From Brat Packer to one of Hollywood’s most famous cougars, the gravelly-voiced Demi Moore has garnered as much attention for her off-screen romances and escapades as she has for the sometimes controversial roles she has picked over the years. Once the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, Moore has starred in roles as diverse as a down-on-her-luck stripper to a Navy Seal trainee, to, perhaps her most famous role, the love interest of a ghost.
BORN FROM TRAGIC BEGINNINGS
In her films, Moore has often chosen to play strong women facing adverse circumstances, which is not surprising given the struggles she, herself, had to face in her early life. Born in 1962 in New Mexico, instability was a hallmark of Demetria Gene Guynes’s early life. Even before she was born, Moore’s biological father had already left her mom, Virginia, who was only 19 when she gave birth.
By the time Moore was 14, Demi, her mother and stepfather, Danny Guynes, had moved approximately 40 times before finally settling in Los Angeles. A year after arriving in L.A., her parents, both alcoholics who would regularly get into physical fights, divorced. In 1980, Guynes committed suicide.
When she was 16, egged on by friend and fellow aspiring actress Nastassja Kinski, Moore quit school to dabble in modeling and acting. Two years later in 1980, she married a 30-year-old rocker named Freddy Moore. The marriage lasted four years before ending in an amicable divorce.
HEATING UP HOLLYWOOD'S FIREIn 1982, Moore was cast as a reporter on the soap opera
General Hospital and landed a few small roles in the films,
Choices,
Parasite and
Young Doctors in Love. Moore's first big roles came in 1984's
Blame it on Rio and
No Small Affair, but it was the 1985 ensemble film
St. Elmo's Fire that helped catapult her into stardom. Moore, along with her
St. Elmo's Fire castmates—Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy—were branded the Brat Pack, a group of young, talented, hard-partying up-and-comers.
Moore and Estevez started dating and were soon engaged to be married. In 1986, the couple starred together in
Wisdom, a movie he wrote and directed. She followed it up starring alongside Rob Lowe in
About Last Night and opposite John Cusack in
One Crazy Summer. In 1987, Estevez and Moore ended their relationship.
TAKING IT ALL OFFIt wasn't long before rumors started popping up that she and popular television actor
Bruce Willis were dating. Their whirlwind relationship culminated in a November 1987 wedding, and their first daughter, Rumer, was born in August 1988. After Rumer's birth, Moore's appeared in two films,
The Seventh Sign and
We're No Angels, before making the 1990 flick that would make her a mega-star,
Ghost. The hit, which co-starred Patrick Swayze and Whoopi Goldberg, earned approximately $218 million and five Academy Award nominations.
During the 90s, Moore’s popularity reached a fever pitch. She posed for an infamous nude photo while seven months pregnant with her second child, Scout, for a 1991
Vanity Fair cover. She responded to the ensuing controversy by posing for the magazine again a year later wearing nothing but body paint. Her 90s films like
A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame and
Striptease made her the highest paid actress in the business and one of the most sought-after.
COUGAR ALERT
But in 1998, her personal life went into turmoil when her mother succumbed to cancer and she separated from Willis. Their divorce was finalized in 2000 and they remain close friends. Moore retreated to Idaho to concentrate on raising her girls (she had a third daughter, Tallulah, in 1994) and producing films such as
Austin Powers and its two sequels. She effectively “retired” from the spotlight until 2003 when she came back in a big way in
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.
That year, she completed her comeback with some arm-candy in the form of then-25-year-old actor
Ashton Kutcher. Their relationship had all the makings of a publicity stunt, but two years later, the pair married at their home in Beverly Hills. Their union, full of public declarations of love via their Twitter accounts and their own charity, the DNA Foundation, looked like the paradigm of happily ever after until allegations that Kutcher was cheating surfaced in late 2010. He denies the claims and the couple is keeping a united front.
Moore hasn’t scored another hit since her Charlie’s Angels role, but no matter what, she’ll forever be the woman who cried her way into everyone’s hearts in Ghost, posed pregnant and naked on Vanity Fair, and married a toddler.
