The course of true love never did run smooth. Ashley Judd is the first to admit that her relationship with estranged husband Dario Franchitti is a complicated one — but complicated isn’t necessarily bad. Speaking about the state of their marriage in the April issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, Judd says they’re still very much each other’s family.
“He’ll always be my loved one,” the Divergent actress, 45, tells the magazine. “Even before our wedding, we agreed not to tell people about our relationship, but to show them instead. What we’re showing them now is we’re human, we’re family, and this is what family looks like.”
(Judd and the retired race car driver, 40, announced their separation in January 2013 after 11 years of marriage. In October, however, she was by his side after he suffered serious injuries in an accident at the Grand Prix of Houston. A source told Us Weekly later that same month that they planned to “give it another try” once he recovered.)
The actress also spoke with LHJ about her new movie, Divergent, costarring Shailene Woodley and Kate Winslet. “It’s based on the teen books [by Veronica Roth] about a society that divides humanity into factions,” Judd explains. “I play a woman who doesn’t fit with the group she was born into.”
She continues: “The film is really about the greatest fundamental human longing, which is to belong. But it’s also about that opposing desire to be an individual. That’s a profound tension I can certainly relate to.”
Indeed, Judd has been open about her struggle to define herself outside of her relationships with her famous family — mom Naomi and sister Wynonna, both country music legends. Her childhood was a particularly tumultuous time, and led to later problems with depression.
Asked what she’d tell her younger self if they came face-to-face, the actress says, “I’d hold her! Adolescence was exceedingly difficult for me…Only when I got into therapy and started to understand what neglect looked like was I able to ask, ‘Where were the teachers? Where was everybody?'”
Old age, she hopes, will be an easier time. In the future, she tells LHJ, she wants to be a “joyful” old woman. “A feminist committed to social justice. A homebody. A Kentucky basketball fan,” she says. “But mostly, a woman who has her priorities in order.”
