‘ MY MARRIAGE TAKES WORK’ Julianne Moore talks love and family
The Oscar-winning star of the new movie ‘Gloria Bell’ reflects on marriage, motherhood and finding true happiness
Julianne Moore has played a professor struggling with Alzheimer’s disease, an heiress who seduces her own son and a porn star, among other daring roles. But when the 58-year-old Oscar winner was asked to dance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she got a real case of stage fright. “I’m not a natural dancer,” says Moore, who plays a woman who lives for disco in the new movie Gloria Bell. “Having to dance is like arrrgh! ” But she boogies with abandon in the film, as a divorced woman struggling to find happiness and romance in midlife.
Moore, who is married to filmmaker Bart Freundlich, 49, immediately connected with her character.
“I love her vivacity and her desire to always try new things,” she says. Moore shares that sense of adventure. “I love my job because I’m always forced to learn something that I’m not familiar with,” says the Manhattan-based mother of Liv, 16, and Caleb, 21. Now the star shares with WHO some of the life lessons that help guide her.
GET YOUR GROOVE ON
Even if it means stepping outside your comfort zone. It’s opening herself up to new experiences, says Moore, that “makes me feel more alive than anything.” MAKE TIME FOR LOVE We have this narrative in our culture that if you want a career you have to work hard, go to school, look for a job and apply yourself. But love is supposed to just happen to you. One day you’re going to meet someone, you’ll be hit over the head, and boom! That happens in romantic comedies, but in real life you have to make time for it. When you find a person, you have to invest in them and in that relationship. That’s what love is. If you put time into that relationship and take care of the people in your life, that’s what makes a family. Family is time. It’s true that thing about love growing – it does grow, and it gets way better.
MARRIAGE MATTERS – FOR EVERYONE
My relationship was pretty unexpected. We met [in 1996], and then I said, “I have a break before I have to do another job, so I’m gonna go to New York and hang around with him there.” And it just kept going. I think that marriage is a container for a family, and that’s why legal marriage is important, for every couple. It’s a way of saying to the world, “I’m going to make this container for us, for the two of us, and then for our children and our life together.”
A GOOD MARRIAGE TAKES WORK
“There have never been more exciting days in my life than the days my children were born”
It’s not airtight, but our container is pretty good! Especially now, having
one child [Caleb] who is almost finished with college and then another [Liv] who will go to college in two years, it’s like, “Wow, we did it!” We’re intact and we’re happy.
THE KIDS WILL BE ALL RIGHT
When I was expecting my first child, a boy, I was panicked because I felt I didn’t know anything about boys. My mother-in-law, who had two sons, said, “Parenting doesn’t happen all at once.” That’s been the real surprise – I didn’t have to learn how to be a parent to a teenager when my children were born; I just had to know what to do with them at that moment.
BUT LETTING THEM GO IS BITTERSWEET
It’s agony when they go to college. We could barely speak. On one hand it’s beautiful to see your child go towards their own future. You feed them, then you teach them how to hold a spoon. You hold their hand, and then they learn how to walk. And later you teach them how to make their own pasta. You’re just teaching them all the skills they’re going to need to move away from you.
REAL SEX IS NOT LIKE IT IS IN MOVIES
People never have sex the way they do in the movies. You see that in these old sexy movies where somebody rips somebody’s blouse off, and I’d think, “I’d be so upset if you tore the buttons off my shirt. I’d be like, ‘ What are you doing?’ ” But I do think that sex is challenging, especially with someone brand-new. What we wanted to depict in Gloria Bell was the reality of that. We wanted it to be real. Not fake. The nude scenes were part of it. We wanted to add a level of reality to the situation.
I FEEL MOST BEAUTIFUL WHEN I’M . . .
In a touched-up photo! [ Laughing] Sometimes I see those things where people say, “I feel most beautiful when I’m wearing sweats and sitting around the house,” and I think, when I catch sight of myself in a mirror when I’m like that, I think, “Wow, try a little bit!” I think what we find beautiful is what we love and the people we care about.
AGEING IS ACCEPTANCE
I think that’s part of life. It’s important to realise this kind of obsession with ageing as a cosmetic issue is silly. What we all hope for is to live as long as possible, and if you’re going to live as long as possible, you are going to age, because that’s what we do. We don’t stay the same. If you’re lucky enough to have a full life, lucky enough to age, my God, how great.
WE DON’T ALWAYS HAVE TO BE HAPPY
I don’t know that we have to always be after a sense of happiness. Life brings you lots of things, and it’s not all happy, but it doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. I look for a sense of engagement in my life. I have to notice myself when I’m unhappy, because that’s not my natural self. One time I was working out with a trainer, and I was really grumpy, and I realised, “You don’t like this.” So I don’t work out that way anymore. You have to listen to yourself.