Watching children’s entertainment with Alizeh also sharpened Davis’ awareness of how rarely girls appeared as central characters. That observation led her to commission research on gender representation and establish the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.
“When my daughter was 2, we watched her first preschool show together, and I immediately noticed there were far more male characters than female ones. Then I saw it in G-rated videos and other shows, and I was horrified. I knew there was gender inequality in general, but I had no idea it would show up in entertainment for the littlest kids. That kind of imbalance trains kids to have an unconscious bias from minute one,” she told AARP in 2023.
By the time Davis won an Oscar for The Accidental Tourist in 1989, she had already started building a career playing women who were funny, difficult, unpredictable and fully alive. She made her film debut as April Page in Tootsie in 1982 and broke through as journalist Veronica Quaife in The Fly in 1986. In Beetlejuice in 1988, she played Barbara Maitland, a newly dead homeowner trying to reclaim her house from both the living and Michael Keaton’s chaos. In 1991, Thelma & Louise pushed that further. As Thelma Dickinson, a sheltered Arkansas homemaker who goes on the run with her friend Louise (Susan Sarandon), Davis played a woman discovering her nerve in real time.
(From left) Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are seen in a scene from the 1991 film “Thelma & Louise.”
©MGM/courtesy Everett / Everett Collection
During an early script session, Davis watched Sarandon question one of her lines with director Ridley Scott and get an easy yes.
“I had never been in the presence of a woman who doesn’t apologize for existing ever and advocates for herself without any fear for herself, and everybody loved her,” Davis said on the podcast. “It wasn’t like she was, like, fighting, but she just knows what she wants and says what she wants.”
The movie also sharpened Davis’ awareness of what women were allowed to do on-screen. The film became a hit, and Davis and Sarandon both received Oscar nominations.
“I think it’s because of Thelma & Louise, and it really heightened my awareness of how women are portrayed,” she said. “Women had so few opportunities to come out of a movie feeling like empowered by the female characters.”
To this day, the two are tight: “She changed my life more than anybody. We’re still, you know, ride or die,” Davis said on the podcast.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.aarp.org ’
