam-packed day is off-kilter. When she finally sits down at a funky outdoor cafe near downtown Los Angeles, wearing faded jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and absolutely no makeup, she orders blueberry pancakes-even though the sun has set long ago and most of her fellow patrons are eating dinner.

Then again, Davis is used to doing things a little later than most people. Having recently turned 50, she is now celebrating the sort of personal milestones that most women mark in their 30s. Married to Dr. Reza Jarrahy, an Iranian-American neurosurgeon 15 years her junior, she became a mother for the first time at age 46. Two years after the arrival of daughter Alizeh, she gave birth to twins, sons Kian and Kaiis. Just as her personal life was falling into place, her dormant career got a wake-up call when she was offered the role of Mackenzie Allen, the first female U.S. president on the ABC series Commander in Chief. The drama became the most watched new show of the fall television season, and suddenly Davis was back in the spotlight. In January, Davis won a Golden Globe for best actress in a drama series; she accepted her award with a witty and charming speech that brought the house down. Happy marriage, beautiful babies, blooming career: Everything is, finally, right on ttrack. “It just happened two decades after I thought it would,” Davis says with a shrug.

Many people still think of her as the tough-girl heroine Thelma, whom she made famous in 1991′s Thelma & Louise. But in real life, Davis has been on a long, arduous journey of self-discovery. After starting out as a model in her early 20′s, she seemed to segue effortless into acting, going from playing a bit part in Tootsie to costarring in Beetlejuice to winning an Academy Award for her role in The Accidental Tourist at age 32. Davis followed her Oscar win with Thelma & Louise and the feel-good baseball comedy A League of Their Own, But just when her career seemed red-hot, it suddenly began to cool. A string of box office disappointments like Cutthroat Island didn’t help; neither did getting older in an age-obsessed industry. By then divorced from actor Jeff Goldblum (she later married and split up with director Renny Harlin), Davis felt isolated and confused.

“I guess I thought my career would just go on the way it had,” she says, shaking her wavy auburn hair. “But once I turned 40, I really did feel like I’d ceased to exist in Hollywood. I thought I’d have an older-woman’s career like Meryl Streep or Jessica Lange did. But not only weren’t there any roles for me, there weren’t any for Meryl either. It was noticeable and unmistakable. And painful.”

At the same time, not working gave Davis a chance to think about what else she might want to do with her life. She came up with two surprising answers. The first came in the form of a bow and arrow. Having been turned on to archery while making the action film The Long Kiss Goodnight in 1996, she began to pursue the hobby seriously and before long was competing in the National Trials. She came close to qualifying for the Olympics. “I didn’t realize archery would become such a big part of my life, but I got completely hooked,” she says.

Archery not only helped her fill her days, it sparked a sea change in the way the actress viewed herself. Davis says she had long struggled with self-esteem; when she was a teenager, her lanky six-foot frame and exotic pillow-lip looks weren’t excactly the norm, and she often felt like an outcast. But finding a sport she was passionate about began to heal old wounds. “Sports are 90 percent mental,” she explains, “and I came to realize that there was this inner dialogue I was constantly having, where I’d be thinking, Oh, that was a horrible shot, and people must be laughing at you and you should be so embarassed. I realized that if I was telling myself that during archery, I was probably doing it all the time in the rest of my life. Becoming confident in my physical abilities, acknowledging that I had a right to take up space and be happy with my performance, was the final piece of the puzzle. I started to believe that people weren’t judging me every second of my life. I began to really like myself.”

Emboldened by the self-esteem boost, Davis found herself drawn in to an unlikely romance with Jarrahy, who was only 27 when Davis, then 42, met him at a party. In the past, Davis says, she had found herself attracted to men whom she thought she’d be able to “fix” and turn into the perfect mate. “I was always in the type of relationship where everything was about the other person,” she says. “I’d find my worth through sacrificing everything for his sake. And that had everything to do with my own feelings about myself; the guys I was with felt pretty great about themselves all on their own – they didn’t need me to fix them because they weren’t damaged. But I sure was.”

By the time Jarrahy came along, Davis knew that the patterns of her past were ready to be broken. “I finally managed to change myself, and that changed what seemed attractive to me. Reza is so different from the kind of men I used to be with. I think if I met someone now who was like the guys I was drawn to in the past, I would just start to laugh.”

Still, Davis admits that the considerable age difference was initially a stumbling block. “A relationship with him seemed a little far-fetched,” she says, remembering her initial attraction to the dashingly handsome doctor. “I remember thinking, This guy is cute – and ridiculously young. At first, to be honest, I was just approaching it like something that would be fun. I wasn’t thinking too far ahead of the game. The amazing thing is, when we started to spend more and more time together, there wasn’t anything about our age difference that stuck out. It wasn’t like I was sitting there saying, “What do you mean, you don’t know who The Beatles are?” It doesn’t feel like we’re from different generations, and now we barely notice it at all.”

Despite three previous marriages, Davis didn’t hesitate to make a fourth trip down the aisle. “I did say to Reza, “You’re about to become someone’s fourth husband. What on earth are you thinking?” But as for myself, I wasn’t nervous at all. I really did feel that I had turned a corner, that I had pulled off changes that were real and permament. And it was exciting to know I was marrying someone who I can be cranky or selfish in front of and he doesn’t run screaming from the room or judge me for it. It’s like I discovered a whole other way to live.”

One year after the two married, Davis’ life underwent another change, when the actress became pregnant. First-time motherhood in her 40s didn’t unnerve her; instead, the actress saw her age as an advantage. “I felt 100 percent that I would be such a better parent than I would have been even five years earlier and certainly ten or 20 years earlier,” she recalls. “If I’d had kids earlier, I could easily have become one of those mothers who overinvolve themselves and try to live their life through their kids. I’m sure there are younger people who have figured things out long before I did, but in my case, I became a parent with the exactly right person, at exactly the right time.”

Having twins two years later, however, “was pretty daunting,” she says with a sigh. “My daughter was two when they were born, so that meant three kids under the age of three at home. And I was worried because part of me thought, Am I going to be able to love the boys as much as I love my little girl? Of course, I do, and it’s been really wonderful. But it was overwhelming.”

Davis also admits to feeling a bit swamped when she thinks ahead to a future raising teenagers at an age when most people begin collecting Social Security. “Oh yeah, I think about it all the time,” she says candidly. “There are moments when I feel like I have a loooong road ahead of me, with college and dating and driving and all of that. But then I realize that just means that I have so much time left to enjoy them. And it really does go by so quickly.”

Now Davis is relishing every second of her role as a mommy. Daughter Alizeh is obsessed with princesses, to the chagrin of her mother, who strive to do more than win the heart of Prince Charming. Still, Alizeh is already putting down her own twist on the fairy tales. “She likes to tell stories about Snow White going into the forest, where she meets an evil witch. But then Snow White takes out a magic wand and turns the evil witch into a nice witch. It’s a good thought,” Davis says with a laugh. “She never wants to play princesses who are just lying there asleep or under some spell. They’re always very active princesses who battle dragons or evil witches.”

As for her parenting style, Davis is making certain not to repeat mistakes from her own childhood. “It’s important to me that my kids feel acknowledged,” says Davis, who grew up with an older brother in Wareham, Massachusetts. “I was raised in a generation where we were taught to stifle things. It was like, ‘Don’t cry’. Or, as soon as you fell down, you were told, ‘That didn’t hurt’. Kids were supposed to be seen but not heard, like they were furniture or pets or something. I’m making a point of letting my kids know it’s OL to express themselves. I try not to decide for them what they’re feeling. I want them to know they don’t have to hide their emotions.”

Their mother seems to have taken that lesson to heart. Asked about turning 50, she doesn’t hesitate to roll her eyes and groan. “Actually, I am OK with it,” Davis says a few moments later. “I don’t exactly want to jump up and down on Oprah’s couch, but I’m at peace with it. I feel like my life has gotten better with every year that goes by, and so I really don’t fear getting older. And this is going to sound crazy, but I like the way I look now more than I did ten years ago. I feel like I’ve settled into my looks more and that I’m more at ease, and it shows. I’m not saying I’ll still feel that way when I’m 70, but for now, I’m pretty content.”

Her happiness has been coming through on the set of Commander in Chief. Peter Coyote, who has guest-starred on the show, says that of all the stars he’s worked with, Davis “is my favorite. She has no entourage and no attitude. Between takes, she sits with everyone, knitting, chatting, and playing practical jokes. She is a joy.”

Playing the president of the United States has come naturally to Davis. In 2004, she founded an activist group called See Jane, which seeks to improve the portrayals of girls and women in the media. Now she hopes her television role will inspire other changes.

“I cannot tell you how many people ask me, ‘So do you think there will ever be a female president in real life?’ I mean, why shouldn’t there be?” she says, her voice rising. “When people ask me that, it really makes me want to examine why the idea of women in power is so threatening.”

But she won’t be able to do that today. With her pancakes long since polished off, Davis needs to get home for bath time with her kids. “My daughter won’t even get her face wet, but my sons literally submerge themselves and try to swim laps in the tub. They stick their whole heads under and blow bubbles,” she says with a delighted laugh. “I can’t tell you how much I look forward to it.”

She slings her bag over her shoulder and hurries off into the night. With any luck, she’ll be right on time.