Dying of Politeness: A Memoir

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When Davis passed the director’s suggestion on to Sarandon, she went straight up to Scott and told him it wasn’t happening. and this book definitely makes me want to check out some of her movies from the 90s that I never got around to watching. After “Tootsie,” my modelling agent took me and a couple of other actor-slash-models to Hollywood to meet casting directors. I had no idea she once dated Christopher McDonald, so that makes Thelma and Louis even more interesting. Davis was in her 40s when she had children; almost as if she finally had time for that when movie roles dried up.

As a Midwesterner living on the East Coast, I did not realize that Wareham, Massachusetts could so easily be relocated to the Midwest with towns full of easy-going, self-effacing and polite folks.Following a long period of intermittent work, Davis often ventured into television acting, and through her organization, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, saw her career expand during the 2010s. In the early two-thousands, sidelined from Hollywood in her forties, she began wondering why the kids’ shows that she watched with her two-year-old daughter had so few female characters. She placed 24th and did not qualify for the team, but participated as a wild-card entry in the Sydney International Golden Arrow competition. Davis says each of her films has taught her something — and she's no longer bogged down by that self-critical voice in her head. During this period, she also auditioned for the 1984 science fiction/action film The Terminator, reading for the lead role of Sarah Connor, which eventually went to Linda Hamilton.

A. So my plan was: I would become a model, and then people would just offer me movies, because at that time Lauren Hutton was showing up in a couple of movies.Not only did it encourage her to start thinking about how her movies would be perceived by female audiences – would it be empowering, would they be inspired?

At the time it made me realise that women get so few opportunities to really live vicariously through the female characters in movies, while men in almost every movie live vicariously through the male characters. It took place in a hotel suite (which wouldn’t be allowed today, not after Me Too), and as soon as I walked in the door—before I could even meet the other people in the room—Bill Murray came up to me excitedly and said, “ Have you ever tried the Thumper? She attended Wareham High School and was an exchange student in Sandviken, Sweden, where she became fluent in Swedish.most notably, stars as lead thelma, in thelma and louise—partly thanks to her, we have that beautiful scene of brad pitt shirtless (one of his first acting roles, if not his first).

When watching children’s programming, she noticed that boy characters were much more plentiful and got more action-oriented roles. It’s part of your job to put up with flirting and things that are much heavier than flirting and just get through it somehow, so you can seem agreeable and keep working.Davis was working as a model when she was cast by director Sydney Pollack in his film Tootsie (1982) as a soap opera actor, whom she has described as "someone who's going to be in their underwear a lot of time". One detail that was interesting to hear about was that you never let your parents know that you didn’t graduate college. In the television series The Exorcist (2016), based on the 1973 film of the same name, Davis took on the role of grown-up Regan MacNeil, who has renamed herself Angela Rance to find peace and anonymity from her ordeal as a child. This would be the first in a series of such incidents in my career that made me realise that the mistreatment of female actors was everywhere. As someone who hates conflict and can also be guilty of “dying of politeness”, she’s inspired me to stand up for myself more, and surround myself by people who will listen to you and speak up for you.