Julie Anne Smith (born December 3, 1960), known professionally as Julianne Moore, is an American actress. Prolific in film since the early 1990s, she is particularly known for her portrayals of emotionally troubled women in independent films, as well as for her roles in blockbusters. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Emmy Awards.
After majoring in theater at Boston University, Moore began her career with a series of television roles. From 1985 to 1988, she was a regular in the soap opera As the World Turns, earning a Daytime Emmy Award for her performance. Her film debut was in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), and she continued to play small roles for the next four years, including in the thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992). Moore first received critical attention with Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), and successive performances in Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) and Safe (1995) continued this acclaim. Starring roles in the blockbusters Nine Months (1995) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) established her as a Hollywood leading lady.
Moore received considerable recognition in the late 1990s and early 2000s, earning Academy Award nominations for Boogie Nights (1997), The End of the Affair (1999), Far from Heaven (2002) and The Hours (2002). In the first of these, she played a 1970s pornographic actress, while in the other three, she starred as a mid-twentieth century unhappy housewife. She also had success with the films The Big Lebowski (1998), Magnolia (1999), Hannibal (2001), Children of Men (2006), A Single Man (2009), The Kids Are All Right (2010), and Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). She won a Primetime Emmy Award for her portrayal of Sarah Palin in the television film Game Change (2012). She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of an Alzheimer's patient in Still Alice (2014) and was named Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in Maps to the Stars (2014). Among her highest-grossing releases are the final two films in the series The Hunger Games and the spy film Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017).
In addition to her acting work, Moore has written a series of children's books about a character named Freckleface Strawberry. In 2015, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and in 2020, The New York Times named her one of the greatest actors of the 21st century. She is married to director Bart Freundlich, with whom she has two children.
Early life and education
Moore was born Julie Anne Smith on December 3, 1960, at the Fort Bragg army installation in North Carolina. Her father, Peter Moore Smith, a paratrooper in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, attained the rank of colonel and became a military judge. Her mother, Anne (née Love 1940–2009), was a Scottish psychologist and social worker from Greenock, Renfrewshire, who had immigrated with her family to the United States in 1951. Moore has a younger sister, Valerie Smith, and a younger brother, the novelist Peter Moore Smith. Having a Scottish mother, Moore claimed British citizenship in 2011 in honor of her.
The Huntington Avenue Theatre, formerly of Boston University, where Moore trained to be an actress
Because of her father's occupation, Moore frequently moved around the United States as a child. She was close to her family as a result, but has said she never had the feeling of coming from one particular place. The family lived in multiple locations, including Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Panama, Nebraska, Alaska, New York, and Virginia, and Moore attended nine different schools. The constant relocating made her an insecure child, and she struggled to establish friendships. In spite of these difficulties, Moore later remarked that an itinerant lifestyle was beneficial to her future career: "When you move around a lot, you learn that behavior is mutable. I would change, depending on where I was ... It teaches you to watch, to reinvent, that character can change."
When Moore was sixteen, the family moved from Falls Church, Virginia, where Moore had been attending Justice High School, to Frankfurt, West Germany, where she attended Frankfurt American High School. She was clever and studious, a self-proclaimed "good girl", and she planned to become a doctor. She had never considered performing, or even attended the theater, but she was an avid reader and it was this hobby that led her to begin acting at the school. Moore appeared in several plays, including Tartuffe and Medea, and with the encouragement of her English teacher, she chose to pursue a theatrical career. Her parents supported her decision, but asked that she train at university to provide the added security of a college degree. She was accepted into Boston University and graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre.
