Geena Davis: the leading lady who counted who else was on screen

Geena Davis is in two careers, and they are arguing with each other. One is the leading lady who put a Thunderbird off a Grand Canyon cliff with Susan Sarandon riding shotgun, and who walked out of the Academy Awards holding the Best Supporting Actress trophy for playing an off-key dog trainer in love with William Hurt. The other is the institute founder who taught studio executives to read a screenplay by counting — counting how many women had speaking lines and how many made it past the midpoint. The argument is over which of those is the real work. Davis has never quite resolved it, and she does not seem to want to.

She grew up in Wareham, Massachusetts, in a Congregational family she has described as so polite it amounted to a small form of suffocation — the kind of household where asking for water at someone else’s dinner table was a moral act. The years of organ practice at her church and the cheer-captain title at Wareham High School do not, in retrospect, look like obvious launching pads for a leading lady. Neither does the student-exchange year in Sandviken that left her fluent in Swedish for life. The drama bug pulled her through New England College and then Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, where she graduated in 1979 with a BFA and the precise combination of small-town politeness and tall-girl visibility that New York would not know what to do with.

Wait-staff shifts and a card at the Zoli modelling agency were how she paid Manhattan rent. It is also the reason a six-foot woman in her early twenties had been hanging around audition rooms long enough for Sydney Pollack to land her a bit part in Tootsie in 1982. Her first scene is a fitting room. Her first line is in her underwear. The career she walked into was the one available to a tall, sceptical comic body: the funny shape in someone else’s frame.

The Fly, in 1986, was the project that taught her she could be more than the foil. Cronenberg’s prosthetics did most of the visible work but Davis carried the grief — and the leading-man marriage; she and Jeff Goldblum married after the shoot and divorced three years later. Then 1988 happened twice: Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Lawrence Kasdan’s The Accidental Tourist arrived in the same year, the goth screwball and the muted Maryland melodrama, and the Oscar went to the second one. Muriel Pritchett, the chaotic dog trainer who wedges her way into William Hurt’s grief, has stayed one of the more peculiar Best Supporting Actress wins on record.

Then the two films that fixed her in the American canon. Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise sent Davis and Sarandon out on a Callie Khouri road script that ended in the only place it could end, and earned Davis a second Oscar nomination — this time for Best Actress. Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own followed, and Dottie Hinson’s catcher’s-mask glare became the other still photograph people carry around of Davis. The two pictures are almost arguments. One says American women in motion will be punished for it. The other says American women in uniform get a wartime league and then get told to go home. Davis was the face of both inside eighteen months, and she was thirty-five.

What happened next is where the bio gets interesting, because the leading-lady track stopped working. The Renny Harlin films — Cutthroat Island, which famously folded Carolco, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, the Shane Black amnesia-assassin script — were a marriage and a working partnership that absorbed her later thirties, and neither found its audience. The marriage ended in 1998. Davis moved sideways into family films with the Stuart Little features, and then to television, where Commander in Chief installed her as America’s first fictional female president on ABC for one rocky season and a Golden Globe in 2006.

The institute is what the bio is supposed to celebrate, and the institute is also where the contradictions sit. Davis founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004, after watching children’s television with her daughter and noticing that even cartoon crowd scenes were mostly male. The institute commissioned the first wide-scope counts of speaking female characters in family films — the data that made gender parity legible to studio decision-makers who do not read culture pieces — and built Spellcheck for Bias with USC’s signal-analysis laboratory, an AI screenplay scanner that flags stereotype patterns before a draft goes out. The objection from the institute’s critics is that an outfit that counts is not an outfit that disrupts, and the studios that quote Davis’s research are the same studios that staff their writers’ rooms the way they always did. Davis’s answer is that visibility data has to come first because nothing gets fixed that does not first get measured. The argument is unresolved.

The selective acting kept happening. Marjorie Prime gave her the small chamber piece her résumé did not have, with Lois Smith and Tim Robbins. She did a recurring arc on Grey’s Anatomy and a clenched-jaw turn in Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice. Her memoir, Dying of Politeness, came out in 2022, and its central credit is to Sarandon, who taught her on the Thelma & Louise set that you could simply ask for the take to be done again. It is also the book where she explains how she took up archery in her early forties, watched Justin Huish win two golds in Atlanta and trained six hours a day, six days a week, until she finished twenty-fourth of three hundred women at the 2000 US Olympic trials — a hand-span short of the team, at forty-four.

The Boroughs lands on Netflix this month. Eight episodes, Duffer Brothers executive-producing, Davis at the centre of a retirement-community ensemble — Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, Clarke Peters, Denis O’Hare — facing a supernatural threat that wants their remaining time. The casting reads like a quiet joke about who gets to be a leading character at seventy. The argument with politeness, it turns out, was not a phase.

Tags: A League of Their Own, actresses, Geena Davis, Ridley Scott, Susan Sarandon, The Accidental Tourist, The Boroughs, Thelma & Louise