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Knowing the Difference
She breezes into the New York City health food restaurant, a vision of unadorned beauty: crimson hair cinched in a ponytail, porcelain skin, zero make-up. She draws no attention, no autograph requests, no fanfare. Julianne Moore is just another face in the crowd.And she's happy to have it that way. For nearly two decades, in films like The Fugitive and Magnolia, she built up a critically acclaimed body of work. But until last year, when she was nominated for two Academy Awards, for her lead in Far from Heaven and her supporting role in The Hours, she often seemed indistinguishable from the characters she played. That, Moore would insist, shows she's doing her job. She's not interested in being a celebrity. "It has no meaning," she says.
It's a surprising view in Hollywood, where ego and ambition often push talent to the background. But it's a view that Moore, 43, the daughter of a career Army man and a psychiatric social worker, embraces totally. Acting is a creative outlet, and a way to make a living, but fame -- well, it's not nearly as important as her relationship with her second husband, director Bart Freundlich, and their children, Caleb, six, and Liv, two.
This month Moore hits the big screen in Laws of Attraction, a romantic comedy with Pierce Brosnan.
RD: You were raised in a military family, and from the sound of it, your dad was a pretty high-testosterone guy.
Moore: He's career Army. He was in Vietnam, where he was a helicopter pilot and a paratrooper, and when he got out, he finished college and went to law school. He went back in the Army as an attorney and then as a military judge. He was a real soldier; he was real Army.
RD: Do you remember him being in Vietnam?
Moore: I was five. I remember he was gone. We lived with my father's parents in Burlington, New Jersey. My mother was so young. I think she was very sad and very worried. She even talks now, since I've had children, about how hard it was. My brother was only two weeks old when my father left, and he didn't sleep well as an infant. She thinks a lot of it has to do with how upset she was. Imagine.
RD: You all moved around a lot.
Moore: By the time I was 20, I'd seen the world. I had lived in other cultures, and I'd heard other languages. We lived in Germany; we went to Panama. We lived in the South and the Midwest and Alaska and the Northeast. The exciting thing is that you learn that nothing is any different anywhere you go, that there's universality to human behavior. Once you've learned that everything on the inside is the same, I don't think you feel so alone.
RD: How did your parents meet?
Moore: They met in church when they were 12.
RD: They've been together their whole lives! What made their relationship work?
Moore: In all the years of their moving around, the one thing that they always had was each other. And their relationship was always private. You know, in some families people have these big anniversary parties. My parents always said, "Our anniversary is not something for you guys to celebrate. It's about us."
RD: It was about 1993 that we started to become universally aware of you. How did you stay determined to make it as an actress in the years in-between?
Moore: I graduated from college in 1983 and got a job six months after. I worked in the theater for a long time. I was in a soap opera for three years and did TV pilots. I did movies of the week. In 1993 I'd been working for ten years. I am an actor, and that doesn't have anything to do with being a celebrity. A celebrity is another thing entirely, and is not something to court. There's no value in it.
RD: What do you mean by that?
Moore: It's not worth anything. There's no personal achievement in celebrity. You don't learn from it. You don't grow from it.
RD: Is there any upside to it?
Moore: Getting a table at a restaurant, that kind of stuff. And if you have some notoriety, you can bring attention to a cause. There's nothing wrong with it. But you have to know the difference between what is entertainment and what is valuable.
RD: We do seem to idolize celebrity. What does that say about our society?
Moore: It's a scary time, because from what I remember from the eighth grade, this is how the Roman Empire fell. We're dancing as Rome burns.
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