Davis won three Primetime Emmy Awards for starring in the television film Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995), and the miniseries Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001) and The Starter Wife (2007).

After making her feature film debut in the buddy comedy High Rolling (1977), Davis first came to prominence for her role as Sybylla Melvyn in the coming-of-age saga My Brilliant Career (1979),[4] for which she won BAFTA Awards for Best Actress and Best Newcomer.

"[7] Her success continued with lead roles in the Australian New Wave films Winter of Our Dreams (1981), as a waif-like heroin addict; the drama Heatwave (1982), as a radical Sydney tenant organizer; and the thriller Hoodwink (1981), as a sexually-repressed clergyman's wife.

[5] Of her performance in Winter of Our Dreams, Roger Ebert wrote that: "Davis brought a kind of wiry, feisty intelligence to My Brilliant Career, playing an Australian farm woman who rather felt she would do things her own way.

[9] Likewise, The Washington Post wrote, "With makeup the color of smudged ivory, her pallor enhanced by the off-white linens she wears, Davis is daringly unattractive for a leading lady; that plainness is emphasized in the book.

"[10] She returned to Australian cinema for her next two films, Kangaroo (1987), as a German-born writer's wife, and High Tide (also 1987), as a foot-loose mother attempting to reunite with her teenage daughter who is being raised by the paternal grandmother.

The following year, she was featured in Joel Coen's Barton Fink,[13] which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, an adaptation of the hallucinogenic novel of the same name.

[14] She returned to E. M. Forster territory in Where Angels Fear to Tread and won an Independent Spirit Award for her work as mannish woman author George Sand in Impromptu, a romantic period drama with Hugh Grant as her consumptive lover, Frédéric Chopin.

Sand, who's the locus of this blissfully high-spirited romp about the circle of writers and musicians in 1830s Paris, never does anything halfway; her life is an experiment in full-throttle, passionate immersion, and that's why Davis is the ideal actress for the part.

"[15] She earned an Emmy nomination and her first Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film for her portrayal of a real-life Second World War heroine Mary Lindell in the CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation One Against the Wind.

Adrian Turner of Radio Times noted of her, "Judy Davis, one of the greatest and least "starry" actresses around, plays Lindell and shows the same sensitivity that she brought to her role in A Passage to India.

She next co-starred with Kevin Spacey in the comedy film The Ref (1994), portraying a married couple whose relationship is on the rocks, with Denis Leary playing a thief who counsels their marriage.

[13] Roger Ebert called Davis "naturally verbal" and praised her for being able to "develop a manic counterpoint" in her arguments with Spacey "that elevates them to a sort of art form.

After appearing in Celebrity, The Guardian newspaper wrote that Davis "in recent years has succeeded Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow as Allen's misfit muse.

She played Dorothy de Lascabanes in The Eye of the Storm (2011), an adaptation of Patrick White's novel of the same title, for which she won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

"[27] In 2017, Davis received a Primetime Emmy nomination for her supporting performance as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in Ryan Murphy's anthology television series Feud.

Ms. Davis is so firmly identified in the American mind with intense, often neurotic city-dwelling characters that it takes an episode or two to get used to her climbing in and out of a police car in the dusty, empty landscapes, wearing a baggy blue uniform that swallows her tiny frame.

James is a formidable woman stuck in the middle of nowhere because of the bonds of family and history, and Ms. Davis's preternatural intelligence and tightly capped energy serve her well.

She created the role of The Actress in Terry Johnson's Insignificance at the Royal Court in London,[33] receiving an Olivier Award nomination, and appeared in a brief 1989 Los Angeles production of Tom Stoppard's Hapgood.