Julianne Moore is an Oscar winner. Shape-shifter. New York mom. She’s built one of Hollywood’s most enviable résumés out of women lying to themselves.
It’s one of those miserable cement-gray December afternoons in Manhattan when no one wants to leave the house, so of course there’s just one other person in the Greenwich Village restaurant whereand I meet for lunch: a petite older woman having a pot of tea. Even so, the construction noise outside is distracting. Moore gets up to ask the host if there’s anything we can do to improve our chances of hearing each other, when suddenly squeals of reunion abound.
Her most memorable roles are some dangerous mixture of the two, and nowhere is that more apparent than in last year’s Late in 1993, Moore arrived at 225 Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan knowing exactly what to say. She had been in Pittsburgh filminga story about an upper-middle-class woman who believes she is slowly being poisoned by her environment and eventually ends up in a cult that masquerades as a health clinic. Moore was so moved by the script that she assumed the lead role had already been cast — and in a way, it had.
Born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Moore was raised by a military lawyer and a psychiatric social worker in nearly 30 places — as dissimilar as Panama, Alabama, Nebraska, and Germany. Wherever the family was, though, when they sat down at the dinner table, they invariably talked about human behavior, what people do and why they do it.
When Julie Anne was in high school, she and a friend were the only two girls in their class who didn’t make the drill team, so she auditioned for the school play to have something to do with her time. Acting, she discovered, was like reading. “I felt like I could hear it in my head,” Moore says. “It didn’t occur to me that not everybody felt that way. Being in a play, for me, was being in a book.”