Julianne Moore

Julianne Moore: Emotional Nakedness as a Discipline

When she went to register with Actors' Equity, the name Julie Anne Smith was already taken — twice over. So she built a new one out of spare parts: her father's middle name, Moore, and her mother's first name, Anne. The invented name turned out to be apt. Over four decades Julianne Moore has made a career out of assembling women who are visibly holding themselves together, and out of the exact moment the assembly fails.

Nine Schools, One Constant

Julie Anne Smith was born on 3 December 1960 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Her father was an Army colonel who became a military judge; her mother was a Scottish-born psychologist and social worker. The family moved constantly, and Moore attended nine different schools across several American states and abroad. There is no obvious causal line from that childhood to her adult specialty, but the coincidence is hard to ignore: an actress preoccupied with people trying to look normal in unfamiliar rooms.

She studied theatre at Boston University's College of Fine Arts and took her BFA in 1983. In New York she worked off-Broadway and studied under André Gregory — the same Gregory whose Chekhov workshop would later become Louis Malle's *Vanya on 42nd Street*, in which she played Yelena.

The Soap Opera Apprenticeship

Her first steady job was daytime television. From 1985 to 1988 Moore appeared on *As the World Turns*, playing half-sisters, and won a Daytime Emmy for it. Soap opera is the most-mocked training ground in American acting and one of the most brutal: pages of dialogue a day, one take, no rehearsal. It taught her speed and it taught her not to be precious, both of which show later.

Altman, Haynes, and the Uncomfortable Nineties

Robert Altman's *Short Cuts* (1993) made her a name in film — a sprawling Raymond Carver mosaic in which her confession of an old infidelity, staged with a deliberate and famous absence of vanity, announced what kind of actress she intended to be. Two years later Todd Haynes cast her in *Safe* as a San Fernando Valley housewife who becomes allergic to the twentieth century; it remains among the strangest and best American films of the decade, and it began a working relationship with Haynes that has now run thirty years.

The rest of the 1990s was deliberately promiscuous. She did blockbusters (*The Lost World: Jurassic Park*, *Assassins*), comedies (*Nine Months*), a Coen brothers cult classic as the sneering conceptual artist Maude Lebowski, Gus Van Sant's *Psycho*, and two films for Paul Thomas Anderson — *Boogie Nights*, which brought her first Academy Award nomination, and *Magnolia*. In 1999 Neil Jordan's *The End of the Affair* brought a second nomination, this time for Best Actress.

2002: The Double

Then came a year almost no one gets. In 2002 Moore played Cathy Whitaker, the Connecticut housewife of Haynes's Douglas Sirk homage *Far from Heaven*, and Laura Brown, the suffocating 1950s mother of Stephen Daldry's *The Hours*. She was nominated for both — Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in the same year, making her the ninth performer in Academy history to manage it. Venice gave her the Volpi Cup for *Far from Heaven*; Berlin gave her a Silver Bear, shared with Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep, for *The Hours*. She won neither Oscar.

The Long Middle, and Sarah Palin

The following decade was uneven by design: Alfonso Cuarón's *Children of Men*, Tom Ford's *A Single Man*, and Lisa Cholodenko's *The Kids Are All Right*, interspersed with work that plainly paid bills. The standout was television. For HBO's *Game Change* (2012) she played Sarah Palin, and the preparation was characteristically forensic: "I read her biography, books that were written about her and the election, listened to her voice endlessly on my iPod and worked with a vocal coach" for two months. She won the Primetime Emmy.

Alice Howland

*Still Alice* (2014) is a small film about a linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, and Moore approached it as research rather than instinct. She spent roughly four months talking "to doctors and clinicians and patients and family members," watching documentaries, sitting in on support groups. Her method with patients was disarmingly plain: "I'd literally say, 'Like, can you tell me what it feels like?,' and I just tried to be as specific as I could." Her co-director Wash Westmoreland described the shared brief — "you don't want to portray anything that seems phony, you want it to look authentic."

It won her the Academy Award for Best Actress on her fifth nomination. The same year, David Cronenberg's *Maps to the Stars* — in which she plays a monstrous, needy, aging film star — won her Best Actress at Cannes, making her one of only two actresses ever to take acting prizes at Berlin, Cannes and Venice.

Why Julianne Is Called a Genius

The evidence for the word is not one performance but a consistency of nerve. Ben Brantley of the New York Times called her "peerless" in her "portraits of troubled womanhood" and named the specialty exactly: "Emotional nakedness is Ms. Moore's specialty." The Guardian's Oliver Burkeman described her characteristic role as a woman "struggling to maintain a purchase on normality in the face of some secret anguish or creeping awareness of failure." What Moore does that few do is refuse the actor's instinct to explain: she lets a character be unsympathetic, unattractive, wrong or simply blank, and trusts the camera to find the fault line.

Her own account of the process is worth taking seriously as technique: "I want to have a sense of who a character is, and then I want to get there and have it happen to me on camera." That is a bet on discovery over preparation — the opposite of the four months of Alzheimer's research she also did. The real skill is knowing which role needs which.

The counter-case is straightforward: this is craft, not intellect, and the word does sentimental work if it implies otherwise. Moore is a superbly trained, exceptionally brave technician, not the inventor of a form, and her filmography holds a great deal of forgettable studio product taken between the good films. She distrusts the heroic framing herself: "I never care that [my characters] are 'strong.' I look for that thing that's human and recognizable and emotional. We're not perfect, we're not heroic, we're not in control."

Afterward

Moore married the director Bart Freundlich in 2003, having met him on the set of *The Myth of Fingerprints*; they live in Greenwich Village with two children. She wrote the *Freckleface Strawberry* children's books, a New York Times bestseller with six sequels and an off-Broadway musical, after her son began disliking his own appearance. She sits on the board of Planned Parenthood, campaigns with Everytown for Gun Safety, and has been a Save the Children artist ambassador since 2008. She has publicly refused cosmetic surgery on the grounds that it "doesn't make people look any younger. It makes them look like they've had surgery." Coming from an actress whose entire subject is the gap between the face people present and the person underneath, that is less vanity than consistency.

Achievements

• Daytime Emmy Award
• Academy Award for Best Actress — 2015
• Silver Bear for Best Actress — 2003
• BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role — 2015
• Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie — 2012
• Worked as television actor, film actor and writer