Geena Davis Net Worth And Biography

Virginia Elizabeth “Geena” Davis is an American actress, activist, producer, and model. She is one of the most successful American actresses and has a net worth of $30 million. In this article, RNN further details Geena Davis’ net worth, biography, and career.

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Bio-Data

Biography

Geena Davis was born on the 21st of January, 1956 in Wareham, Massachusetts. Her mother, Lucille Davis, was a teacher’s assistant, and her father, William F. Davis was a civil engineer and church deacon. She has an older brother whose name is Danforth.

Geena Davis picked an interest in music at a young age. As a teenager, she learned piano, and flute, and also played the organ. She eventually became the organist at her Congregationalist church in Wareham. Geena Davis attended Wareham High School and was an exchange student in Sandviken, Sweden which helped her become fluent in Swedish. She also studied at New England College and Boston University where she bagged a bachelor’s degree in Drama in 1979. Geena Davis had her post-university work as a window mannequin for Ann Taylor and later on, she signed with New York’s Zoli Modeling Agency.

She is said to have adopted “Geena” (her nickname) after seeing shows with characters Cheburashka and Gena the Crocodile, Swedish Druttem och Gena, which aired in Sweden in the late 1970s.

Early Career

Whilst working as a model, Geena Davis was cast by Director, Sydney Pollack in his film, Tootsie in 1982 as a soap opera actor. The film was the second most profitable film of 1982, it received up to ten Academy Awards and is also considered a “Cult Classic”. She won the regular part of Wendy Killian in the tv series, Buffalo Bill which aired from June 1983 to March 1984, and she also had a writing credit in one episode.

Simultaneously, Geena Davis guest-starred in Knight Rider, Riptide, Family Ties, and Remington Steele, including her self-owned Sara which lasted 13 episodes. At the same time, she auditioned for The Terminator.

She also appeared in Fletch (1985), starred in Transylvania alongside Jeff Goldblum, and together also starred in The Fly (1986). In 1987, she appeared with Jeff Goldblum again in Earth Girls Are Easy.

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Career Breakthrough

Geena Davis was cast in Beetlejuice (19988) and the film made $73.7 million from a budget of $15 million with her performance in the film receiving majorly positive reviews. She acted in The Accidental Tourist (1988) as an animal hospital employee and dog trainer with a sickly son. The film was a critical and commercial success and it earned her an Oscar Award for Best Supporting Actress. She appeared in Quick Change (1990) and starred with Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise (1991). The film was also a critical and commercial success, considered a classic for influencing other films and artistic works and becoming a landmark feminist film. For good performance, Geena Davis again received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

In 1992, she starred in A League of Their Own and the film reached number one at the box office, becoming the tenth highest-grossing film. Her performance in the film earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress. In 1994, Geena Davis played an office worker in Angie and the film received mixed reviews from critics, as a result, it became a commercial failure. The same year, Geena Davis reunited with Michael Keaton to play insomniac writers who fall in love in the American Romantic Comedy film, Speechless. The film received negative reviews and modest box office returns but despite this, she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.

1990s

Geena Davis alongside her then-husband, Director Renny Harlin teamed up for the films, Cutthroat Island (1995) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) with her starring in the films. However, The Long Kiss Goodnight managed to become a moderate success but Cutthroat Island was a flop critically and commercially. The film was listed by Guinness World Records as having the largest box office loss. In 1998, Geena Davis divorced Renny Harlin. After then, she appeared as Eleanor Little in Stuart Little (1999) and repeated her role in Stuart Little 2 (2002), and Stuart Little 3: Call of the Wild (2005).

Career Downturn & Break

By the mid and late 1990s, her film career had lost some kind of glorious touch and she herself made recounted it in a 2016 interview with Vulture. According to her, “Film roles really did start to dry up when I got into my 40s. If you look at IMDb, up until that age, I made roughly one film a year. In my entire 40s, I made one movie, Stuart Little. I was getting offers, but for nothing meaty or interesting like in my 30s. I’d been completely ruined and spoiled. I mean, I got to play a pirate captain! I got to do every type of role, even if the movie failed.”

Geena Davis starred in the sitcom The Geena Davis Show which aired for one season on ABC. Then she starred in the ABC television series, Commander in Chief. Her role as the first female president of the United States earned her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series in 2006. The season was however canceled after its first season and Geena Davis expressed her displeasure at the cancelation in a 2016 interview. She was also nominated for an Emmy Award and SAG Award for Outstanding Female Actor in a Drama Series and won the 2006 Women in Film Lucy Award. Geena Davis was the only American actor to be cast in the Australian-produced film, Accident Happens (2009).

Professional Expansion

After a long period of irregular career work, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media saw her career expand during the 2010s. In 2012, she starred as a psychiatrist in Coma, a miniseries based on the 1977 novel of the same title by Robin Cook and the subsequent 1978 film. She played a powerful female movie executive in the critically acclaimed comedy, In a World (2013) which served as Lake Bell’s directorial debut.

In 2014, she provided her voice for the English version of the Studio Ghibli animated film, When Marnie Was There. She repeated her role as Dr. Nicole Herman in the 11th season of Grey’s Anatomy (2014-2015). In 2015, she launched an annual film festival to be held in Bentonville, Arkansas, with the goal of highlighting diversity in film and accepting films that prominently feature marginalized groups and women in the cast and crew. The first Bentonville Film Festival took place from May 5-9, 2015, and Geena Davis appeared as the mother of a semi-famous television star in Me Him Her (2016).

2017-Present

In 2017, Geena Davis starred in the film adaptation, of Marjorie Prime and played the daughter of an 85-year-old woman experiencing the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. And in 2018, Geena Davis returned to Grey’s Anatomy repeating the role of Dr. Nicole Herman in the 14th season of the show. She executive produced the documentary, This Changes Everything where she was interviewed about her experiences in the industry. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival where it was named first runner-up for the People’s Choice Award: Documentaries.

In 2019, she joined the voice cast of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power as Huntara. The same year, she joined the cast of Glow as Sandy. In 2022, Geena Davis’ likeness will be used for the character of Poison Ivy in the DC Entertainment comic book series, Batman ’89.

Geena Davis’ Net Worth

As of 2022, Geena Davis’ net worth is estimated at $30 million. In truth, Geena Davis’ net worth is proof that she has toiled and successfully gathered quite an amount of wealth throughout her career journey.

Activism

Geena Davis is a supporter of the Women’s Sports Foundation and an advocate for Title IX which is an Act of Congress. This Act of Congress focuses on equality in sports opportunities and is now expanded to prohibit gender discrimination in American educational institutions.

According to recounts, she noticed an imbalance in the ratio of male to female characters while watching children’s tv programs and videos with her daughter in 2004. This prompted her to sponsor the largest-ever research project on gender in children’s entertainment at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. The study, directed by Stacy Smith, revealed that there were nearly three male characters to every female one in the nearly 400 G, PG, PG-13, and R-rated movies analyzed. In 2005, Geena Davis then launched a venture alongside the non-profit group, Dads and Daughters to balance the number of male and female characters in children’s tv and movie programming.

In 2007, Geena Davis launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Her work with the organization earned her an honorary Doctor of Fine arts degree from Bates College in May 2009. And an honorary Oscar, the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2019.

In 2011, Geena Davis became one of the celebrities attached to USAID and Ad Council’s FWD campaign. She also joined Uma Thurman, Chanel Iman, and Josh Hartnett in tv and internet ads to “forward the facts” about the crisis.

Personal Life

Geena Davis started dating Richard Emmolo in December 1977 and moved in with him a month later. They got married on March 25, 1981, and divorced on June 27, 1984. Then she dated Christopher McDonald. In 1985, she met Jeff Goldblum and they got married on November 1, 1987. They appeared together in The Fly and Earth Girls Are Easy. Come October 1990, she filed for divorce.

After dating Renny Harlin for five months, they got married on September 18, 1993, and she again filed for divorce on August 26, 1997. The date was a day after her personal assistant gave birth to a child fathered by her husband, Renny Harlin. In 1998, Geena Davis dated Reza Jarrahy and they allegedly got married on the 1st of September, 2001. The couple has three children together; a daughter, Alizeh, and fraternal twin sons, Kaiis and Kian. In May 2018, Reza Jarrahy filed for divorce from Geena Davis. She responded by filing a petition in which she claimed that they were never legally married.

In July 1999, Geena Davis was one of the 300 women that contested a semifinal berth in the US Olympic archery team to participate in the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics. She didn’t qualify for the team but participated as a wild-card entry in the Sydney International Golden Arrow competition.

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