She nearly died at 8, then became one of Hollywood’s most powerful women! – Story Of The Day!

After high school, she attended New England College in New Hampshire and later transferred to Boston University to study drama. Her parents didn’t fight the decision. They weren’t stage parents pushing a dream; they simply didn’t fully understand how improbable a successful acting career was. Davis later noted that they accepted her choice partly because the idea of it working seemed so unlikely. She also admitted a strange detail: she never told her parents she didn’t graduate, even though the public narrative often assumed she had. They died without knowing the truth.

In 1977, she moved to New York City and did what nearly every aspiring performer does: whatever work she could find. She was a window mannequin, a sales clerk, a waitress. At the same time, she pursued modeling, believing it could be an entry point into film. Her thinking was blunt and practical: at the time, famous models like Christie Brinkley and Lauren Hutton were getting film offers. She figured modeling might be the quickest route into movies. She wasn’t chasing fashion for fashion’s sake. She was chasing a door.

She signed with the Zoli Agency and landed work, including being featured in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. That catalog appearance proved to be the hinge in her story. Director Sydney Pollack saw her and cast her in Tootsie in 1982, launching her acting career in a way no amount of planning could have engineered. Suddenly, she was on screen alongside Dustin Hoffman, receiving strong reviews and being pulled into a wider circle of opportunity. She moved to Los Angeles, and her name started to carry weight.

She worked steadily through the 1980s, appearing in the TV series Buffalo Bill and later starring in her own show, Sara. When television didn’t sustain her momentum, she pivoted harder into film. A misstep—Transylvania 6-5000—didn’t stop her. Her real breakout arrived with The Fly in 1986, where she starred opposite Jeff Goldblum. The film became iconic, and Davis became impossible to ignore.

Then came a run of projects that cemented her status. Beetlejuice in 1988. The Accidental Tourist in 1989, which earned multiple Academy Award nominations and brought Davis the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She wasn’t just a pretty face or a “type.” She was an actor with range, timing, and control.

Her most culturally enduring role came with Thelma & Louise, the feminist landmark directed by Ridley Scott. It wasn’t only a career peak; it was also a personal turning point. Davis has credited her friendship with Susan Sarandon with teaching her something she hadn’t learned as a child: how to speak plainly, how to say what she thinks, how to stop shrinking herself to fit the room. The film became a phenomenon, and the response highlighted something uncomfortable in the industry: stories centered on women were still treated as exceptions, even when audiences clearly wanted them.

She followed it with A League of Their Own, another women-driven hit that reinforced her identity as a major star who could carry films that didn’t revolve around men. At the height of her fame, she enjoyed the glamour, too. She talked openly about the thrill of dressing up for major events, acknowledging how surreal it felt for a woman from a sheltered small-town background to step into the Oscars in a dramatic gown. Her mother, she noted, wore almost no makeup except red lipstick. Davis understood exactly how far she’d traveled from that world.

But as she approached forty, the industry’s familiar pattern emerged. Roles for women narrowed. The offers changed. She described it later as “falling off the cliff,” the moment when even proven actresses discover that Hollywood’s imagination for women has an expiration date.

Her influence, though, didn’t disappear. Neither did her life beyond film. She married four times, including a marriage to Goldblum, and later became a mother for the first time at forty-six. With her fourth husband, surgeon Reza Jarrahy, she had three children: a daughter, Alizeh, and fraternal twin sons, Kaiis and Kian. Becoming a mother later in life came with challenges, but she described the emotional reality with disarming honesty—how she feared she couldn’t love anyone as much as she loved her daughter until her sons arrived and proved that love doesn’t divide, it multiplies.

Motherhood also sharpened her perspective on media. Watching children’s content, she noticed patterns she couldn’t unsee: who got to speak, who got to lead, who got to exist as more than decoration. That observation turned into action. In 2004, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, pushing for measurable change in representation and calling out the industry’s imbalance, including the dominance of men in directing and decision-making roles. She wasn’t arguing that women lacked talent. She was arguing that the system wasn’t built to let that talent run the show.