On her stay at a co-dependency treatment center last year in Texas to sort out issues of anxiety and depression:

“I wanted to clean out the wreckage of my past. It used to be that every time I made a movie, I had to deal with gut-wrenching anxiety. Now I feel that I have the tools to be creative and nurture myself at the same time.”

On her international charity work ranging from family planning to AIDS and malaria prevention:

“Service work is my highest purpose. When I travel, I get to see poverty reduction strategies in action. I am particularly committed to the empowerment of girls and women, but my experience has shown that problems don’t exist in isolation. Gender inequality is linked to poverty, which is in turn linked to lack of education, lack of infrastructure, and so on.”
“It’s so fortunate that people are interested in my movies, but when I talk to someone, all I want to do is discuss social justice and changing the world.”

On her new, very unglamorous role in Bug:

“When I’m considering a part, a key factor is spending as little time as possible in hair and makeup, and I certainly didn’t need much of that for this movie.” (laughed)  “Lately I’m very picky when it comes to movies. I don’t do as many as I used to since I married my husband [racecar driver Dario Franchitti] five years ago. Bug was a truly out-there experience. The script put me in a ‘bet-you-can’t-do-this’ situation, so I wanted to prove that I could. I like projects that provoke me as an artist.”

On future roles:

“I’d love to do a mountain movie, something specifically Appalachian. Or a good justice story, or something with animals…you know, just the stuff I really like.”

Thanks Bill! Source

39-year-old Ashley Judd received a bachelor’s degree in French, but it wasn’t clear whether she attended any of Sunday’s graduation ceremonies, UK spokesman Jay Blanton told the Lexington Herald-Leader for a story on its Web site.

Judd attended the university from 1986 to 1990, but left one course shy of graduation.

Blanton said student confidentiality laws prevented him from saying how she finally received her degree.

In an interview last year, Judd told the newspaper that she would probably take a correspondence course to finish the one class necessary to get a degree. When she left in 1990, online and correspondence courses weren’t allowed to count toward graduation.

Ashley Judd has praised her husband for helping her to overcome a bout of depression earlier this year. The actress checked into the Shades Of Hope Treatment Center in Buffalo Gap, Texas, in February while suffering from depression and an eating disorder, and completed a 47-day program to aid her recovery.

She’s now confident she’s beaten the illness, saying, “I have so many more tools now. My self-care is really good.” And she thanks her husband, racing driver Dario Franchitti, for standing by her during the treatment: “He is so supportive in just the right way. Pitch-perfect.”

Source

After having endured a “chaotic” and “dysfunctional” childhood, Ashley Judd underwent a 47-day program at a Texas treatment center last February in order to deal with the issues of her past, including depression, isolation and co-dependent relationships, she says.

“I needed help. I was in so much pain,” Judd, who says she slept to combat depression and exhibited a compulsion to clean, tells Glamour magazine.

In recounting her childhood, Judd, 38, describes herself as a “hyper-vigilant child” who attempted to behave perfectly in order to compensate for her lack of security. She went to 13 schools in 12 years and shifted from living with her mother, her father and her grandparents.

“Supposedly, my sister was the ‘messed-up’ one, and I was the ‘perfect’ one,” says Judd, whose mother is Grammy-winning country singer-songwriter Naomi Judd and sister is Wynonna, another Grammy winner. Her father is her mother’s high-school sweetheart, Michael Ciminella. (Ashley’s parents divorced when she was four.)

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