Julianne Moore's Biography
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ulianne Moore comes from a long and vital
tradition of Army brats who have spun their childhood ability to adapt
to an ever-changing social milieu into an acting career. The daughter of
a psychiatric social worker and a military judge, Moore alighted in some
twenty-three different places all over the world before landing at Boston
University. After earning her B.F.A. degree in acting from the university's
School of the Performing Arts, Moore touched down in Manhattan, where she
appeared in a number of late-eighties off-Broadway plays, including productions
of Caryl Churchill's Serious Money and Ice Cream With Hot Fudge.
She branched out into television with a short-term part on the daytime
drama The Edge of Night, which led in turn to a three-year stint
(1985 to 1988) playing half-sisters Frannie and Sabrina on As the World
Turns, a dual role for which Moore earned an Outstanding Ingenue Emmy
in 1988.
Moore's first minor coup on the small screen came in the form of a supporting
role as Valerie Bertinelli's friend in the 1987 prime-time mini-series
Judith
Krantz's I'll Take Manhattan. A subsequent string of forgotten TV movies--Money,
Power, Murder, The Last To Go, Cast a Deadly Spell, Lovecraft--certainly
benefited from her striking presence, but they did little to boost her
career. Moore's feature debut as the victim of a mummy in the deplorable
Tales From the Darkside: The Movie (1990) also failed to raise her
prominence in Hollywood, but she fared significantly better as the salon-coiffed,
outspoken real estate agent friend of Anabella Sciorra who meets a grisly
greenhouse demise in the 1992 thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
Things were looking up significantly the following year: she played a fleeting,
but pivotal, role in the Harrison Ford-Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster The
Fugitive; she shouldered the thankless, if high-profile, burden of
playing Willem Dafoe's wife in the execrable Body of Evidence; and
she stole the show as the waitress girlfriend of Aidan Quinn in the endearing
fable Benny & Joon. In Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Moore
startled audiences with one of the year's most talked-about scenes: in
the role of Matthew Modine's artist-wife, she delivers a feisty monologue
while standing before him--and us--in the nude from the waist down.
She capped off the banner year by appearing opposite Al Pacino in a workshop
production of Strindberg's The Father.
In what is likely her most prestigious and perfect performance to date,
Moore reprised her beguiling Yelena from Andre Gregory's ongoing workshop
version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in Louis Malle's critically acclaimed
Vanya
on 42nd Street. Following another secondary role as D.B. Sweeney's
social-worker wife in Peter Yates's Roommates, Moore tackled her
first lead in underground filmmaker Todd Haynes's societal critique, Safe,
in which she delivered a stunning performance as a well-to-do L.A. housewife
who develops an inexplicable and terrifying allergic reaction to her oh-so-ordered
twentieth-century existence. She offset the seriousness of that film with
performances as Hugh "Mr. Naughty Pants" Grant's pregnant girlfriend in
the fluffy romantic comedy Nine Months, and as a sassy and smart
electronics security expert targeted for assassination by Sly Stallone
and Antonio Banderas in Assassins. She then helped illustrate beyond
the shadow of a doubt that Pablo Picasso (Anthony Hopkins) was a right
bastard, with her compelling portrayal of Dora Maar in the Merchant-Ivory
team's Surviving Picasso (1996).
Though the titian-haired beauty has garnered uniformly rave reviews from
critics and audiences alike for her scene-stealing performances in both
commercial and independent features, her seemingly inevitable rise to superstardom
has somehow continued to elude her. Luckily, her relatively anonymous standing
looks to change significantly in 1997. Her three-minute performance as
Harrison Ford's doctor colleague in The Fugitive was enough to convinceSteven
Spielberg to cast her--without an audition--in the female lead, as Jeff
Goldblum's paleontologist girlfriend, in the Jurassic Park sequel,The
Lost World. Apart from the history-making, record-smashing success
that has been that film's lot, Moore will test her box office drawing potential
in three more feature films this year: she co-stars with Noah Wyle and
Blythe Danner in The Myth of Fingerprints, the story of a dysfunctional-family
Thanksgiving; she appears opposite John Cusack and fellow carrot-top Gillian
Anderson in the social comedy Hellcab, which chronicles a day in
the life of a cabbie during the Christmas holiday; and she teams with Burt
Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson's
dark comedy about a family of filmmakers who aspire to elevate the adult-entertainment
industry (read: porn flicks) to a high art form.
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You can email
me at: juliannemoore@multimania.com