``It's so crowded, so dirty.''
It's England.
The ``scepter'd isle''? The ``earth of majesty''? The ``other Eden, demi-paradise''? This ``blessed plot, this earth, this realm''?
That England?
``A stifling place,'' the actress opines. ``Filthy.''
She'll take LA any day.
Two years ago Davis did exactly that. The star of such pictures as Ken Russell's ``The Rainbow'' and ``The Lair of the White Worm'' and John Boorman's ``Hope and Glory'' traded the rainy isles for sunny Southern California.
``It was a life decision as opposed to a work decision,'' Davis said during a recent visit to Seattle. ``The atmosphere, the weather, everything made me feel freer.'' California was a welcome change from her homeland, where ``I'd just come to a point where I felt that every time I jumped up in the air I was bashed in the head by the heaviness of the country. There's so many restrictions.''
There was also, she admits, an insufficient appreciation on the part of British film producers and critics for her talents. Although her performances as a heroin-addicted waif in ``Mona Lisa'' and as the headstrong sister of ``Hope and Glory's'' little-boy protagonist had won her plenty of critical praise and film-industry attention, she felt her career had hit a plateau after ``The Rainbow.''
The filmed adaption of D.H. Lawrence's novel about a young woman's sexual and emotional awakening marked Davis' first lead performance. Industry reaction to the picture was restrained. ``I felt I'd done something good,'' Davis said, ``but nobody in England responded to me in a really positive way.'' Offers of other leading roles did not come flooding in.
Davis thinks the fact that the picture was directed by Russell, a filmmaker with a wild-man reputation and a hot-and-cold (lately mostly cold) relationship with the press and the film industry, had something to do with that. She also thinks her lack of formal training may have worked against her. In a country where the best film performers, from Olivier to the likes of Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis, come from a formal theatrical background, Davis was considered something of a maverick.
The daughter of the owner of a small ad agency and the product of a convent-school education, she took only two terms of drama classes at the community college in her hometown, Kidderminster in England's Midlands. She dropped out in the early '80s and moved to industrial Birmingham, England's third-largest city. Still in her teens, she joined a small theater touring group that put on plays for schoolchildren. ``We did socially relevant plays for 15- and 16-year-olds, plays we'd written ourselves about subjects that we thought were important, like women at work and technology.''
That lasted for two years. In 1983, at age 19, she moved to London. After months of scuffling and starving, she landed a small part in a TV show. Her first film role was in ``Mona Lisa,'' released in 1986, and others quickly followed. She had a small role in ``Lionheart,'' a little-seen 1987 picture about the ill-fated Children's Crusade of the Middle Ages, but her breakthrough came when John Boorman cast her in ``Hope and Glory.''
That film's rebellious daughter was like a spiritual sister to Davis - ``a very free kind of expressive character'' - and Davis shone in the part.
Her next picture, ``A Prayer for the Dying,'' in which she played a blind girl who falls in love with an IRA terrorist played by Mickey Rourke, was a setback, blasted by critics and ignored by audiences.
She did some TV work and a couple of other pictures, including the outrageous black-humor horror comedy, ``The Lair of the White Worm,'' in which she played a village girl terrorized by a man-eating serpent. That was her first experience working with Russell, and it was on the basis of that that she was cast in ``The Rainbow.'' Once again she was playing a woman trying to break free of the restraints of conventional society, and once again Davis felt a strong connection to the character. Having grown up feeling repressed by the nuns at the convent school, by the provincial mind-set of her small hometown, she said, ``there was so much inside me kind of bubbling, stuff that conflicted with my education, stuff that we're told we don't feel, you don't express, you don't do.''
``The Rainbow's'' Ursula Brangwen and the sister in ``Hope and Glory'' allowed her to literally act out the sorts of conflicts she felt while growing up. ``I enjoyed those parts, because it (the impulse for self-expression) was suppressed inside me in real life. So I could express it there in the roles.''
``I just felt trapped. I never really felt like I fit anywhere in England,'' Davis said. When ``The Rainbow'' met with lukewarm response, she took that as a signal that the time had come to try to make a clean break. So she packed up and moved to Los Angeles in 1989.
She'd hardly unpacked when she was sent a script for a small independent picture called ``Horseplayer.'' It was a low-budget film by a writer-director she'd never heard of. But she was intrigued by its story of a strange young couple who sexually and emotionally manipulate a repressed stranger until the man goes off the deep end. Davis got the script the week she arrived. She got the part almost immediately, and three weeks later she was filming.
When shooting concluded 31/2 weeks later, she got the director. And vice versa. Almost to their surprise, she and filmmaker Kurt Voss discovered they had fallen in love.
``It started happening during the filming, but neither of us were aware of it or did anything about it,'' Davis said. ``It was after we finished filming that it just happened. I know I loved his script and I loved his work and I found him - and I still do - a totally fascinating guy to be with.''
The fascination was mutual, and the couple married in Las Vegas in April of last year. Since then, Voss has written two more scripts that have starring roles for his wife. What sorts of parts? ``Cool parts!,'' Davis said with a laugh. ``Wild parts.'' Perhaps even parts that will allow her to play her age for a change. Up until ``Horseplayer,'' she consistently found herself playing characters younger than herself. Now 27 (she celebrated her birthday during her Seattle visit), she looks no more than 22, a slender blonde 22 who speaks in a lilting semi singsong and punctuates her statements with frequent laughter.
``Horseplayer'' is due to open in Seattle next Friday, and after that Davis will be seen in ``Homefront,'' a new series on ABC's fall schedule. In it, she plays a young English war bride. The role is ``almost like an older `Hope and Glory' character,'' Davis said, ``a very strong, very sexual young woman arriving in America.''
With a new American husband, a new American film and a new series on American television (it's her first), the Americanization of Sammi is well under way. Any homesick pangs for dear old England?
``Not the tiniest, weeniest little'' bit, Davis said firmly, and then amended that to ``except for my family. Obviously, I miss my family. But in terms of England, no, nothing.''
So as far as she's concerned, the island could, say, make like Atlantis and sink into the sea? ``Absolutely . . . as long as my family were on the boats.''