The Biography Channel - Julianne Moore Biography

A versatile actress who most recently scored Oscar nominations for The Hours and Far From Heaven, she has excelled in blockbusters, comedy and serious drama.

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Julianne Moore
born: 30-12-1960
birth place: North Carolina, USA

The award-winning actress Julianne Moore was born Julie Anne Smith in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1960. Julianne was born into a military family; her father Peter worked as a judge in the US Army’s Judge Advocate General Corps. Her mother, who was called Ann, was a Scottish-born psychiatric social worker.

Peter Smith’s work as an army judge meant that the family moved around a great deal whilst young Julie was growing up, living in Army bases as far-flung as Alabama, New Jersey, Nebraska, Juneau in Alaska, Panama and Germany - around two dozen locations, all told. But this peripatetic upbringing doesn’t appear to have affected Julianne adversely, since she happily describes herself as a “proud army brat”. Julianne has a younger sister, Valerie, and a brother called Peter Moore Smith III, who is a novelist by profession.

Julie grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual and emotional enquiry, as her parents would both discuss their various cases at the dinner table. She graduated from Frankfurt High School in Frankfurt, Germany in 1979, and was initially encouraged to take up acting by her English teacher at school. Her parents weren’t keen on her choice of career, as they‘d both hoped she’d opt for something more stable - but Julie’s mind was made up. As a compromise solution, she attended the College of Fine Arts in Boston, where she majored in drama, thereby combining her acting training with an academic degree.

After she’d been awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, she moved to New York to pursue her dreams of acting. But when she tried to register with the Actors Guild, she was dismayed to discover that she couldn’t use her own name, since there was already another actress called Julie Smith. So she tagged on her mother’s Christian name Ann to her own name, and took her father’s middle name as a surname, thus arriving at her stage name - Julianne Moore.

At the start of her career, Julianne focused on stage acting, and soon found work in off-Broadway productions, such as Serious Money and Ice Cream With Hot Fudge. She then moved into television acting, and found work in popular soap operas, such as As The World Turns, a daytime show that had been broadcast since 1956. Julianne’s performance in this TV production resulted in her first award, an Emmy for Outstanding Ingenue in a Drama Series in 1988. But Julianne was enjoying mixed fortunes in her personal life. Her first marriage, to Sundar Chakravarthy ended in 1985, but Julianne found love again around this time. She married fellow actor John Gould Rubin in 1986, and this second marriage lasted until the couple divorced in 1995.

Julianne was keen to break into movie acting, but the only parts she could garner at first were in horror movies, or sci-fi pictures, such as the movie version of Tales From The Darkside. But when she finally succeeded in landing the more substantial role of Marlene Craven, the savvy realtor in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, her career finally began to take off.

Julianne began receiving better and better roles as time went by; she was given a small, but important role alongside Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, which brought her talents to the attention of Steven Spielberg. This was a contact that would stand her in very good stead in the future; Spielberg was so impressed with Julianne’s performance in The Fugitive that he subsequently cast her as Dr Sarah Harding, Jeff Goldblum’s paleontologist girlfriend in Jurassic Park 2 (1997).