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Davis made her feature film debut starring opposite Dustin Hoffman in the classic 1982 classic comedy, Tootsie, and she went on to star in such films including The Fly, Beetlejuice, The Accidental Tourist, Thelma & Louise, Hero, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Stuart Little, and A League of Their Own. From the quirky and offbeat dog trainer Muriel Pritchett in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Accidental Tourist, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, to her Academy Award nominated and Golden Globe nominated performance as Thelma in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise alongside Susan Sarandon, to leading the cast of Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own opposite Tom Hanks; Geena Davis has portrayed characters who claim their own narrative and make us reimagine womanhood. Geena Davis’s roles have remained evergreen in their ability to reflect the human condition, brilliantly, long after their release. In 2019 Davis was honored with a second Oscar trophy, this time the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in recognition of her work over the decades to achieve gender parity onscreen in film and television. Ahead of her time, Davis also earned the 2006 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Dramatic Series for her portrayal of the first female President of the United States in the ABC television series Commander in Chief. Geena Davis is the archetype fearless female who gets it done. Yet, to speak with her is to witness a soft spoken and centered human being who draws you into her space with carefully cultivated wisdom that doesn’t need to shout to be heard. A world-class athlete (at one time the nation’s 13th-ranked archer) and a member of Mensa, most recently, she is recognized for her tireless advocacy of women and girls nearly as much as for her acting accomplishments. Davis is the Founder and Chair of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which engages film and television creators to dramatically increase the percentage of female characters — and reduce gender stereotyping — in media made for children 11 and under. Allison Kugel: What are the three major life events that shaped the human being you are today? GD: The first one would be having the parents that I did. Both of them were great, but particularly, my dad was very encouraging in a subtle way. Whenever he was doing something, like working on the car, shingling the roof, or whatever, it was he who would have me come along with him just as a matter of course. I grew up feeling like there wasn’t anything I wasn’t supposed to do, and also feeling very capable, which I’ve taken into my life. Another one would be getting to work with Susan Sarandon. She had the most impact of any person in my life, because I’d never really spent time with a woman who moves through the world the way she does. It sounds crazy to be 33 years old at the time and first experiencing a woman like that, but I really had previously never met a woman who didn’t preface everything with, “Well, I don’t know what you will think, and this is probably a stupid idea, but…” AK: Really? Interesting… GD: Yes. She just lived her life and said, “This is what I think.” To have three months of exposure to that was amazing. And obviously the third biggest impact on my life was becoming a mother. AK: Same here! I want to ask you, regarding Susan Sarandon, when you watched her move with such confidence, and I’m assuming this was on the Thelma & Louise set, how was she received by male co-stars, producers, writers, the film’s director (Ridley Scott)? GD: As completely normal, which was also stunning to me. The way I was raised was to be extremely polite, to a fault. I was sort of trained not to ask for things and not to be any trouble to anybody, but she obviously wasn’t (laughs), so she just said things the way she wanted to say them, like, “Let’s cut this line,” or “Let’s do it this way,” or “This is what I would like to do.” There wasn’t any reaction whatsoever from anybody of, like, “Wow!,” partly because she didn’t present herself as combative. She was always just like, “This is what I want. This is what I like. This is what I think.”