Ashley Judd was stroking one of her five cats—huge, fluffy, mixed-breed tabbies—when an alarm began wailing throughout her nineteenth-century Tennessee farmhouse. "Something's on fire," she said. Judd turned her head. Flames, feet high, were leaping out of the living room. A thick cloud of black smoke was spewing quickly forward, toward us. I stood in bare feet—no shoes are allowed past the Judd doormat—frozen, if that's the right word, to the spot. I was thinking, Bucket? 911? How do you find the telephone in a house whose every surface is covered with tea cozies, table mats of peacock feathers, figurines, commemorative plates, buttercup sterling silver, needlepoint homilies on all and pillow, books—old, new, decorative, well thumbed—car-racing helmets, trophies, bath products, photographs, and countless other objects of autobiographical, historical, and aesthetic significance?

The actress, in a sporty white tank and can-do khaki A-line skirt, jumped to it. Sprinting, she turned on the faucets in the kitchen and guest bathroom. She grabbed towels—this is not a household with a shortage of terry—soaked them, and fearlessly whacked at the huge blazing armchair that was the source of the trouble. "I'm only worried about the animals," she said as she gallantly struggled against the mini-inferno. "What should I do?" I asked pathetically. I had already blown out some of the 30-odd candles that burned in the living room; one of them had evidently mingled with the upholstery. "Get more towels from the guest bedroom," Ashley said calmly. "Straight ahead, then left, then right." Soon after Judd had single-handedly put out the fire, her brother-in-law Mario returned from the woodpile with the somewhat unbelievable intention of finding a flame-starter to burn logs. He helped drag the armchair into the garden and turned a hose on it when it started flickering once more. Ashley said, "Well, we're just going to have to tell ABC Carpet that this fabric is flammable." Then she started looking through cookbooks. She was preparing Pop's (i.e., her stepfather's) birthday dinner that night (main course: fried pork chops), and she needed a recipe for devil's food cake.

If I was awed by Ashley Judd's comportment during this stunning sequence, perhaps I shouldn't have been. She has made a career portraying either ordinary women in extraordinary peril, in the tradition of Joan Fontaine, or kooky, sweeter-than-pie stunners who operate in a pronounced domestic world (Donna Reed with a drawl). Thus, this spring has already seen the release of Carl Franklin's High Crimes, in which Judd stars as an attorney whose ex-Marine husband has a dark and dangerous past. (It was number two at the box office in its opening weekend, behind Panic Room, further confirming the Hepburn/Tracy appeal of Judd and her wonderfully unlikely costar, Morgan Freeman.) This month she can be seen in Callie Khouri's adaptation of Rebecca Wells's best-selling novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. In the film, she plays the young Vivi, the most bewitching, beauteous, and demented member of a circle of women friends (the Ya-Yas). The action unfolds in a world of large country houses, southern privilege, and intensely grounded relationships.

This is a world that Judd happens to inhabit. She lives with her husband, the Scottish CART-racing driver Dario Franchitti, on ten acres of farmland that abut her sister's 490 acres and her mother's 500. She enthusiastically maintains her sorority friendships (University of Kentucky, Kappa Kappa Gamma) through E-mail, and hangs out with old non-industry girlfriends (more of which later). What makes the setup not so Ya-Ya is that her husband, who at 29 is five years her junior, is absolutely pivotal to her life. They met at a friend's wedding in Santa Monica, courted intensely, and then spent the best part of a year trying to organize a pressproof wedding. The couple finally tied the knot last December, at Skibo Castle, Scotland, the scene of the Madonna-Ritchie nuptials. Judd wore a simple dress but "ended up with the most gigantic veil in the world. Like a fountain." Grazie, Mr. Armani. Although the bride's father and stepfather were present, she walked down the aisle solo. "I don't believe in women being handed over as an economic asset from one man to another," she told me over a homemade lunch of tuna casserole and chocolate cream pie.

Judd has been cooking a lot recently. Since the wedding, the newlyweds have been holed up in rural Tennessee in order to devote themselves to yoga (Dario studies with Ashley; Ashley with a local Ashtanga guru), woodchopping (excellent upper-body work), bird-watching, reading (Judd recently finished Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride), and other pastimes that would no doubt meet with Thoreau's approval. She has 20 pounds of powdered sugar from Kroger's market in her basement ("So I can bake whatever strikes me") and eighteen kinds of dairy products in her fridge. "Relentless work and marriage are mutually exclusive endeavors," said Judd, grating extra cheese on her casserole. "There's no way, at least if you want to have any genuine intimacy in your married life. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise." Still, there are signs that all this restful behavior is making her restless. "I was a little weird in my head yesterday, and I thought, Am I not in my full flourishing because I'm not at work or something?" She gazed out the window and saw an industrious woodpecker furiously sharpening his beak.

So here is the Judd predicament: how to reconcile strong ambitions for movie glory with an equally fervent desire to live a life of middle-class virtue and down-home values. "She has really suburban dreams and fantasies," Hugh Jackman, her costar in Someone Like You, says affectionately. "Being a florist, baking cookies, wanting to teach." Judd obviously has mixed feelings about following an occupation that is not inconsistent with brainless egotism. No one who meets her is allowed to walk away in the mistaken belief that she's just a pretty face (although she is exceptionally lovely in person, with shiny bob and glowing skin, courtesy of nature, Kiehl's, and Lorac). Here is what I learned within minutes of meeting her. She prefers novels to magazines. She is close friends with Bobby Shriver, with whom she discusses the campaign to eliminate Third World debt. She can cite, in an anecdote about a massage therapist, an unfinished poem by Robert Frost. She speaks French and is addicted to NPR. The one chink in the intellectual armor, perhaps, is a typically thespian sincerity about karma. She speculates that Dario, a voracious reader of literature about World War II, may have been a small Chinese boy who listened for snippets of war news on the wireless. And her yearning to walk—how to put this?—au naturel in the woods could, Judd muses, indicate an aboriginal previous life.

For possibly karmic reasons, she cultivates fatalism: "What goes around comes around. If there's a project that I've really loved but was passed over for, invariably it has come back somehow. I have a very relaxed attitude toward all that, which does not mean that I'm not ambitious. It's just that I've kind of inoculated myself against the disease." Nevertheless, Judd can't stop herself from trying to fix things on behalf of her nearest and dearest. She worries that Dario's CART-racing circuit is not well marketed in the States, so she turns up on obscure radio shows about auto mechanics to talk it up. She worries about her sister Wynonna's struggles to diversify her country-music success, and would love to help. "I would like her to do a song for a movie of mine, but only if it had the right title placement. She would want to do it in any case, to help me."

Of course, underlying all these dilemmas is a belief in the perfectibility of life. Judd exudes a quintessentially American optimism that goes some way toward explaining her strong mainstream allure for cinema audiences. We love Ashley because we are grateful that such a beauty could share our basic bourgeois impulses. When she learns, in film after film, that her husband is a homicidal maniac, there is little space between her horror and ours.

Judd's clothing sense consolidates this appeal. She has a fashion historian's knowledge of cut and ornamentation, and a stylist's awareness of her own body (one shoulder, she says, is fractionally higher than the other, so all straps have to be adjusted). And yet she is not drawn toward conceptual or directional looks. Judd doesn't do edgy, ever; she sticks to the continuum between just plain pretty (Lilly Pulitzer shifts, Marni prints, Missoni knits) and big-time glamour (Armani, Valentino, Chanel). Her walk-in closet—which is a room, actually—reveals a whimsical, feminine aesthetic: tiers of Prada and Manolo kitten-heels; Muriel Brandolini caftans; stacks of sherbet-hued cashmeres (some vintage, some new); lots of Tuleh; old Voyage (which she recently started wearing again); neatly pressed khakis; perfectly shrunken baseball tees. "I'm pretty simple," she says. "I don't participate in trends. The times that I have, it's because I haven't been paying attention—when I've let someone do my hair, looked at it as I was walking out the door, and said, 'Oh, shit.' " Last summer, in Portofino, Judd repeatedly visited the Pucci store to try on a dress. On her umpteenth session in the dressing room, Dario peeked in and said, "What a pretty dress." That sealed it for Judd. "He loves it, which for some reason I find terribly endearing."

For her red-carpet appearances, the actress is helped by her close friend, the stylist Samantha McMillen. McMillen won't accept payment, so Judd "pays" her pal in Marni. "I cleaned out the Milan store," she says. McMillen, who used to work for Armani, is responsible for Ashley's long- standing relationship with Giorgio, which has resulted in numerous memorable looks. (For Oscars 2001: thirties-esque satin-bodiced dress with asymmetrical tiered skirt, which the designer sketched after Ashley and Samantha sent him pictures of long beaded strands from Fred Leighton. For Skibo 2001: simple but stunning wedding gown that Armani designed from an ad Judd sent him of a matron-of-honor dress with a little silk pocket.) When the actress wants something a little less austere, she turns to Valentino, with whom she has a similarly intense relationship. The glossy amethyst, side-twisted Oscar dress from 2000? "It was red in the couture show, and I loved it. We spoke on the telephone—I think I caught him on the slopes in Switzerland—and he said, 'Do you know anemones?' Sold!"

A couple of weeks after the Tennessee conflagration, I met Judd and McMillen in the Bel-Air hotel. Judd was in Los Angeles to tape The Tonight Show and walk the red carpet at the premiere of High Crimes. The star had flown in from Sardinia, site of the Vogue shoot, with her dog Buttermilk, a few tees and jeans, a T. Anthony monogrammed makeup case, and the stomach flu. The scene in her suite was pure Ya-Ya. Ashley, who was having her hair curled for the night ahead, was surrounded by her bridesmaids, Samantha and Gabrielle (whom she met when she was three), and an ex-assistant, Michelle, who was also present at Skibo. There was a lot of whooping and verbal pillow fighting. Room-service guacamole, quesadillas, and iced tea went untouched. "Anybody want a hand massage?" Ashley drawled when her manicure was finished. "Yes, please," said Michelle. Then everyone—Ashley, the girls, the hair and makeup guys, and I—played password. (Judd: "Don't be a creepy journalist; you have to play.") Somebody gave the clue "contour," and Judd snapped back, "Shade!" Correct. "You're so competitive," Gabrielle at one point shrieked at Ashley. "So are you," Ashley retorted competitively. Then somebody gave a whole bunch of agonizing clues that included "suburban" and "trailer." "Ball-hitch!" yelled Samantha finally. "Of course," everybody shouted, "how obvious!"

Then it happened: Flames leaped from the coffee table. One of Ashley's candles had set fire to tissues. Everybody threw iced tea.

We all escaped into the car and zoomed off to Leno. Judd was in an unusually provocative getup: Earl low-rise jeans ("I can't believe how much I'm loving these jeans. It's amazing what clothes that fit can do for your self-esteem"); a Michael Stars tank top with a slogan, customized by Sam, that said, this is what a feminist looks like; Tod's high heels; and a fisherman's cap from Dolce & Gabbana. We started playing a new game, Druthers, in which everyone has to elect the worse of two evils. Sam: "One big nostril or a black tongue?" Ashley: "Gimme the unischnozz. At least it's out there." Sam: "Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash?" Ashley (without hesitation): "Johnny Cash." The atmosphere changed from Ya-Ya to Something About Mary. Sam: "You wake up in the morning. You have either a dog's penis coming out of your forehead or a dog's balls attached to your chin." (Buttermilk perked up at this one.) Ashley: "The balls. You can always wear a scarf." Ashley: "You can either be a hard body, or 30 pounds overweight but amazing at yoga for the rest of your life." Everyone: "Hard body!" Ashley: "Oh, I'd go for yoga, definitely." Everyone: "Hey, we're here."

In her dressing room at The Tonight Show, Ashley chats with Jay—not about herself but about Dario's upcoming race at Long Beach. "You have to come out," she says. "You'll have paddock seats." Leno wanders off. We watch his opening schtick, in which we see a joke clip from Panic Room. "What's a promo for Panic Room doing on my show?" Judd demands, mocking her own rivalrous nature. Then she finds a candle and lights it.