Names and faces
■ Country music star Naomi Judd died from suicide, her actor daughter Ashley Judd confirmed Thursday during a “Good Morning America” interview with ABC journalist Diane Sawyer. The “Double Jeopardy” and “Twin Peaks” star spoke tearfully with Sawyer as she shared details of her mother’s April 30 death, one day before the 76-yearold musician and her elder daughter, Wynonna Judd, were to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. The Judds singer, whose family had previously only said they lost her “to the disease of mental illness,” used a gun to end her life, and Ashley Judd said that she was the one who discovered her body. Her family — including stepfather Larry Strickland and sister Wynonna — deputized Ashley to disclose the matriarch’s manner of death because “we don’t want it to be part of the gossip economy,” she said. They also wanted anyone suffering from similar struggles to seek help before it’s too late. “Our mother couldn’t hang on to be recognized by her peers. That is the level of catastrophe of what was going on inside of her,” she said. “Because the barrier between the regard in which they held her couldn’t penetrate into her heart and the lie the disease told her was so convincing.” The lie, she explained, was her mother’s thoughts “that you’re not enough, that you’re not loved, that you’re not worthy.” “Mom was a brilliant conversationalist, she was a star,” Ashley Judd said. “She was an underrated songwriter. And she was someone who suffered from mental illness and had a lot of trouble getting off the sofa — except to go into town every day to the Cheesecake Factory where all the staff knew and loved her,” she joked.
■ Viewers who tuned in to Thursday’s episode of “Candy,” starring Jessica Biel, may have recognized a familiar face: Biel’s husband, Justin Timberlake. The musician and actor portrays a deputy who investigates the murder the show is centered around. Biel, a co-executive producer on the project, says Timberlake first approached her producing partner, Michelle Purple, about wanting to be involved. Biel admits to being worried at first about whether their dynamic would “translate at work” but that quickly went away. “I actually felt total peace when he was around. Like, I knew he was going to hold that sort of safe space for me to work in the way I needed to and be nonjudgmental and open and free. And he gave me the freedom to improvise, which he’s so good at and I’m less comfortable with.” In “Candy,” Biel plays Candy Montgomery, a young, outgoing, church-going wife and mother in Texas who voraciously reads romance novels. She seems to have it all — but is bored — so she begins an affair with a man from her town (played by Pablo Schreiber) and ends up killing his wife, Betty, with an ax. Montgomery pleaded innocent to the crime and a jury sided with her, some even saying they never liked Betty.