Defying convention

In her long and enviable career, Julianne Moore has made a point of appearing in both big-budget pictures like Non-Stop, the recent Liam Neeson thriller, and in underfunded independent films like What Maisie Knew, where the costume budget was so skimpy she wound up lending the production some of her own clothes. This season, she’s in the third installment of the Hunger Games trilogy, and also in David Cronenberg’s newest film, Maps to the Stars. Though set in Hollywood, Maps was mostly shot in Toronto, to save money, and this time Moore had to scrounge some jewellery and handbags.

The commercial movies pay the bills, but the indies have generally provided Moore with the better parts. She is probably most celebrated for her subtle, affecting performances in films like Far From Heaven, The End of the Affair and The Hours, in which she plays women who are repressed or secretly tormented, hiding something from the world, their families and even from themselves. But she also specialises in ranters, ravers and crazies: characters who conceal absolutely nothing. The first time many of us saw her on film was in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), in which she delivered a memorable tirade while naked from the waist down. She was also Amber Waves, the loopy, cocaine-snorting porn star in Boogie Nights; the trophy wife who at the end of Magnolia tells off a pharmacist in language seldom heard in a drugstore; and, in The Big Lebowski, a long-winded performance artiste whose great theme is her own vagina.

In her shoes
Moore’s role in Maps to the Stars is of this big, no-holds-barred variety. She plays Havana Segrand, a sort of latter-day Norma Desmond, a fading B-List Hollywood actress who is both needy and tyrannical, childlike and monstrous. Her character has to, among other things, engage in an explicit threesome, have back-seat limo sex with her chauffeur (Robert Pattinson), dance in glee upon hearing of a child’s death and deliver a bossy monologue while seated on the toilet. Moore’s performance is so vivid and daring, while also sad and at times extremely funny, that it earned her the best actress prize at Cannes, and some forecasters are already speculating that it may finally win her the Oscar that has so far slipped just out of her reach. (Moore has been nominated four times, including twice in 2002, for The Hours and Far From Heaven.)

Cronenberg said not long ago that one reason he cast Moore is that she looked the part. “You have to have someone who’s the right age,” he explained, “and she has to be beautiful. She has to be convincing as someone who has had a moment of stardom. And, of course, she has to be willing to do it.” The toilet scene may have been a deal breaker for some; even Cronenberg’s sister, Denise Cronenberg, the movie’s costume designer, thought it was too much.

Those who have worked with Moore says that in real life, she couldn’t less resemble the temperamental Havana Segrand. “She’s incredibly well prepared and a wonderful collaborator, a proper pro,” said Stephen Daldry, who directed her in The Hours.

Staying humble
Cronenberg agreed. “You don’t get the diva, the ego, the entourage,” he said. “Right up until the moment the slate clicks, she’s 100 per cent her sweet, approachable self, and then she’s this character that you wouldn’t want to spend any time with.”
Unlike Havana, Moore is happily married — to Bart Freundlich, a filmmaker — and they have two children. She lives in New York, not Hollywood, and she’s smart, funny, down to earth.

“I like to call myself bourgie Julie,” she confessed, and explained that she put a lot of stock in Flaubert’s famous admonition: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, who has known Moore since the early ‘90s, when they acted together in both the stage and movie versions of Andre Gregory’s Vanya on 42nd Street, said of her: “It’s partly generational. She doesn’t have a Joan Crawford type of star personality. She’s sort of a New York mom, with a lot of interest in home furnishing, who in her job can suddenly be a murderer or whatever.” He added: “I think she’s partly in it for the adventure. Acting is mostly what it looks like. Everyone who isn’t an actor plays just one part, himself. But in a certain way, an actor gets to experience what it would be like to be in completely different circumstances, and Julianne really enjoys that adventure and that exploration.”
Moore said that she doesn’t think of herself as especially daring: “Once I’ve ascertained that I’m safe and I’m with a director who is taking care of me, then I’m able to go and do what I need to do and know it’s not me, it’s the story.”
She went on: “It’s almost like I go unconscious or something. I actually think acting is a form of self-hypnosis. You have to be hyper, hyper aware of what’s going on around you. You have to know where the lens is, what the shot is and where you’re moving. And then you have to trick yourself into an emotional state where you believe this stuff is actually happening.”