By Tim Nasson
Forty-two-year-old Julianne Moore has been busy. Very busy. An actor is usually lucky to be considered at year’s
end for one Academy Award nomination. It’s very unusual for an actor to be nominated for performances in two movies in one year. This seems to be Julianne’s year.
Don’t be shocked to see her winning Oscars in March for two movies: Best Actress for Far from Heaven, the story of a privileged housewife in ’50s suburbia who finds out that her husband is gay, directed by Moore’s best friend, the openly gay Todd Haynes; and Best Supporting Actress for The Hours.
The Hours, an homage to author Virginia Woolf and her first novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is based on gay author Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and boasts an ensemble cast of past Oscar, Tony and Emmy winners and nominees in addition to Moore, including Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Claire Danes, Allison Janney, Jeff Daniels, Miranda Richardson, John C. Reilly, Eileen Atkins and Toni Colette. The film is directed by the openly gay Oscar-nominated director of Billy Elliot, Stephen Daldry, his sophomore effort.
Moore plays a severely depressed, sexually frustrated ’50s housewife and mother in The Hours, one of three woman in
three stories set in three eras — the others are an unrecognizable Kidman as Woolf, and Streep as Clarissa Vaughan, the modern-day, NYC version of Mrs. Dalloway.
Playing a mother comes easily to Moore, the mother of two children herself. In fact, during certain scenes of filming both Heaven and Hours, the directors needed to keep her ever-expanding stomach hidden, whether by focusing on her body above the waist, or stuffing her into specially-made, oversized dresses. “I was so pregnant when filming Far from Heaven and the reshot ending of The Hours, I couldn’t believe the cameras would be able to work magic and make me seem slim,” Moore told me.
In one scene in The Hours, Moore’s character ages 50 years, and is made to look 80. “All of this makeup to make me look old,” she said, “while, under the black dress, I’m ready to drop the baby! Certainly, the world’s oldest pregnant woman.”
Star vehicle
“My work in Safe in 1995 put me on the map, and I owe it all to Todd,” Moore said of her Heavenly director. “I would do anything that Todd asked me to, but the fact that he wrote Far from Heaven for me to star in was such an
honor.”
Securing her role in The Hours was a little less of a shoo-in. “I read The Hours when it was first published. Though I loved it, I thought it would be the last book any producer or director would want to film. The novel seemed almost unfilmable, with three stories, in three eras, happening simultaneously. I was shocked when Scott Rudin called me and offered me the role of Laura. Meryl and Nicole had already been cast. I was the last of the three main characters to be cast, but according to Scott, the first and only choice for the role of Laura.”
Though married and the mother of a six-year-old in The Hours, Moore has a fleeting kiss and romantic moment with Toni Colette’s character. Has she ever kissed a woman in real life? “No, I have not. I identify as heterosexual.”
Moore grew up traveling the world with her parents (her father was a military judge), graduating from Boston University with a BFA in 1983. After her stint on the soap As the World Turns, her first role on the big screen was in Curtis Hanson’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Her first big role in a motion picture was in Robert Alt¬
man’s Short Cuts (1993). That role earned her notoriety for ironing nude in what is, to this day, the longest solo full-frontal female nude scene in mainstream movie history.
While picking and choosing her roles carefully, for the most part opting for smaller, independent movies, she is not adverse to doing movies with big paychecks, like Hannibal. “The big-budget movies I do I would like to also
think are good movies. But by doing the ones that actually pay me something, I can do the smaller movies, the more intimate ones that seem, at times, to have no budget.”
If you want more of Moore, all you need to do is turn on the TV. She’s the new Revlon girl, and can be seen in commercials promoting Revlon products. “You can’t get away from me,” Moore said. “I’m taking over!”
Julianne Moore Interview with Tim Nasson for The Hours.
