Age: 56
female
Essie Davis is an Australian actress. Born and raised in Hobart, Tasmania, she is the daughter of locally famed artist George Davis. She emerged from the Old Nick Company at the University of Tasmania in the late 1980s and has gone on to appear in Hollywood movies. She is a graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney. Her career started after her role in the all Australian movie Dad and Dave: On Our Selection (1995), also starring other prestigious actors such as Geoffrey Rush, Leo McKern, and Joan Sutherland. Her most famous movie roles are in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, Richard Flanagan's 1998 Tasmanian film The Sound of One Hand Clapping, and Girl with a Pearl Earring. In 2003 she won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress for her UK performance in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. In 2004 she starred in a Broadway production of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, for which she earned a Tony nomination. In 2005 she appeared as Mrs. Nellie Lovett in the BBC production of Sweeney Todd with Ray Winstone. In the 2008 film Hey, Hey, It's Esther Blueburger she plays Esther's controlling mother.
Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer. 2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed? Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield.
