Demi Gene Moore (/dəˈmiː/ də-MEE; née Guynes; born November 11, 1962) is an American actress. After making her film debut in 1981, Moore appeared on the soap opera General Hospital (1982–1984) and subsequently gained recognition as a member of the Brat Pack with roles in Blame It on Rio (1984), St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and About Last Night... (1986). She had her breakthrough for her starring role in Ghost (1990), the highest-grossing film of that year. Her performance was praised and earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
She had further box-office success in the early 1990s, with the films A Few Good Men (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), and Disclosure (1994). In 1996, Moore became the highest-paid actress in film history when she received an unprecedented $12.5 million to star in Striptease. She had starring roles in the films The Scarlet Letter (1995), The Juror (1996) and G.I. Jane (1997), all of which were commercially unsuccessful and contributed to a downturn in her career. Her career has since had a resurgence with voice roles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002) and supporting roles in such films as Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Bobby (2006), Mr. Brooks (2007), Margin Call (2011), and Rough Night (2017).
In 2019, she released a memoir titled Inside Out, which became a New York Times Best Seller. Moore has been married thrice, to the musician Freddy Moore and the actors Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher. She has three daughters with Willis.
Early life
Childhood and family
Moore was born November 11, 1962, in Roswell, New Mexico. Her biological father, Air Force airman Charles Harmon Sr., left her then 18-year-old mother, Virginia (née King), after a two-month marriage before Moore was born. When Moore was three months old, her mother married Dan Guynes, a newspaper advertising salesman who frequently changed jobs; as a result, the family moved many times. Together, they had Moore's half-brother Morgan. Moore said in 1991, "My dad is Dan Guynes. He raised me. There is a man who would be considered my biological father who I don't really have a relationship with." Moore has half-siblings from Charlie Harmon's other marriages, but she doesn't keep in touch with them either.
Moore's stepfather Dan Guynes divorced and remarried her mother twice. On October 20, 1980, a year after their second divorce from each other, Guynes died by suicide. Her biological father Charlie Harmon died in 1997 from liver cancer. Moore's mother had a long arrest record which included drunk driving and arson. Moore broke off contact with her in 1989, when Guynes walked away halfway through a rehab stay Moore had financed at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota. Virginia Guynes posed nude for the magazine High Society in 1993, where she spoofed Moore's Vanity Fair pregnancy and bodypaint covers and parodied her love scene from the film Ghost. Moore and Guynes briefly reconciled shortly before Guynes died of a brain tumor on July 2, 1998.
Moore spent her early childhood in New Mexico, and later, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. She suffered from strabismus as a child, which was corrected by two operations; Moore also suffered from kidney dysfunction. Moore learned of her biological father, Harmon, at age 13, when she found her mother and stepfather's marriage certificate and inquired about the circumstances since she "saw my parents were married in February 1963. I was born in '62."
Education
At age 14, Moore returned to her hometown of Roswell and lived with her grandmother for six months before relocating to Washington state, where her mother and siblings were residing near Seattle. Several months later, the family moved again to West Hollywood, California, where Moore's mother took a job working for a magazine distribution company. Moore attended Fairfax High School there, and recalled, "I moved out of my family's house when I was 16 and left high school in my junior year." In 2019, she stated she was raped at 15 by landlord Basil Doumas, then 49. Doumas claimed he had paid Moore's mother to get access to Moore to rape her, although Moore said it is unclear if this were true.
