The rise, fall — and rise again of Demi Moore
Derided as a ‘popcorn actress’ and damaged by drugs, Demi Moore experienced difficulties in her career and married life. But at 62, she has finally received recognition at the Golden Globes.
When Demi Moore accepted her Best Actress award at the Golden Globes on Sunday night, she did it in classic Hollywood style. Dressed in Armani couture and Cartier diamonds, she said that she was humbled and grateful. Her casting in The Substance was the universe telling her “you are not done”. And then, while other actors thank their agent, Moore thanked a tarot card reader. “You can know the value of your worth,” the woman had told her, “if you just put down the measuring stick.”
Moore’s life has more acts than Shakespeare. She overcame a childhood so traumatic her own daughter once described her as forged, not raised. Now 62, she’s lived her entire adult life in the public eye. She has been derided over the years as everything from a bimbo to a cougar, in and out of rehab, married and divorced, and her appearance has been variously celebrated, speculated on and vilified. If anyone ever makes a film about Demi Moore’s life, no one will believe it.
She was born Demetria Guynes, in Roswell, New Mexico. Her father, who she later discovered was not actually her father, sold newspaper adverts, her mother was still a teenager when she became pregnant, and the family moved around to find work and escape the bailiffs. Moore later estimated that she’d moved more than 30 times by the time she and her younger brother, Morgan, hit their teens. Her parents both struggled with addiction issues and later divorced.
As a child, she fished the pills out of her mother’s mouth during a failed suicide attempt while her father held it open. She was raped at 15 by a man who knew her mother. He asked her: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for $500?” Her mother later told an interviewer: “The more famous she becomes, the more of a bitch she becomes.”
She left home at 16 and began to model and act. She was briefly married to a much older musician, Freddy Moore, when she was 18 and he was 30. “I’ve never met a woman with a more obsessive need to be liked and loved,” he said after they divorced. “She was always plagued by jealousy and insecurity.”
Over the years her traumatic childhood manifested itself in alcohol and drug abuse and eating disorders. But success came quickly. She was still a teenager when she landed her first big role, in the daytime soap General Hospital, and her role in St Elmo’s fire would change the lives of her and her fellow “brat pack” of young actors, including Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe. But her addictions had spiralled out of control. She snorted so much cocaine that “I nearly burned a hole through my nostrils”. When she arrived drunk for filming one day the director threatened her with the sack unless she went to rehab. She went for a fortnight and stayed clean for 20 years.
Dismissed by one executive as a “popcorn actress”, as opposed to a serious actress, she nevertheless held her own opposite Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men and Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal. Ghost was the highest-grossing film of 1990 and, at the time, the third highest ever. Her dress in Indecent Proposal sparked a million knock-offs (although her self-styled outfit for the Oscars that year was described by Vanity Fair as “one of the worst outfits in the history of the Academy Awards"). Her hairstyle in Ghost spawned a million pixie cuts.
But it was her brain and ambition that made her the highest-paid female actress in the world when she negotiated a record US$12 million fee for Striptease. Her fight for equal pay was condemned as greedy. Striptease, The Juror and GI Jane all performed badly at the box office and Moore spent much of the next few years raising her family away from the glare of Hollywood.
“It was an honour,” Moore later said of her fight for equal pay, “and with that came a lot of negativity and a lot of judgment, which I’m happy to have held if it made a difference. I know that it really resonated … clearly it didn’t do enough because we’re still, this many years later, dealing with it.”
“She was really the first person who fought for pay equality and got it, and really suffered a backlash from it,” said her friend Gwyneth Paltrow. “We all certainly benefited from her.”
In 1987 she married the Die Hard star Bruce Willis, moved to Idaho and brought up three daughters: Rumer, Scout and Tallulah. At the height of their fame they needed two private jets to transport their family and entourage of three nannies, a cook, trainer, make-up artist and personal assistants.
“My wife and I realise it’s going to be difficult enough for our daughter, growing up with two famous parents,” Willis said after Rumer’s birth. “I would like to shelter her from all the horseshit.” Moore was one of the most celebrated women and half of a Hollywood golden couple. Ghost and Die Hard 2 at one point sat in the No 1 and 2 slots at the box office.
But even in Idaho, Moore was never far from controversy. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, her 1991 cover shoot for Vanity Fair, while she was heavily pregnant and wearing only diamond jewellery, caused an international outcry. It also, as Vogue pointed out, marked “a seismic shift in the representation of pregnancy once the picture was printed”. (Twenty years later, as recently as 2012, a similar outcry greeted Moore, now a 50-year-old mother of three, posting a bikini selfie on social media. One observer conceded grudgingly that yes, she had the body of a much younger woman, but was it “seemly"?)
Her relationship with Ashton Kutcher, when she was 40 and he was 25, marked a low point personally and professionally. Rumours abounded of his infidelity, which he denied. She wrote in her memoir, Inside Out, that at his request they had threesomes, which “filled me with shame”. She miscarried their child at six months and relapsed in her sobriety. One Hollywood executive speculated whether the marriage was business or pleasure: her career needed a restart and his needed a kick-start.
“The reality is that there are a lot of parts I would like that just don’t come to me,” she said at the time. “That’s not how it used to be.” They separated after six years of marriage in 2012, when she was 49. Amid reports of her partying and alcohol abuse her relationship with her daughters fell apart. Anorexic and suffering from auto-immune and digestive problems she collapsed with a seizure after smoking “spice” – a synthetic drug – at a party and checked into rehab.
“Part of my life was clearly unravelling,” she told The New York Times. “I had no career. No relationship.”
The irony is not lost on Moore that her award-winning, career-reviving role in The Substance is about a woman sacked from her career in the entertainment industry for being too old. Everything about her own appearance has been the subject of endless speculation: has she had plastic surgery, and if so where, when and how much? Her cheekbones at a recent fashion show were analysed, and even her knees have not escaped scrutiny for allegedly suspicious youthfulness.
Apparently single, she has said that dating is not her “focus”. She still lives in Idaho, near her ex-husband Willis and his new family, and posts pictures on Instagram of her children, grandchild and pet chihuahua, Pilaf. Most recently, though, she posted a recent cover of the Hollywood Reporter. On it, she posed alongside actors including Angelina Jolie and Zendaya for an issue celebrating women in the film industry.
“She became a movie star,” Paltrow says, “in this time where women didn’t naturally fit into the system.”
Nobody calls them popcorn actresses now.
The Times
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