Not long ago, Julianne Moore says, she was invited to give a talk to a group of drama students and one of them put up their hand to ask, "How do you become a famous actress?" It is a silly question, a star-struck kid's question, addressed to an actor who is indubitably a "star" - Moore was recently polled fifth most successful actress in Hollywood after Renée, Nicole, Julia and Catherine Zeta - and she could have given it a silly answer. Such as: "Wear a daft dress to a gala premiere. Put your genius into creating a complicated public mess around the drama of your private life. Marry Hollywood aristocracy. Pose pregnant and naked for Vanity Fair. Don't worry about talent. You may very well not have it, anyway."
And who could quibble? But she didn't say any of this. Instead, she told them, "You can ask me anything you want about acting and I will try and answer. But if what you want to know about is fame and celebrity, then I can't help you. Because the whole celebrity thing has no content to it. It's not valuable, it's not meaningful, it's not anything. It's not real." At which point, I can imagine, a whole classroom of kids' jaws hit the floor, illusion dashed. Not so much the reluctant celebrity, that is an old story. A "real" star.
Before I met her, I was struck and puzzled by how many times people asked, "Who is Julianne Moore? What does she look like? Which films has she been in?" Since 1993, when she was first spotted, by Steven Spielberg among others, in a cameo role opposite Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, she has been in 25 films, including Hannibal (2001), in which she took over the role of Clarice Starling from Jodie Foster, on Anthony Hopkins' recommendation, allegedly, and against the competition of Helen Hunt and Cate Blanchett; and Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), in which, naked from the waist down, she railed against her husband while ironing his shirts.
"She is a real redhead," the tabloids observed. She has received two Oscar nominations for best actress: for the porn queen Amber Waves in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), a part he wrote for her; and for her role opposite Ralph Fiennes in Neil Jordan's adaptation of Graham Greene's novel The End Of The Affair (1999). In Anderson's next movie, Magnolia (1999), the story seemed to form itself around her; and her extraordinary ability to embody the inner rhythm of a film even transferred itself to Tom Cruise, who gave his most revealing and self-critical performance yet. Next week, she'll appear on our cinema screens with Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep in Stephen Daldry's The Hours, already tipped for the Oscar for best film.
But, to my mind, she has never been better than in two films by Todd Haynes: Safe (1998), her first lead role, and Far From Heaven, out next month - companion pieces, you could almost say - both of them about women in various stages of forgetting themselves. After Safe, a small independent, admittedly (a $1m budget), I remember thinking, they won't forget her after this. Well, only some of them did. In his Biographical Dictionary Of Film, David Thomson has this to say about Safe. After describing it as "one of the most arresting, original and accomplished films of the 1990s", he goes on, "in which abstraction and a very strange human situation were perfectly embodied in Julianne Moore's immense but tenuous presence". Can you be abstract/immense, real/ tenuous - both, and at the same time? How do you remain abstracted and yet completely immersed in a role? It's the question the kids might have asked her had they not been looking the wrong way, misdirected into fame. What is acting?
I met her in a nondescript Los Angeles diner - the sort of place you might go to with an old friend. She arrived bang on time, wearing the ubiquitous dark glasses, tracksuit and trainers, her Titian hair falling over a perfectly oval face, youthfully freckled. Beautiful, yes, but that kind of unremarkable, unassertive beauty that is just itself. And she chatted, no other word for it, for two hours about the films she has made, but principally about family. Her sister Valerie, "the person I have been closest to in my life". About Bart Freundlich, the father of her two children, Caleb, five, and Liv, eight months, and whom she will marry in the summer. Not a Hello! wedding. "No, I don't think Hello! will be invited." About her parents, now married 43 years, and to whom she speaks every week.
I repeat to her a funny story that I have read about her mother and that I particularly liked. How, after she appeared nude in Short Cuts, her mum said to her, "I'd much rather see you naked than dead." Funny, but also poignant. Yep, she said. And then went on to explain that it was an allusion to a performance she gave as Ophelia at the Guthrie Theatre, in the early 1980s, when she was brought on dead in an open casket and, though she had warned her parents, "My mum was a bit upset." Ophelia, another woman "tenuous" and yet the still centre around which the action turns.
I can't help noticing that she has about her none of that buzz of implication - people don't approach her, don't attempt to claim some part of her, they leave her alone. And when I pointed this out, which was a mistake - I shouldn't have done it, invited her to observe herself being observed - she just said, "That's LA. They are used to it here." Actually, it's not LA, or certainly not all of LA, which is coming increasingly to resemble a city of mini fortresses - go up into Beverly Hills or, worse still, Bel Air, and the walls are almost as high as the trees. Anyway, she doesn't choose to live in LA, she rents when she is there. She prefers Manhattan. "There's a real community there. I know people say that New York is a tough, unfriendly place to live, but after September 11 I don't think anyone can say that again."
Does she find the "celebrity" oppressive? Not really, she said. "I don't think it has to be that way - servants, helpers, security. I don't think I could tolerate that. Some have to, but that isn't my situation." And: "Look at Harrison Ford. He goes all over the city, he doesn't have an entourage and he does just fine. So I think there are ways to do it."
And, of course, she is right. Celebrity is not merely what we project on to the "stars". They have to be complicit in it. That's why the reluctant celebrity is such a brittle pose. Celebrity is the antithesis of everything that acting is, or should be - ie, the ability to enter into the dynamic of a drama without bringing in any other drama. Which is why we wince every time we see a "personality" actor - say, Meryl Streep - practising some little naturalistic tic, some nuance of emotion that has been learned. An actor has to be a kind of blank. But also, for the great actor, something else. Because behind the role, as Thomson suggests, abstracted from the role, we have to sense a "real" person. A person not so much identifying with the part they are playing, pretending, as one identifying the part with inner elements of themselves, elements that they possess and that they select. And the paradox is that it takes great force of personality - because to do it, to pull it off, you have to be not frightened. Brando can do it, obviously - he practically invented it. De Niro never got there. Pacino only in The Godfather. Nicholson can do it, sometimes, does it in About Schmidt, or so they are saying: "Here is a Jack Nicholson you have not seen before." And Julianne Moore - modest, soft-spoken, impeccably well-mannered, considerate always of others, the most unostentatious of stars - can do it. And everyone in Hollywood knows it. It's why the writers and directors she works with ask her back so frequently.
A few days after meeting her, I watched the Golden Globe ceremony on television. Moore had been nominated as best actress for Far From Heaven. The award went to Kidman for The Hours. There was Streep, on stage, receiving a best supporting Globe for Spike Jonze's Adaptation, reminding everyone how long she had been forgotten. "Not since the Pleistocene era" had she received an award. Kidman, sporting a plastic red nose - a comic allusion to the prosthetic nose she wears as Virginia Woolf in The Hours - looked somehow sad. Renée Zellweger was feigning embarrassment at receiving the Chicago award she pretended should have gone to Catherine Zeta-Jones. Jack was playing the Joker. When Moore got up on stage, sandwiched between Streep and Kidman both holding their Globes, to take the applause for her role in The Hours, she looked what she is - not part of the sham. So, to answer the question: Who is Julianne Moore? I don't know. I just know that she is not pretending to know, either. She is the actor asking the actor's question, asking the human question: Who am I?
Her background was stable and shifting. Her parents' marriage was strong, but because her father was in the army, a helicopter pilot, later a paratrooper who saw active service in Vietnam and was injured there - "He has a Purple Heart and a Silver Star" - they moved around a great deal within the US and later to Panama, Alaska, Germany. It didn't matter that it was hard for her to make and retain friends - she is still cautious about friendship, she says, not someone to throw herself at people - because she had her siblings, her younger sister, in particular, and her younger brother. Her mother, Scots by birth, who came to America in 1950, must be a pretty formidable woman - she brought up the children with not a lot of money while her husband was in Vietnam and if she was fearful, she didn't show it. "I don't remember her being afraid. Maybe I was too young." Maybe, but belied by Moore's own observation with her son. "There is a particular kind of nonverbal intimacy with a child, where they know everything you feel, you affect them so dramatically."
It is funny, she says, she has always been emotionally brave. "But, physically, I am a terrible coward. I didn't learn to swim until late. I'd never dive into a pool." Not surprising, really, if she was over-protected as a child. If you were a mother, like hers, with a husband away at war, you probably wouldn't risk anything much with your children, would you? You'd keep them safe. But not, if you were shrewd, so safe that they couldn't look after themselves should the situation require it.
Temperamentally, Moore says, she was always a "good girl" - "I liked rules, still do. Show me a rule and I'll follow it." She was a swot at school, immensely studious and bright, and the plan was that she would be a doctor. But at 16, then living in Germany, she joined a drama class and one day the teacher told her that she had the talent to act professionally. And that was it. Her mother, instead of resisting, took her on a plane to New York to audition for drama school. "They were horrified, I think. But they'd always been the kind of parents who thought you couldn't make your child do something, who told us, 'You can be anything you want in life.' " They made one proviso, however - that she must study drama at a university, "so that if it didn't work out, I'd have a college degree, I'd have a rescue plan." She would be safe. At 17, she enrolled at Boston University; her mother went back to Germany.
What happens, I imagine, if you are alone and in a big city, an ocean away from the people you love, is that you get frightened. This, anyway, is how she accounts for her first marriage, to the actor John Gould Rubin. "I had been alone a long time, I needed somewhere to belong and he was quite a lot older than me." The relationship ended after almost a decade. "I spent my 20s working on my career. I was so concerned to get on." Like a lot of actors, she says, she was good at being whoever she needed to be in a given situation. She always knew what she wanted in terms of work. "I was interested in that, it was no problem." But then, in her early 30s, she looked around. "I realised I had no personal life. You are part of a group and a lot of things are determined by the place you live, the people around you. You read a situation, you respond, and the notion of who you are, who you want to be, gets lost. And then I began to think, 'Who are you?' It took me a long time, I have to say." It was devastating to her to leave Rubin, it broke the rules. It meant she had to, as if for the first time, register the irrational element in life - that people get hurt. "And I'd always been a good girl, I'd never screwed up. I still don't know how I did it. It was one of the biggest decisions of my life. And it changed everything for me. It was the point at which I truly started living my life." It was 1993; they divorced in 1995.
There are some film-makers - writers, directors, actors - of whom it would be true to say that their work reads like chapters from their autobiography, Woody Allen being perhaps the example par excellence. This would not be true of Moore - her body of work is too big, too diverse. But in so far as there is a theme, in her most successful roles she plays characters in a state of alienation, amnesiacs, women who have forgotten or lost themselves. People whose identity is a question.
We were talking about Laura, the character she plays in Daldry's film of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Hours. It is a wonderful book, not a bad film, which focuses on a day in the life of three women: Virginia Woolf, played by Kidman, who is in the process of writing Mrs Dalloway and trying to decide whether or not to kill her off; Clarissa, played by Streep, a latterday Mrs Dalloway - she is preparing for a party; and Laura, a bourgeois housewife of 1950, pregnant, with a small son and a devoted husband. A great reader, someone for whom the world of the book is more real than her own reality, Laura is reading Mrs Dalloway and she is contemplating suicide. Laura chooses life but, as Moore says, "at what cost?" She leaves her family, abstracts herself from her environment, and goes to Canada to become a librarian, to immerse herself in literature.
But, as Moore says, of Laura, the person, nothing is left. "She is someone who is not conscious in her life. She doesn't want to be in her life. She can't understand the conventions of the time, she is not like everybody else, she has special needs. But rather than explore it, figure it out, Laura draws back." Forsaking reality, Laura retreats into illusion. And though illusion may help her out - Laura survives the book - it is not identity. Like Moore's Carol White in Safe, Laura has dissolved, become a blank.
But for Cathy, in Far From Heaven, I say to her, surely there is hope. Cathy, too, is out of her time, 1957 Connecticut. Naive, idealistic, she doesn't understand the mores of the community in which she finds herself. Befriending her black gardener leads to tragic results for them both. Haynes's film is a homage to the film-maker Douglas Sirk, a gorgeous, virtuoso period piece, made with 1950s production values. Haynes uses the heightened artificiality of the style, the gap between then and now, to pose the question Cathy might ask herself if she could only abstract herself from her place and time: What is reality? There is a beautiful scene in which Cathy goes for a walk with her gardener in the woods - it is autumn, they are surrounded by nature. Is it possible, the scene asks, the whole film is asking, to be natural, like nature, just to be ourselves? And what would that mean? For Cathy, it means the loss of her illusions. At the end of the film, she is left alone; we don't know what will happen to her. "I know," says Moore. "Cathy will go out and get a job, that's what Cathy will do. She has gone from being an idealist to a realist. And that is not a bad place to be in your life."
Just like the rest of us, I guess, Moore must have her anxieties. There is the inequity between her success and that of her partner Bart, a writer and director. "Bart is nine years younger than me. We are in a different place professionally, sure." There is Hollywood and the ferocious speed with which stars rise and fall. "That's every actor's worry. Of course. It is a commercial industry, devoted to creating a product that will make money worldwide, so as an actor you do have to be careful not to be carried away by other people's expectations of you."
And what she doesn't say. That if you do let yourself be carried away by it, you will be consumed by it, you will dissolve. So, to answer the question again. Who is Julianne Moore? She is the most talented actress of her generation, and also, undoubtedly, the cleverest
· The Hours goes on general release next Friday; Far From Heaven is out next month.