A striking redhead in a class all her own, Julianne Moore has become one Hollywood's most sought after stars, appearing in big budget blockbusters, quirky comedies, and esoteric independent films with regular frequency. She gained a somewhat shocking notoriety by performing a scene in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993) naked from the waist down and further enhanced her reputation as an risk taker with her no holds barred performance as the porn star Amber Waves in Paul Thomas Anderson's legendary Boogie Nights(1997). Yet Moore has a dignity and an endearing comedic sense that enables her to adapt easily to just about any kind of role. Whether getting chased by dinosaurs in The Lost World: Jurassic Park II (1997), playing a scheming Edwardian blackmailer in The Ideal Husband (1999), picking up where Jodie Foster left off in Hannibal (2000) or doing pratfalls with David Duchovny in Evolution (2001) Moore brings a thinly veiled intensity to each role.

No overnight sensation, Moore plugged doggedly away at her career from her days following her graduation from Boston University's School of Performing Arts. Moving to New York in the early 1980s, Moore appeared in a number of off Broadway shows, including a stint as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Guthrie Theatre. She began getting steady television work and for three years played the dual roles of Frannie and Sabrina on "As the World Turns," winning a Daytime Emmy Award in 1988. After a number of forgettable TV movies, she made her feature film debut in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990) and spent the next three years building her reputation. In 1993, a small but memorable role as a suspicious doctor in The Fugitive threw the doors wide open; she followed Short Cuts with a critically acclaimed appearance in the art house hit Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) and the following year garnered mass attention as the woman having Hugh Grant's baby in Nine Months (1995). After her career moved into high gear, Moore wisely chose to mixed independent films with more mainstream fare, appearing in quick succession in Safe, Assassins, (1995) Surviving Picasso (1996) and The Myth of Fingerprints (1997). Her Oscar® nomination for Boogie Nights solidified her rise to the top, and she worked again with director Anderson on his follow-up film Magnolia. It was only one of five films in which she would appear that year, the others being Cookie's Fortune, An Ideal Husband, A Map of the World, and The End of the Affair, for which she received another Oscar® nomination.

Moore, who seems to have no trouble finding material that is both challenging and controversial, costarred with Dennis Quaid in Far From Heaven (2002), as a 1950s housewife who turns to her black gardener for solace after catching her husband in bed with another man. And in late 2002 she formed one third of a dynamic trio, sharing screen time with Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman in the Virginia Woolfe inspired tale The Hours. 

Credit: amctv.com