More Julianne
Julianne Moore stirs controversy with her latest film
WORDS ELAINE LIPWORTH
PORTRAIT RAYMOND MEIER
JULIANNE MOORE IS A RARITY: a movie star who is among the great talents of her generation yet courageous enough to seek out offbeat independent films. Sitting on the terrace of the Four Seasons hotel in the hazy LA sunshine, she is cool and composed and without any of the intensity of her screen characters. She is effortlessly elegant in a bottle-green silk top over narrow midnight-blue cargo trousers and spiky black heels, with her trademark glossy red hair swept back into a ponytail. Her make-up is light and her pale, freckled skin is remarkably smooth apart from faint lines around her mouth and eyes, noticeable only when she smiles.
She is about to turn 50. The thought alone would incite most A-List Hollywood actresses to run for the hills, or the nearest plastic surgeon. Try finding a decent role for an actress over 50 that hasn’t been snapped up by Meryl Streep. But the tentative tone in which I broach the subject makes Moore laugh. “I will be 50, yeah,” she says. “It’s an interesting place to be. Middle age is about having more of your life behind you than ahead of you, so you have to go, ‘Wow!’ I think you’re really conscious about your mortality.
“I’m always interested in those people who claim: ‘I don’t feel old. I feel like I’m 19!’ I say, ‘Seriously?’” Moore stops. “I’m going to get maudlin here. Our life expectancy is, what, 80? That means, if you’re lucky, you have 30 years left. Women in their early forties talk about how they’re not middle-aged. How long are they expecting to live? If you’re lucky you get to live to your eighties; if you’re unlucky, like my mother, you don’t. I don’t think that you should be behind or ahead in your actual life,” she adds reflectively. “The trick hopefully is to be present.” And ‘present’ she certainly is. Recently described by Vogue as ‘the most glamorous grown-up on screen’, Moore is now becoming one of a handful of older actresses, including Streep, Helen Mirren and Susan Sarandon, who are constantly in demand.
She began her career in 1983 playing minor roles, before joining the cast of the soap opera As the World Turns, for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award five years later. Her big-screen success came relatively late in her thirties, with The End of the Affair in 1999, (based on the Graham Greene classic, co-starring Ralph Fiennes) and Magnolia (the same year, co-starring Tom Cruise). She was praised for her portrayal of a betrayed wife in Far from Heaven (2002), winning several awards as best actress, in addition to Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Last year she was nominated for a Golden Globe for A Single Man. Her co-star Colin Firth won the Bafta for Best Actor.
So far she hasn’t won the ultimate prize, an Oscar. But she doesn’t seem worried. “I should have won for all my films,” she jokes. “No, no, I think the unfortunate thing about the Oscars is that there are more losers than winners.” There are expectations in the industry that both Moore and her co-star Annette Bening will get nominated next year for The Kids Are All Right, which is released next month. If people think that a movie is good, that’s great,” she says graciously.
With career success came an immediate sense of dissatisfaction – even urgency – because Moore also wanted a family. She is happily married to indie filmmaker Bart Freundlich, whom she met while he was directing her in The Myth of Fingerprints – he was 26 and she was 35 when they began dating in 1996. In a recent interview she said, “We’ve been together for so long and I still find it incredible. I love Bart, but he also interests me. And that makes a big difference.” They wed in the garden of their New York home in the presence of their children,12-year-old son Caleb and seven-year-old daughter Liv.
“The fact that, by 50, I have done both is great. As an actress you get these kind of facile questions about aging and what it means to age. I think you just become more aware of how fortunate we are to have got here and lived to 50.” She didn’t get into the business for the glamour – she simply wanted to act. She is one of the few middle-aged stars who is refreshingly unfussed about clinging to youth and has, so far, resisted the temptations of plastic surgery. Her forehead moves (she doesn’t have the tell-tale frozen ‘Botox’ look).
“I don’t understand how an immobile face is a beautiful face. I did think for a while that maybe I should get boobs, but then I rejected the idea because it seemed like major surgery. You want to hold people to standards that are human and attainable and naturally beautiful, rather than thinking we have to be something we’re not. The analogy I use is ancient Chinese feet-binding. At what point did they decide that small feet were more beautiful? People started making them smaller and smaller until they were stumps. I feel we have decided that being expressionless and young- looking is the most beautiful thing and, in pursuit of that, it becomes more and more exaggerated.”
It’s 8am on a Sunday morning – pretty early for such a passionate polemic. But it was the only time that Moore could fit the interview into her hectic schedule to discuss The Kids Are All Right. Are you usually up at this time I ask her? “I have children so I’m often up early – although my son Caleb is 12 so he’s heading into the teen sleeping thing. My daughter Liv still gets up early, but I can sleep late if I’m allowed.”
The film is a moving and funny story about a middle-aged gay couple with growing children – Moore (an unfulfilled housewife) and Annette Bening (her wage-earning doctor partner) – whose lives are thrown into disarray when their two teenage kids decide to seek out their anonymous sperm-donor father (Mark Ruffalo).
Moore hopes audiences will see past the stereotyping. “This is a portrait of a conventional long-term marriage. These people have been together for maybe 20 years and they made a decision to be together, to have children. They have one working parent and one stay-at-home parent, which almost nobody in the world does anymore. Out of necessity people have two working parents. The kids are getting ready to leave home and my character is like, ‘Oh my gosh, what have I been doing for the last 18 years?’ The film explores what a long-term relationship is. What it means to stick it out with somebody, to forgive people’s mistakes, to guide them toward growing up and leaving after you’ve been so attached.”
What did her children think about her taking this role? “My children have grown up in a world where they know people who have two moms or two dads, and they believe it’s possible to get married to a man or a woman. There was an article in the New York Times that talked about ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (the US military policy, currently under review, restricting the military from outing gay personnel). The article argued that it was a dangerous idea because what changes peoples’ prejudices is first-hand experience. I agree. If you’re in an army unit and you realise the guy next to you is gay, then suddenly he’s not different, he’s just this soldier who you know. It’s the same thing with a gay family or a gay marriage. Once that’s part of your milieu, it’s not different anymore. Familiarity builds tolerance.
“But I also believe that movies reflect popular culture more than they influence it. Twenty years ago this movie would have been risqué. The reason a movie like this can get made today is because it’s something that’s happening in the world around us – and this family is actually very conventional and bourgeois.
“I related to the film most as a parent. I don’t have teenagers yet, but we’re heading into adolescence with my son. In six years, he’s going to go to college and six years is no time…” Moore pauses, momentarily contemplating the reality of her children leaving home, and then casts her glance over to the teenage girl reading a book in the corner of the room. In my family, we don’t have the luxury of one parent staying at home and I have had to bring my teenage daughter along with me today. Moore is friendly and has been chatting with her. “Where do you want to go to college?” My daughter explains that she intends to go to university in England even though we live in Los Angeles.
The actress pulls an anguished face. “It’s too far,” she tells her. “I say to people all the time: ‘Don’t go very far away because you will want to come back. My family was living in Germany and I went back to the States.
I couldn’t come home on the weekends and it’s a difficult transition. So listen to your mother.” The death of her own mother in April last year was devastating for Moore. Ann, 68, suddenly fell ill and died within hours. “I was on a plane on my way there when she passed away,” she says a touch sadly. “It’s been tremendously difficult. She was Scottish and I look just like her. Life and family can be difficult and challenging but it can also be amazing.”
In recent years she has curtailed the amount of films she makes to spend time with her children. The family live in an elegant brownstone in the fashionable Meatpacking district of Manhattan. She is often photographed in the streets in jeans and an army jacket walking her kids to school.
“We have a very solid family life,” she says. “And I want to be with my husband and kids as much as I can. There are some celebrities who take their children everywhere with them, despite having to pull them from school and friends. Because of my own childhood experiences, I try to work in New York or I work during the summer when my family can come with me. The days of me doing a film where I need to be away for months during the school year are over. I couldn’t imagine having to be away from my children for several months in a row.”
She claims she has “a very low-key and pedestrian life”, but has never been happier. When she was in her twenties, she got married straight out of university, “was consumed by work, smoked a lot and didn’t have much of a life”. By her thirties, she quit smoking, went into therapy and got divorced. She had vowed never to marry again, but she changed her mind following therapy and went on to marry Freundlich in 2003. “For me the only reason to get married was my children,” explains Moore. “I had a therapist who said marriage is really a container for a family, and that made sense to me.”
She and Freundlich work hard to instil a sense of privilege and good fortune into their children: “The kids go to a Quaker school and their father and I believe in community and making sure you give to people less fortunate than you. We talk about responsibility a lot.” Are they aware of her fame? “I think they see it as separate from me. I always say, ‘I’m not on the cover because I’m famous. It’s my job, I’m in a movie.’I stress work and accomplishment, and not celebrity.”
Who is the tougher parent of the two? “When I was young my father gave me money and my mother gave me permission. My father would say, ‘Here’s $50, but you can’t leave the house’. My mother would say, ‘You can go out but I’m not going to give you any money’. I see that with my children too – but there’s almost no way to even delineate what we both do because we flip-flop on different things. It’s odd but that’s what happens in a family.”
The children of army parents – Moore’s father was a military lawyer, her mother a psychiatric social worker – she and her brother and sister moved around constantly, both in and outside the US, living in Germany for much of her teens, attending nine schools in all. “It’s a terrible way to grow up!” she says, letting out a horrified laugh, then casting around for positives. “You get close to your family. It’s not something I recommend, but it made me who I am. It gave me a sense of resilience and worldliness. I’d come back to the States and people wouldn’t know a thing about European culture: they hadn’t travelled.”
Her nomadic childhood taught her to be adaptable and various influences primed her for acting. The eldest of three children, she was an obsessive reader, which she says has been a huge advantage in ensuring she can pick a good script. “Acting and reading are very similar. You’re right in the middle of it. You’re creating it, you’re almost the conduit for the story. It’s really exciting getting lost in a story. That’s when I’m happiest.”
As a child Moore was skinny, with glasses, red hair and freckles. “I was a complete geek. You know, there’s always the kid who’s too short, the kid who wears glasses, the kid who’s not athletic. I was all three”.
She was teased at school (inspiring her in adulthood to write a children’s anti-bullying book called Freckleface Strawberry). Then when the family moved to Germany and Moore attended Frankfurt’s American High School, she had her hair cut and bought contact lenses. “People were suddenly much nicer to me,” she recalls. “It was shocking, emotionally.”
She says she saw her hair as just an outward manifestation of a deeper sense of difference. “American redheads don’t get called ‘ginger’. I was stunned by how much people get teased in the UK for red hair. But, if you’re going to put a redhead on stage, there has to be a reason.” So why didn’t she colour her hair? “I never did; I don’t know why. I only dyed it recently when I did Blindness, and I was convinced the character had to be blonde. But I hated it. I didn’t think it would bother me. I thought being a redhead was visible, but I didn’t feel like myself.”
For an actress who has always been seen as cerebral, Moore has done her fair share of erotic scenes – from The End of the Affair with Ralph Fiennes to intense love scenes with Mark Ruffalo and Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right. Do they get any easier as she gets older? “Mark is a really good friend – so that made it easier.
My husband hasn’t seen the film yet. But I try not to talk about the sex scenes in a film. It’s always an issue. Nobody likes it, so basically the less I talk about it, the better. I just act like it’s not happening. And afterwards, I am just like ‘I don’t remember doing that.’” She didn’t know Annette at all except from awards ceremonies, “so we just knew each other slightly. But we’ve both been married for a long time, so it’s something that we have familiarity with. She’s incredibly talented and was very passionate about the part.”
So she has the career, the marriage, the children – what’s left to achieve? Moore laughs. “There are some things I still want to achieve, though nothing I feel like sharing at this point. But overall I’d say, so far so good. Freud says you need love and work, a family and a job to give you balance. One element can’t possibly give you everything. My husband and I try to spend time alone, but it is hard because the kids ask, ‘Why are you going out? You went out last night.’ We try to make time for each other, take trips together. I wouldn’t call it a struggle, but it’s not easy. It’s what anybody I know who has a family and a career deals with. It’s a challenging balance. I feel fortunate that I have both and I work hard to maintain them.”
The Kid Are All Right is released next month
