The Double Life of Julianne Moore

It’s raining when Julianne Moore steps out of her limousine onto the red carpet at the 67th annual Golden Globe Awards. She stops to flirt with the photographers clamoring for her attention. Her publicist holds an umbrella over her blisteringly red hair, which is pulled back tightly to reveal a pair of wrecking ball-size emerald earrings that complement her shoulder-baring gunmetal Balenciaga gown. It’s been a very busy week for the 49-year-old actress, nominated this year for her supporting role in Tom Ford’s A Single Man. Over the past four days, Moore has been brushed and glossed for the AFI Awards, the BAFTA/LA Awards Season Tea Party, the Critics’ Choice Awards and the T Magazine Golden Globe Awards cocktail party. She also appeared on The Jay Leno Show, where she shared stories about her 12-year-old son Caleb’s budding interest in the opposite sex. “You must work at Subway, because you’re giving me a foot-long,” says Moore, excerpting with mock disgust his most pubescent pick-up line. Leno and the crowd erupt with laughter, in a scene straight from an old episode of Kids Say the Darndest Things.

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Earlier that same week, a very different Julianne Moore settles into a seat near the back of New York’s Café Cluny, a small French bistro doors down from the West Village brownstone where she lives with her husband, filmmaker Bart Freundlich, and their two children. Her hair is tousled from the winter hat she had been wearing. Her skin is the color of rice paper dipped in milk. “I really don’t like doing talk shows,” she says. “They make me very, very nervous. People aren’t just chatting on those shows. You get on the phone beforehand with the person who’s producing that segment and you have a conversation, where they probe you about what’s going on in your life. But if I were being honest I’d say, well, nothing. I picked up my kids from school. Then we went to the orthopedist and the dentist.”

Considering the number of disturbed women she has played, it’s difficult to believe that Moore is as normal as she claims. The first of her four Academy Award nominations came in 1998, for her portrayal of happy dust-busting porn star Amber Waves in Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s paean to pre-AIDS pornography. Two years later, she starred opposite Ralph Fiennes in Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair, a devastating story of repressed desire based on Graham Greene’s novel of the same name. In 2003, Moore became part of an elite group when she was nominated for two acting Oscars in the same year—one leading and one supporting—for her transformations into tortured housewives in Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours. The latter film co-starred Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. Of her friend, Streep says, “Julianne is a fearless actress, with a wild redhead bravado that’s countered by her delicacy and great beauty. But she has never allowed her beauty to subvert her eccentric, outsider sensibility. The possibility that she might do something crazy stalks even her calmest performance.”

Leave it to Streep, whom Moore once referred to as the craft’s “gold standard,” to strike at the core of what makes the scorching character actress so seductive. It’s the constant friction between a broken interior and a placid, passive exterior—presented without judgment or condescension—that proves so volatile and compelling. Her storm is quiet until it isn’t. “We can go from being okay to complete disasters in a matter of hours,” she says, “if that’s the story we allow ourselves to tell.”

Long before becoming a world-famous actress, Julie Anne Smith was born at Fort Bragg’s Womack Army Medical Center, not far from Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her mother was a psychiatric social worker, and her father was employed by the military, forcing his family to move often. Moore lived briefly in Alaska, Nebraska, Virginia and Frankfurt, Germany, among other places. “I was never in one city long enough to consider it home,” she says.