Soap addicts of 1980s America knew Julianne Moore as Frannie Hughes, the bouncy-fringed ingenue with a disastrous love life in As the World Turns. On weekday afternoons she was tangled in plotlines that encompassed being kidnapped by a homicidal fiancé and battling an evil British twin. With sheaves of rapidly written dialogue and barely time for two takes, that stint on daytime television at the CBS studios in Hell's Kitchen was a small-screen bootcamp for Moore and the incongruous flipside to her nightlife off-Broadway in the likes of Caryl Churchill's skewering of Eighties greed, Serious Money. The actor had arrived in New York in 1983 with a theatre degree from Boston University, a laser focus and a sideline in magical thinking: her morning ritual at the time, christened “the lucky way”, involved leaving her apartment at precisely the same moment each day and adjusting her gait so she never waited at a traffic light. There were no downtown clubs or aftershow parties. She mastered her lines, forced herself to watch her performances for hairline cracks and excelled, picking up an Emmy for the soap and lauded work onstage. Yet one thing eluded Moore: she couldn't make a dent in the film business. “There were all these big, splashy, commercial movies in the Eighties, and I just didn't get them,” she says today, spooning honey into her tea as we sit in the leather booth of a bistro near Washington Square Park, the fireplace lit against a darkening afternoon. “I figured maybe it wasn't going to happen for me. I just could not get a film.”
Today Moore is the versatile queen of that medium. Acting opposite her is, as Mark Ruffalo once put it, “like sharing the court with Michael Jordan”. In the four decades since her debut, the 63-year-old has played glassy-eyed porn stars and incestuous heiresses, ziplining artists and viperous blackmailers, housewives stifled in suburbia and dystopian presidents corrupted by power. She has embodied real women, from the feminist icon Gloria Steinem to the red-meat Republican Sarah Palin — transcending the punchlines and nailing the latter's folksy vernacular. “All of them are close to me,” she says, refusing to choose between them. “I'm only using myself or what I've observed.” Those razor powers of observation make her a master at peeling away the artifice to reveal our true selves in all our flaws and messiness — the petty cruelties and crumpled aspirations, the quotidian grind and flashes of joy. Whether she's suppressing unwieldy feelings under a minutely rippling surface or her face is soggy with tears (no one silent-cries, choke-sobs or all-out wails like Moore can) she has the kind of screen presence that makes an audience hold their collective breath. And while she's done her share of big-budget action — she has co-starred with a mother and baby T-rex and hunted a brain-eating psychopath — Moore has always seemed more interested in navigating psychological riptides than voyaging into actual stormy seas. “Oh
