She pauses to twist her hair back into a
tight bun, then traces her chin with her fingers. ‘There are things about my
face that I’m not crazy about, but you are who you are. ‘It seems like
everybody has done work,’ she goes on. ‘I see a lot of it, but i don’t think it
looks any better. You’re not suddenly going to look 25. I‘ve always been
acutely aware of my mortality.
You
don’t have as much time in front of you as you have behind you.
‘You never know when it’s all going to be
over. Being middle-aged,’ she says emphatically. ‘Is about realising that
you’ve lived most of your life? You don’t have as much time in front of you as
you have behind you.’
Moore was born in Fort Bragg, an army base
in North Carolina. The family (Moore has a sister, Valerie, and a brother,
Peter) moved more than 20 times during her childhood.
‘We were all over the place: Nebraska, then
Alaska, then New York, then Virginia, then Germany when I was 16 in 1977. It
was very hard, I don’t recommend it. I think moving around so much makes you
insecure socially.’
I
am not a natural performer, but I really like to pretend.
There was a positive side, too. She says.
‘It makes you adaptable. And you’re always searching for the universality of
human behavior — which you do in acting, too, asking, “ What’s the thing that
we all relate to? How are we the same?”
Moore wasn’t a confident child. ‘I didn’t
mind my hair, but i just hated my freckles. Kids would say things like: “Are
you dirty? Do they go away?” The experience inspired her to write her
children’s book series. Freckle face Strawberry. It was Moore’s love of reading
that propelled her into acting. ‘I read everything Louisa May Alcott ever
wrote. Acting was an extension of reading. I am not a natural performer, but I
really like to pretend.’
She
studied drama at Boston University
She studied drama at Boston University,
then worked as a waitress to support her acting, and spent most of her twenties
working in theatre and television. A stint on the soap opera As the World Turns
led to a Daytime Emmy Award. Robert Altman’s Short Cuts in 1993 gave Moore her
first film break, but global success came relatively late. There were three
defining films that she says changed her status from supporting player to
leading lady: Safe, from the director Todd Haynes; Niize Months, with Hugh
Grant; and Louis Malle’s Vanva on 42nd Street. The thriller Assassins followed,
then came Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur lock buster The Lost World: Jurassic
Park. ‘Suddenly I had a commercial film career,’ she says.
‘I don’t think that early success really
serves anybody. What are you going to do for the rest of your life? What do you
aspire to? It’s all about doing work because you like doing it. That’s what
will sustain you, rather than doing it for fame or recognition.’
She has enjoyed plenty of both, with seven
Golden Globe nods and Oscar nominations for Boogie Nights, the Eizd of the
Affair, the Hours and Far from Heaven. Although, surprisingly, not for The
Kids Are All Right, in which she played Jules, a lesbian mother of two,
opposite Annette Bening.
In Crazy Stupid Love Moore plays a woman
who is bored with her comfortable but dull 25-year marriage to Steve Carell,
and has an affair. ‘I loved the fact that on the first page of the script there
are the words, I want a divorce. You generally don’t see anything that bold in
a studio comedy. It didn’t pull any punches.
