Geena Davis - Actress / Activist

Virginia Elizabeth "Geena" Davis (born January 21, 1956 in Wareham, Massachusetts) is a skilled American actress, whose charm and likeability portraying eccentric characters earned her an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. She has been nominated for a British Academy Film Award and a Primetime Emmy Award. She is activist, producer, and former model. In 2019, she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her work fighting gender bias on and off- screen in Hollywood.

Davis studied drama at New England College and later at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, from which she graduated in 1979; she also worked in summer stock theatre. She then moved to New York City, where she initially found work as a server. She became a lingerie model with the Zoli modeling agency and made her feature film debut in a bit part in the comedy Tootsie (1982). She went on to play guest roles in other TV series, including a recurring part in 1984 and 1986 as an inept housekeeper in the sitcom Family Ties. Davis also appeared in the box office failures Fletch, with Chevy Chase, and Transylvania 6-5000, with Jeff Goldblum (both 1985), before her breakthrough role opposite Goldblum in David Cronenberg’s horror film The Fly (1986).

More successful were Tim Burton's dark comedy Beetlejuice (1988) and The Accidental Tourist (1988). For the last film, she was the surprise winner of the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. More fun movies followed with the flying-saucer-in-the-pool Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) and everyone-loves-a-clown Quick Change (1990) with Bill Murray. The very successful Thelma & Louise (1991), directed by Ridley Scott, again garnered nominations for the Academy Award and Golden Globe. A League of Their Own (1992), with Tom Hanks and directed by Penny Marshall, was the turning point as her next film, Hero (1992), was only average. Geena starred in the thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and played Eleanor Little in Stuart Little (1999) and Stuart Little 2 (2002). She returned to TV, headlining The Geena Davis Show (2000) and Commander in Chief (2005).

Davis was also a well-known activist. In 2004 she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, an organization that highlights and seeks to correct gender imbalance and to challenge demeaning stereotypes within the entertainment media. The institute partnered with the UN women’s agency and the Rockefeller Foundation to produce (2014) the first international study of gender images in movies. In addition, Davis was named the UN special envoy for women and girls in information and communications technology in 2012.

Fun Facts:

* Is a member of MENSA with an IQ of 140

* Is fluent in Swedish

* Wears a size 12 shoe

* After graduating from Boston U. she worked as a window mannequin