By Eliot Wilder / She's talented. She's striking. She won't shut up. She's superstar Ashley Judd, and although many admire her talents, others find her puffed-up personality downright irritating.

An actor as well as philosopher, Ms. Judd is possessed of an uncanny ability to utter the type of haughty quip that puts a sizable blip on our pretentiousness meter. Her conversations with the media, often elliptical in nature, are usually laced with references to anthropology, yard sales, existentialism and just how much dung per year is produced by McDonald's beef cattle.

Undeniably, Ashley's as smart as her features are finely sculpted, admitting to Cosmo, "I don't know too many people who like to read the dictionary." When Playboy asked her if she could list three words she was dying to use in conversation, Ashley responded with: "His lack of perspicacity was revealed by the calumny with which he spoke. Hence, a debacle ensued. Debacle is not so fantastically challenging a word but it is wonderful in the mouth."

Judd's perspicacity is not limited to her waking life. "My dreams are overtly cinematic," she explained to Premiere magazine. "There are close-ups, they're edited. They have irony, satire, puns."

As for her roots, Ashley's a little bit country. "We had a really wonderful rural lifestyle there," she told E!online in reference to her backwoods Kentucky upbringing. "There was no TV. We made our own soap and sometimes churned our own butter."

But she's also a little bit rock 'n' roll. In an interview with Cosmo she said she's "counter-programmed against that feminine-wile thing. The thought of being strategic makes me want to throw up. To toss my head or bat my eyes - that is not about my essence." She went on to add that she's "a ball-buster, blonde or brunette!" But this brave ball-buster admits that "I'm not fearless, but I do have courage, which is action in the face of fear."

Yes, Judd does not like to go down without a fight. For her role as a hip Manhattanite in "Someone Like You," Ashley had to prove that she was no mere country bumpkin. "Because I got my pets that travel with me everywhere, people think I'm not urbane," she informed Entertainment Weekly. "I speak three languages! I've lived in France! I really had to struggle to get this."

Determined? Utterly. Vivacious? Absolutely. But the girl is also learning how to have fun, city-style. "Last night I did something that I'm really not sure I've ever done before in my life," Judd said to Premiere. "I - what's the word? Gelled? Chilled? No, vegged! - I vegged in front of the TV. I channel-surfed and everything. And I totally understand now what a balm that can be."

Speaking of veg, don't expect Judd to be serving veal parmesan at one of her champagne and chandelier dinner parties. "A friend of mine told me that you eat the animal's fear," she said to Premiere magazine. "Which, if you think about hormones, and adrenaline, and the panic of the flight-or-fight response, is quite true."

Even as a kid, Ashley must've imagined herself as a Moulinex toaster in an Easy Bake Oven world. "I was always told I was different," she imparted to US magazine. "I was always told I was special. And I was also assured that I had a gift and a purpose. All my life, I believed that things work to good for all those who are good and who love God, and I do."

It seems young Judd always had a certain je ne sais quoi, even when it came to playing innocuous parlor games. "While my girlfriends dressed as ladybugs for Halloween parties, I came as a full-grown woman in cocktail attire," she told InStyle magazine. "By fifth grade I had bought pearlized mauve and gray Borghese eye shadow."

Curiously, for someone so seemingly cultured, Ashley's fairly nondiscriminatory when it comes to her objects of desire. "If it is possible to fall in love with a pail, I did," the actress told Marie Claire magazine, which sent her on a Peace Corps mission for a week. "It was fluted and so pretty, and came with a lid with a sexy little handle."

Does Ashley ever hold back from expressing her intelligence in certain situations? "Like, do I have to downplay it for the schmucks? No," she told E!online. "What I think I find a little more often than what you're suggesting is people's surprise that I might have an urban side to me ... I'm making a guess as to why I walk into someone's office, and after five minutes, they'd go, 'You know, you're so urban.'"

This uptown girl certainly sounds like she'd be an interesting and, uh, lively escort for an evening, although she cautions that "whoever I date, that person can't be afraid of me," she said to US magazine. "All artists have a personal power that can be flashingly unnerving to nonartists."

We'll keep that in mind, Ashley.