THE JURY MIGHT be out as far as the rest of America is concerned, but in Hollywood, at least, it appears that a woman can be president.
Not one but two television series featuring a female leader of the free world have hit US screens in recent months, lending fuel to the debate about whether a woman - be it Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice - will enter the 2008 race for the White House. Recent polls are more or less unanimous that most Americans would vote for a woman if they thought she was the best candidate.
But sitting before a life-size model of Air Force One's fuselage on a Los Angeles backlot, Geena Davis, who plays President Mackenzie Allen in Commander in Chief, is more circumspect. 'The polls say up to 80 per cent of Americans would be comfortable voting for a woman, but who knows what would actually happen? It's a nice thing to say on a form.'
Yet if Clinton or Rice end up running in two years, they may owe a small debt of gratitude to Davis. The 50-year-old's performances in the series, which premiered in Hong Kong on Friday, earned Davis a Golden Globe award for best actress in a television drama.
In her acceptance speech she regaled the audience with details of a heart-rending exchange with a little girl who told her she wanted to be president when she grew up. When Davis admitted that the encounter was entirely made up, she brought the house down.
'I had thought of it a couple of days as a joke and my husband said I should do it. So I did. But then when everybody went, 'Ahh', I started thinking, 'Oh, my god. Should I just leave it at that, or are they going to be really disappointed when I say that wasn't true?' But it worked out great.'
