Geena Davis

Height as a Statement of Intent

Geena Davis is 6 feet 1 inch tall. That height closed many doors early on in her modeling career in New York, but it gave her a physical presence that 1980s cinema could not ignore. In 1982, Sydney Pollack cast her in a tiny role in Tootsie, where she appeared in her underwear in a dressing room. She didn't need to say much for the camera to be captivated by her.

That brief appearance was the prelude to a decade in which she took on projects that defied the expectation of being just a pretty face. In 1986, she shot The Fly alongside Jeff Goldblum and proved she could carry the emotional weight of a visceral horror film. Two years later came industry recognition with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The Accidental Tourist.

And she did it without following the usual paths to stardom.

Her performance as Muriel Pritchett in that 1988 film established her public image as a woman with a fragile appearance but an unyielding inner determination. But it was her role in Beetlejuice that same year that embedded her in the collective imagination of a generation looking for something different at the movies.

The Desert and the Top of the World

In 1991, the release of Thelma & Louise changed the course of her career and that of many women in the industry. Callie Khouri's script put Davis and Susan Sarandon in a 1966 Ford Thunderbird to escape a suffocating reality. The film sparked a social debate that is still studied in film schools around the world today.

The box office take of 45 million dollars in the United States was only part of the phenomenon. Davis received an Oscar nomination and became the face of a new way of understanding female leading roles. But the industry wasn't ready to keep up with that pace of complex stories.

In 1992, she starred in A League of Their Own. This film about a women's baseball league during World War II required her to learn to play professionally so the scenes would be believable. The movie performed well at the box office because Davis brought a mix of physical authority and vulnerability that connected with a mass audience.

The Flop That Changed the Rules

Her romantic and professional relationship with director Renny Harlin brought the most difficult moment of her life. In 1995, they starred in one of the most memorable financial disasters in Hollywood history, Cutthroat Island. The production company Carolco Pictures went bankrupt after the shoot.

The boat sank.

Although The Long Kiss Goodnight in 1996 tried to restore her status as an action heroine with a solid script by Shane Black, the industry's perception had changed. Major studios began to see her as a financial risk. So Davis decided to look for other paths away from the main spotlight of the red carpets.

In 1999, she surprised the sports press by narrowly missing a spot on the U.S. Olympic archery team. She had only started practicing the sport two years earlier. She finished in place 24 of 300 competitors in the qualifying trials for the Sydney Olympic Games.

Data Against Invisibility

In 2004, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media after noticing the lack of female role models in the cartoons she watched with her daughter. She didn't limit herself to giving speeches or complaining in interviews. She hired experts to analyze thousands of hours of content and present empirical data to the heads of major studios.

Her goal was to prove with numbers that women were underrepresented on screen.

That research effort earned her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2019. Meanwhile, she kept working on television projects such as Commander in Chief in 2005, for which she won a Golden Globe. In 2019, she joined the cast of GLOW, playing a former Las Vegas showgirl.

In 2023, she appeared in the independent drama Fairyland, set in 1970s San Francisco. A year later, in 2024, she joined the cast of Blink Twice, the directing debut of Zoë Kravitz. The budget of her big pirate flop in 1995 was 98 million dollars.