Julianne Moore's career accelerated after her divorce in 1995, and she now seems to be in almost every major movie, but she's more interested in acting than being a movie star, she tells Donald Clarke.
Julianne Moore and I are ensconced in a hotel on New York's East Side discussing the US presidential election. "Bush does not represent the United States," she says calmly. "It is always important to say this is not who we are. And I am really hoping that things will work out." She pauses for a moment then clenches her fists and, insofar as such a thing is possible for one so preternaturally wan, reddens in the face. "Oh this f***ing war!" she snaps.
It is quite a moment. Up to this point, Moore has been so darn nice. Not just nice as in polite and helpful - though she is those things - but nice as in Doris Day, soda pop and merry-go-rounds. Tell a joke and she flutters her hands, shakes her famous red hair from side to side and whinnies: "Ohhhhh! That's funny." She wears a leather bracelet with the word "mommy" written on it. She admires female journalists' blouses and engagement rings. Had I not seen Mark Wahlberg do what he did to her in Boogie Nights, I might have been tempted to describe her as America's Sweetheart material.
And then there was the scene in Robert Altman's Short Cuts where she delivered an entire scene with her lower body in such a state of déshabillé that more than one critic felt it necessary to note that she was obviously a natural redhead. It was a fine, dignified performance in a terrific film of course, but she really doesn't seem like the kind of person who would warm to such situations.
"Oh, I am a human being, so whenever I do anything that involves any sort of exposure, emotional or physical, I am going to have some anxiety," she says. "But that's what I do. I am interested in how people's behaviour manifests itself in various guises. My father was a military judge dealing with defendants and my mother was dealing with people as a social worker. I grew up in a family that was interested in human behaviour. We were people watchers."
Moore's skills as a creative anthropologist have made her, arguably, the most highly respected movie actress of her generation. Not many American performers manage the tricky business of maintaining a reputation as a grown-up actor while still convincing the people who put faces on magazines that they are bona fide film stars. But ever since her emergence as a major force a decade or so ago, Moore has adroitly juggled delicious, independently minded fodder - Magnolia, Far From Heaven, Vanya on 42nd Street - with more mainstream pictures such as Hannibal, The Lost World and this week's weird supernatural thriller, The Forgotten.
"Well, I have to make commercial movies just to make a living," she says. "But also I need to create some commercial viability for myself in order to get those independent movies made. Once I get that, then a financier will maybe give $5 million to help a small-scale movie with me in it get made."
Clever girl.
Julie Anne Smith - she later squashed two forenames together and adopted her father's middle name as her last - was born in 1960 in North Carolina. Her parents were both the first people in their respective families to go to university, so were faintly appalled when their daughter declared her intention of becoming an actor. "They were great about it though. They said it was fine as long as I got a degree first. So I went to Boston University where I majored in drama. But I had to take other classes and I could always have gone to graduate school if things worked out differently."
Fortunately, she never had to return to academe. By 1985 she had secured a major role - two actually - in the hilariously unhinged daytime soap opera As the World Turns. Playing (get this) Franny Hughes Crawford and Sabrina Hughes Fullerton Crawley, Julianne managed to achieve a class of supermarket-tabloid celebrity, before going on to win a daytime Emmy.
"There was a good sister who was red-headed and then there was a half-sister who was English and had a wig and was incredibly selfish. It was fun," she laughs.
But hard work?
"Oh very. There is just so much material you have to get through. You might be at the front of the story and have 30 pages of dialogue a day. And everyone else is working so quickly, there really is nobody around to help you because they are all hustling, too. But even now somebody will come up to me and say: 'I remember you from As The World Turns.' That's nice."
In the early 1990s Moore managed to secure small roles in a number of major pictures. But what finally got her noticed by the studios was a brief turn in the 1993 thriller The Fugitive. Interestingly, she has always connected the acceleration of her career with her 1995 divorce from the actor and director John Gould Rubin. (So little has been written about one Sundar Chakravarthy, to whom she was apparently married from 1983 to 1985, that he has begun to take on the mysterious quality of the first Mrs Rochester.)
"Well yeah. I got married pretty young to somebody I met as soon as I moved to New York and I spent those years focusing on my work and that was all I focused on. The marriage wasn't really able to sustain that. But I thought that is what everybody's marriage was like. I would say to people 'I don't think this is right' and they would say 'Oh, everybody feels like that'. A lot of people get very complacent about their personal lives. I concentrated on work, work, work, and then I suddenly thought, this is not what I want. I want to set up my life so I can have a little of both things."
I'm not quite sure I follow this. She got divorced because she felt that she wanted to concentrate more on relationships than work. And then she began working more. Help me out here.
"Well my career did take off in my early 30s. There was a bunch of films that I made when I had left him. Once I had decided to attempt to be really happy, that was when my career took off."
So when she relaxed and stopped trying so hard, it became easier to find work?
"It kind of came like that. I became a different sort of person."
Short Cuts in 1993 marked a real breakthrough. In Moore's most notorious scene, the camera trains itself throughout on her entirely naked lower body. What did Julianne's mother make of it? Laughing, she explains that Mom had become far more upset watching her die on-stage as Ophelia a decade earlier.
"Well, think of it. My mother could care less about nudity," she says. "She has certainly seen my body on numerous occasions. Parents don't care about your flesh. But to see your child even pretend to be dead for an instant must be truly horrific."
Moore's mother, who sounds like a decent sort, was born in Scotland, but emigrated to the US in the 1950s. The actress properly came to terms with the Celtic looks she inherited from Mom - red hair, translucent skin - while shooting the ropey, romantic comedy Laws of Attraction with Pierce Brosnan in Ireland two years ago.
"My mother looks quite Scottish still," she says. "Actually she looks quite like me. But I look really Irish, too. I have my mother's face and I have my father's family's body, which is very Irish: no real waist. Oh, I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but I saw lots of women who were tallish, with long legs, boyish bodies and red hair when I was there. I can't tell you how many tourists would ask me for directions."
It says something about Hollywood's inflexible template for female beauty that Moore is often described as an unlikely-looking sex symbol. The red hair and the freckles are, writers occasionally suggest, more suited to the decoration of independent films than projects featuring giant lizards eating Manhattan. But she continues to sell tickets. The Forgotten, in which Julianne plays a distraught mother investigating the accidental death of her young son, opened at number one at the US box-office (though it didn't stay there long). Before it goes completely and utterly bananas - can you guess where some of the planet's apparently deceased children have actually gone? - Moore gets across her character's sapping distress very effectively. Does being a mother of two help in the creation of such a role?
"Everything that you have experienced as a person is going to enable your work," she says. "Because you only have your own experiences to draw from. But I think it is always important to stress that we are pretending here. You have to find a way to empathise even if you haven't experienced what the character is experiencing. She is still just a normal woman."
In 1997, while working on the worthy character piece The Myth of Fingerprints, Moore fell for the film's director Bart Freundlich. They have been together ever since. For many years, the couple, who live in a vast loft in downtown Manhattan, batted away questions about why they had not yet married. Last year they finally gave in and tied the knot.
"I think probably our second child was the thing that confirmed things," she says. "It became clear then that we were family. Nobody is going anywhere. And there were legal concerns. In terms of property, wills, all that kind of thing, there are no domestic partnership laws. If I was in hospital and only Bart was there, they would, before we were married, have had to phone my mother if I needed an operation."
I can't imagine they are the sort of people who would have a hugely vulgar showbiz wedding with longboats made from begonias and swimming pools full of Madeira. "No, no, no," she says, laughing and fluttering. "We got married in our back yard. It was very small and it was perfect - just delightful. We had about 30 people for a ceremony and then we had dinner."
Liv Helen, the child who precipitated the marriage, was born in 2002, and readers wishing to observe moments from her gestation should take a glance at that year's excellent Far From Heaven. Moore broke the news to director Todd Haynes that she was pregnant just before filming began. "The first thing he said was 'Oh Julie, congratulations. Don't worry, we'll work it out.'"
And he did. There are only a few brief moments in Haynes's brilliant pastiche of 1950s melodrama where inappropriate swellings are apparent. "I just got bigger and bigger," she says. "But there is a scene with me in a bathing suit and I look pretty damn good in it, don't I? I was just barely showing when I did that bathing scene. But by the end I was six months pregnant. This is my second child, so I got bigger faster. The great thing about those full 1950s skirts is you can just keep raising the waist."
Far From Heaven came at the end of a fantastically busy period for Moore. About three years ago some movie bylaw seemed to have been passed stating that any film which did not star Cate Blanchett should feature Julianne Moore. "Well, people just disappear in this business. You need to apply yourself while you can," she says. But, though she has had a lower profile of late, that flurry of activity put her face about a lot when her son, Cal, was at an impressionable age. Considering how insistent she is about the normality of her home life, she must be concerned about her children inflating their mother's significance in the universe.
"Yeah, my son did come home and say that I was on the cover of a magazine, because I was famous, and I had to say, 'No. I am on the cover of a magazine because that is my job.' I try to teach my children that content is what matters, not the outside stuff. People go on and on about movie stars and looks and plastic surgery and ageing. Looks change and go in and out of fashion, but ability - the essence of somebody - that is something that always belongs to you."
So she still sees herself as an actor first and a movie star second? "I guess. You may not be a movie star forever, but you can be an actor forever. I started out wanting to be an actor and I was just lucky that I got to be a movie star as well. That was a real nice add-on."
And she chuckles like Doris Day.
The Forgotten went on general release last night