How is it possible that Julianne Moore has never won an Academy Award? Of course, the Oscars are the Oscars ? they have a proven track record of not honoring those who have routinely deserved golden boys (Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Stanley Kubrick are just three who come to mind). But with movies like "Short Cuts," "Magnolia" and "The Hours," for heaven's sake ? a movie that practically has "Oscar Winner" embossed on its screening passes ? you'd think Moore would have nabbed that coveted statue at this point.
But no matter. She's still one of the most important and in-demand actresses working, a woman with not just an outstanding, singular talent, beauty that's much like her work ? both powerful and delicate all at once. With her newest movie seeing release, the romantic comedy/drama "Crazy, Stupid, Love." (co-starring Steve Carell) we're taking a look at 10 of Moore's greatest roles. This wasn't an easy task, because there are so many terrific performances on this woman's resume (check the stretch from "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" to "Children of Men"), so don't get angry, just look further. There's much more of Moore to love.
Short Cuts (1993)
This might be the first bravura performance by Moore, and certainly is her most visibly memorable. Why? In case you haven't seen the picture (because if you have, you know what I'm talking about), she delivers an intense, brutal emotional monologue entirely pantless. No underwear. This was indeed a brave move for a mostly unknown actress, and a risk that could have backfired had the dialogue been even remotely subpar. But since it was adapted from a collection of masterful Raymond Carver stories and directed by Robert Altman in one of his greatest pictures, it was a triumph that cemented Moore as one of the most talented actresses working. As the wife to a wealthy Los Angeles doctor (Matthew Modine), Moore's unraveling occurs as they await a Sunday dinner date with a couple they've just met when Modine confronts her about a past affair. What's terrific about this scene is that even as she's bottomless and admitting to sex with another man, it's remarkably unsexual in its bluntness. It only serves to show how fractured this couple has become. Emotionally naked, pantless or not.
Boogie Nights (1997)
Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling epic dealt with the rise and fall of not just its centerpiece, porn star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), but also the 1970s porn industry and culture on a grander scale: the business, the excess, the charms, the dangers, the humor and the tragedy. A landmark film of the '90s, this was an assured, mature, soulful second film by a filmmaker not yet 30. Anderson is a superb filmmaker and an actors director who casts brilliantly, from Burt Reynolds here to Tom Cruise in "Magnolia," to Adam Sandler in "Punch-Drunk Love," to Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood," to, of course, the woman we are discussing, Julianne Moore. Here she plays porn star Amber Waves, a role offered to many other actresses who passed, probably afraid of its literal and figurative naked emotionality. It's a lovely, sad performance, filled with compassion and maternal likability, but never simplistic: She never merely plays Amber as a porn star with a heart of gold. Moore layers Amber with demons, chiefly the custody of her daughter and a bad cocaine problem, but she doesn't condescend. The result is a heartbreaking performance about a woman who won't get out of this world unscathed and, quite possibly, alive.
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005)
Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling epic dealt with the rise and fall of not just its centerpiece, porn star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), but also the 1970s porn industry and culture on a grander scale: the business, the excess, the charms, the dangers, the humor and the tragedy. A landmark film of the '90s, this was an assured, mature, soulful second film by a filmmaker not yet 30. Anderson is a superb filmmaker and an actors director who casts brilliantly, from Burt Reynolds here to Tom Cruise in "Magnolia," to Adam Sandler in "Punch-Drunk Love," to Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood," to, of course, the woman we are discussing, Julianne Moore. Here she plays porn star Amber Waves, a role offered to many other actresses who passed, probably afraid of its literal and figurative naked emotionality. It's a lovely, sad performance, filled with compassion and maternal likability, but never simplistic: She never merely plays Amber as a porn star with a heart of gold. Moore layers Amber with demons, chiefly the custody of her daughter and a bad cocaine problem, but she doesn't condescend. The result is a heartbreaking performance about a woman who won't get out of this world unscathed and, quite possibly, alive.
The Hours (2002)
Adapting Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for the big screen could not have been an easy task, and with its story of three complicated women, one of them being a literary giant (Virginia Woolf), it needed three substantial, perfect performances. It got just that with Meryl Streep as a present-day literary editor, Nicole Kidman as Woolf, and Julianne Moore as a stifled, sad 1950s housewife. Using Woolf's 1925 novel "Mrs. Dalloway" as its focal point, the movie intertwines the book around these women, opening the picture with Woolf's famous suicide and capping it off by Moore's decision to choose "life." Oh, but it's not so easy and inspirational as all that. As Moore proves in one of the picture's most powerful moments ? her older self, explaining why she abandoned her children and family ? you see that choosing life is not always a happy, resolved ending. A woman who could have been viewed as a monster, she gives her character a tortured and yet matter-of-fact depth that doesn't make her likable, just brutally, movingly honest. Does she feel terrible about leaving her family? "What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. Here it is. No one's going to forgive me." Actually, some of us will.
The Kids Are All Right (2010)
Julianne Moore understands the universality of vulnerability. That sounds easy, since of course everyone, from a repressed '50s housewife to a porn star is vulnerable, but Moore makes her willingness to showcase the perilously curious aspects of her characters as a sort of strength. In writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids Are All Right," she's open to a love affair ? but as a lesbian living with her long-term partner (played by Annette Bening), it's with the surprising choice of a man. And not just any man, but the recently unearthed sperm donor (played by Mark Ruffalo) to her two teenage children. Taking this rather dramatic and potentially ruinous relationship seriously, the movie and Moore also manage to convey how these things can just happen. It doesn't mean she's not in love with her partner, it doesn't mean Ruffalo is simply a cad, and it doesn't mean all lesbians secretly yearn for a man. It just means we're all human. And, again, as Moore so eloquently reveals, vulnerable.
Safe (1995)
Todd Haynes really plumbed the mysterious depths of Julianne Moore with his slice of suburban horror, "Safe," a movie in which the seemingly perfect Moore has a seemingly perfect life with a seemingly perfect house and seemingly perfect hair until ... that permanent. And that nosebleed. And then all of those toxic fumes outside, attacking the once healthy housewife, creating myriad symptoms, from coughing to difficulty breathing to seizures. As the timid, agreeable Carol White, Moore manages to merge a cipher of a woman, a woman of small gesture and small voice, with an incredibly dramatic crisis, one with horrifying implications: that we're sucking in poison each day of our lives and that none of us are safe, anywhere. When she realizes that her problem is severe chemical sensitivity, she is, of course, viewed as crazy by most. Her doctors find nothing physically wrong with her, and her husband is frustrated. She must live with others afflicted to treat the problem and find some kind of camaraderie. What's wonderful about the movie and Moore's performance is just how much we wonder, how much we question how much of her problem is psychosomatic, or a response to her antiseptic life ? her regular, going-through-the-motions tedium (even sex with her husband is to lie there and receive duty). Moore's sad blankness allows viewers to read multiple mysteries within her character, and wonder, with terror, about their own lives as well.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
"Do you like sex, Mr. Lebowski? Sex. The physical act of love. Coitus. Do you like it?" How could we forget Maude Lebowski? And how often does Julianne Moore allow herself to make comedies? Not enough. As evident in the Coen brothers' cult masterpiece, "The Big Lebowski," she clearly is as comfortable with broad comedy as with drama, making her Maude one of the most unforgettable characters in her career. The daughter of the Lebowski everyone is supposed to be after (we'll not go into the multilayered, Raymond Chandler-inspired plot with the money and the Dude and how the rug really tied the room together here), Moore's pretentious feminist artist is an inspired creation (her work has been said to be "strongly vaginal"). From her method of painting, to the way she bowls in a dream sequence (and sports a Viking helmet), to her need for a child, she is both ludicrous and entirely recognizable. And not just funny, but hilarious.
The End of the Affair (1999)
Never has Moore been more rapturously beautiful than in Neil Jordan's gorgeous adaptation of Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair," a movie that doesn't get enough praise or discussion. A powerful love story, the tale begins not with love but with hate, as Greene's tortured novelist Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) attacks his typewriter. "This is a diary of hate," he taps, after swilling a long shot of whiskey. It all began with an affair in 1939, while England was at war. Bendrix meets and immediately falls in love with the beguiling Sarah (Moore), a woman stuck in a comfortable but passionless marriage to civil servant Henry Miles (Stephen Rea). Moore is both modern and old-movie-star mysterious here and, with the help of Fiennes, conveys a fervent romance ? they rendezvous in a seedy room while bombs shake the walls. It is also long (five years), which only heightens Bendrix's intense jealousy, as Sarah will not leave her husband. Glamorous, romantic, tormented and tragic, this is a movie and performance that should be revisited often.
Far From Heaven (2002)
By taking on the lushly budgeted, Technicolor, studio melodramas of the 1950s (most notably, the genius of Douglas Sirk), director Todd Haynes could have fallen into the land of kitsch, irony or ? worse ? poor filmmaking that was nowhere near the depth and breadth and beauty of Sirk. And yet, with his lyrical melodrama "Far From Heaven," a movie that could almost be dubbed "Imitation of Sirk," Haynes triumphed, not only in telling a powerfully emotional and socially relevant story, but by showcasing just what was so innovative, timeless and so very honest about melodrama. The story takes place in 1950s Connecticut, where supposedly "perfect" (whatever that means) homemaker Cathy (Moore), must deal with the end of her marriage (her husband, played by Dennis Quaid, is gay) and the condemnation of her community when she begins to have feelings for her black gardener, Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert). In her beautiful period frocks, perfected, never-out-of-place hair, her scarves, her gloves and red lipstick backlit against the faux autumnal colors and studio Eden, Moore is both movie-star ravishing and intensely real.
Magnolia (1999)
Moore's second pairing with director Paul Thomas Anderson ("Boogie Nights") is one of her most challenging, emotionally raw and complicated performances. And it involves a lot of crying. Crying that you never tire of. You don't. Among an epic cast of incredibly knotty individuals, she plays the trophy wife to a dying television producer (Jason Robards). She's a woman on the verge, a woman facing her past mistakes while preparing for the imminent death of a man she now realizes she actually loves. In a bracingly honest moment, she confesses to marrying him for his money, cheating on him and now, filled with intense sadness and remorse over her actions, wants none of his money. You believe her. And then there's her face-off with the pharmacist, perhaps one of Moore's most famous and quoted scenes of her entire career ("Shame on you! Shame on both of you!"). In lesser hands, this part could have been overplayed ? annoying, even ? but Moore finds the core of this potentially unlikable woman and dives directly into her soft spots, getting her and us right where we live.
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ONTD, what is your favorite Julianne Moore performance?
P.S. How many times has she played a character who is having an affair?
Richard Gere James Hetfield Noah Taylor Eddie Deezen Blanchard Ryan