It's kind of hard for me to imagine that Julianne Moore is 50 years old today.
It really caught me by surprise. I was on campus this morning at the community college where I am an adjunct journalism professor. I was walking through the commons area in one of the buildings, and I saw one of those message boards reciting the names of famous people who were born on this date, and it announced that Julianne Moore was 50.
I guess, in a realistic sort of way, I knew that was coming, but even so ...
Wow. Julianne Moore is 50.
I suppose it says something (although I'm not quite sure what) about our culture. A beautiful and talented woman turns 50, as people tend to do if they live long enough, and we're shocked — as if they were supposed to remain young and beautiful forever.
Our culture will really be able to say it has matured when it can look at women who are older and see them as beautiful, too — in spite of wrinkles or gray hair or a few extra pounds. Perhaps, when our society is able to do that, the risky eating disorders that have plagued young women in their endless quest for eternal youth finally will begin to decline.
I always thought of myself as being up to date on things in the movie world, but Julianne Moore kind of snuck in under my personal radar. Twenty–five years ago, she had a part on a soap opera. I've never been a soap opera fan so I wasn't aware of her work, but she won an Emmy for it before she was 30.
Twenty years ago, she broke into the movies. She made several TV movies, then plunged into theatrical releases with supporting parts in movies I've seen on cable.
At that point, I still hadn't heard her name.
Most moviegoers probably became aware of her in 1997, when she appeared in "Boogie Nights," the Burt Reynolds–Mark Wahlberg film about the adult film industry. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Amber Waves.
But I first remember seeing her in a film a few years earlier, when she appeared in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," which was based on several short stories by Raymond Carver.
The movie may have been Altman's finest. It was a series of vignettes following the lives of some two dozen folks in Los Angeles, and most were concerned with death or infidelity. Moore played a woman whose drunken dalliance with a man at a party years before threatened to undermine her marriage.
She and her husband, played by Matthew Modine, let the issue simmer, unaddressed, until finally things boiled over when they were preparing to have guests over for dinner. Moore's work was ignored by Oscar but not by the Independent Spirit Awards, which nominated her for Best Supporting Actress.
Both gave what I felt were courageous performances — and I would have felt that way, even if the scene had not required Moore to walk around bottomless in most of it.
The fact that she did so without appearing self–conscious or excessively nervous indicates, in my opinion, one of two things — either she was so cool and professional that they filmed the scene in one take or it took several attempts before she was comfortable enough to do it as flawlessly as she did.
Which do you think it was?
Personally, I'll go with the former. Moore's talent speaks for itself. In 1999, she was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress for her work in "The End of the Affair." And in 2002, she received nominations for both Best Actress ("Far From Heaven") and Best Supporting Actress ("The Hours").
She hasn't won one yet, but I think one of those golden statuettes — at least one — is in her future.
