Occupation: Actress
Date of Birth: December 3, 1960
Place of Birth: Boston, Mass., USA
Sign: Sun in Sagittarius, Moon in Gemini
Relations: Ex-husband: John Gould Rubin (actor); son: Caleb (the child's father is director Bart Freundlich)
Education: Boston University; BFA from the School of Fine Arts
Julianne Moore is a rare breed of actress, indeed. But, it wasn’t until 1999 that her star shone bright.
As an Army brat who developed a taste for the spotlight, she's not so unusual. Her father, a military judge, led the family to over two dozen locations around the world before Julianne settled in at Boston University. Perhaps the fact that her mother was a psychiatric social worker helped the young girl adapt.
After graduation, Julianne moved to New York, where she appeared in Caryl Churchill's off-Broadway plays Serious Money and Ice Cream with Hot Fudge. Despite her formal training, Moore fell into the attractive actress' trap of the mid-1980s: TV soaps and miniseries. She paid her rent on The Edge of Night As the World Turns, for which she won an Outstanding Ingenue Daytime Emmy Award in 1988. Shortly thereafter, Moore graduated to prime-time melodrama, including Judith Krantz' miniseries I'll Take Manhattan and the forgettable MOWs The Last to Go and Cast a Deadly Spell. Such is the trap for attractive women with lusciously thick auburn hair.
In 1992, being a beautiful-woman-who-gets-killed finally paid off. As a real estate agent in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Moore met a particularly grisly death at the hands of Rebecca DeMornay (remember the greenhouse scene?). That led to a three-minute performance as Harrison Ford’s colleague in The Fugitive, which in turn convinced Steven Spielberg to cast her in 1997's The Lost World: Jurassic Park. As Jeff Goldblum’s ill-fated paleontologist girlfriend, Moore fared far better than her character, making the transition to 'movie star' for good. The same year, Julianne cemented her good fate with roles in The Myth of Fingerprints and Boogie Nights. Since then, she has landed major roles in no less than eight films, including The Big Lebowski, An Ideal Husband and Cookie's Fortune, which re-teamed her with Short Cuts director Robert Altman. Factor in the birth of her first child, Caleb, in December of 1997, and Moore has been one very busy woman.
Moore has never forgotten her roots in classical theatre: her box-office bonanza roles were sprinkled between art-house films (Surviving Picasso, Vanya on 42nd Street) and even the occasional return to the stage, such as her 1993 turn opposite Al Pacino in Strindberg's The Father.
Moore welcomed in the new millennium with a pair of Golden Globe nominations, for The End of the Affair (Best Actress, Drama) and An Ideal Husband (Best Actress, Comedy). Add to that her turn opposite Sigourney Weaver in A Map of the World and a critically-acclaimed performance in Magnolia, and Moore may just be the actress of the 21st century.
MOVIES
2000 Unbreakable
2000 The Ladies Man
1999 Magnolia
1999 The End of the Affair
1999 A Map of the World
1999 An Ideal Husband
1999 Cookie's Fortune
1998 Psycho
1998 Chicago Cab
1998 The Big Lebowski
1997 Boogie Nights
1997 The Myth of Fingerprints
1997 The Lost World: Jurassic Park
1996 Surviving Picasso
1995 Assassins
1995 Nine Months
1995 Safe
1995 Roommates
1994 Vanya on 42nd Street
1993 Short Cuts
1993 The Fugitive
1993 Benny & Joon
1993 Body of Evidence
1993 Luck, Trust & Ketchup
1992 The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag
1992 The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
1990 Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
1988 Slaughterhouse 2
TV
1991 Cast a Deadly Spell
1991 The Last to Go
1989 Money, Power, Murder
1987 I'll Take Manhattan
1985-88 As the World Turns
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
