30 Fairlady/September 2019
ith the support of her high school
theatre teacher, Julianne told her
parents she was going to Boston to
study acting after graduation. Her
mom, not overly thrilled with her
why she was wasting her brain. In
theend,theygaveher their blessing and off she went.
At25,Juliannelanded her big break when she
wascastinthehitsoap As the World Turns. She played
Frannie Hughes – and her evil half-sister Sabrina.
Julianne recalls a particular favourite line from her
time on the soap: ‘Now that I know Kevin [her
boyfriend in the show] is out of jail, I think I’ll take
a nap.’ The role earned her a Daytime Emmy Award.
By 30, she made her big-screen debut in the
comedy horror anthology Tales from the Darkside,
before moving on to major projects like The Hand
That Rocks the Cradle, The Fugitive (which caught the
eye of Steven Spielberg, who would later cast her in
The Lost World: Jurassic Park) and Nine Months. From
1996 to 2006, Julianne appeared in an average of two
movies a year.
Today, after almost three decades in the industry,
she’s easily one of the most sought-after actors in
Hollywood, with four Oscar nominations and one
win under her belt. Despite her apparent affinity for
playing an adulteress, however, Julianne never finds
herself pigeonholed: she’s done both comedy (who can
forget her deadpan performance in The Big Lebowski
or her stint as Nancy Donovan on 30 Rock – that
Boston accent!) and drama: in Boogie Nights, Magnolia
or Still Alice (the role that finally won her an Oscar).
‘What’s important to me is always the script. There
has to be something about the story that grabs me,
otherwise, why waste even one day on it?’
Not that it’s always been plain sailing. On an
episode of Watch What Happens Live, Julianne spilled
on what had really happened on the set of Can You
Ever Forgive Me?, confessing that she was booted off
the project while Nicole Holofcener was still at the
helm of the Lee Israel biopic. ‘I think she didn’t like
what I was doing,’ Julianne explained. ‘I think her
idea of where the character was, was different from my
idea of where the character was, and so she fired me.’
Shortly after her axing, production fell apart and the
movie was eventually passed on to Marielle Heller and
Melissa McCarthy (who went on to be nominated for
an Oscar for her performance). Julianne added that
she hadn’t seen the film, and while she has the utmost
respect for Melissa, the whole experience still hurt.
When she’s not on location, Julianne lives in
New York with her husband, director BartBecause of her father’s career, they never stayed in one
spot for too long. This meant that Julianne had moved
a total of 23 times and enrolled at nine schools before
she turned 18. ‘It’s not something I’d recommend
but it made me who I am,’ she says. ‘It gave me
adaptability, a sense of universality.’
Hard as it is to imagine, she wasn’t always as
poised and graceful she is now. ‘In grade school
I was a complete geek,’ she says with a laugh. ‘You
know, there’s always the kid who’s too short, the one
who wears glasses, who’s not athletic. Well, I was all
three.’ She was also teased about her freckles; at the
age of seven she was given the nickname Freckleface
Strawberry (more about that later).
Julianne found comfort in books (‘I was always the
first person at the library checking out as many books
as I could’) and this sparked her love for storytelling.
But it was only when her family settled in Germany
that her love of acting really took shape.
‘When I started doing acting at school it seemed
like I was reading aloud. You feel like you are in
the story.’Maude Lebowski in The Big Lebowski (1998)
Evelyn Ryan in The Prize Winner of Defiance,
Ohio (2005)
Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair (1999)
Linda Partridge in Magnolia (1999)
Charley in A Single Man (2009)
Jules in The Kids are All Right (2010)
Alice Howard in Still Alice (2014)
Laura Brown in The Hours (2002)
Amber Waves in Boogie Nights (1997)
Cathy Whitaker in Far from Heaven (2002)Top 10 Julianne Moore
performances