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Moore and more

Moore specialises in ranters, ravers and crazies: characters who conceal nothing. She’s also played women who are repressed or secretly tormented.

Moore plays a B-List Hollywood actress whose lustre is dimming, in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars. Moore plays a B-List Hollywood actress whose lustre is dimming, in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars.

Charles Mcgrath

Julianne Moore has done it all — big-budget pictures, underfunded indies, subtle roles, screechy ones. This time, she’s back with Maps to the Stars, in which she plays a temperamental actress that’s just not her

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.

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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 artist whose great theme is her own vagina.
Moore’s role in Maps 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 this spring, and some forecasters are already speculating that it may finally win her an Oscar. (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. But those who have worked with Moore say that in real life, she couldn’t less resemble the temperamental Havana Segrand.

Festive offer

“She’s incredibly well prepared and a wonderful collaborator, a proper pro,” said Stephen Daldry, who directed her in The Hours. 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. One recent morning, she turned up at Cafe Cluny, not far from her West Village home, in a plain white blouse and black cotton pants, her red hair loose and no makeup concealing her abundant freckles.

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“I like to call myself bourgie Julie,” she confessed, and explained that she put a lot of stock in French novelist 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: “I think she’s partly in it for the adventure. 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 exploration.”

Moore said that she doesn’t think of herself as especially daring: “Once I’ve ascertained that I’m safe and 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.”

Moore, 53, was born at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and grew up an Army brat, moving some 20 times and attending nine different schools. Her mother, from whom Moore says she gets her look, was a Scot who moved to the US at a young age but never abandoned her heritage. Moore recently published a children’s book about her, called My Mom Is a Foreigner, but Not to Me.

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As a youngster, Moore was not particularly stage-struck. She was a bookworm and discovered the theatre through reading.

“What I hate is having a meeting and hearing someone say, ‘The script is a blueprint’,” Moore said. “I’m like: ‘Don’t do that. I want language’.” What most appealed to her about Maps to the Stars, she added, was the screenplay by Bruce Wagner. “Bruce’s language is so spectacular that it wasn’t hard to get into the character of Havana,” she explained. “Because the language was so detailed, I felt like I could hear her and see her.”

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First uploaded on: 21-09-2014 at 00:04 IST
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