Successful Actor Interview: Marion Cotillard

"I can fit in any process as long as the director respects who I am and doesn’t try to put me in a situation to get something out of me."

Ms. Cotillard, you have worked on all kinds of different projects, from art house French films to Hollywood blockbusters. Do you have a favorite style of working?

No, I love when it’s different every time. I don’t like to compare because I don’t see the point. I don’t have a favorite process. My favorite process is the right process for the person I am working with. I can fit in any process as long as the director respects who I am and doesn’t try to put me in a situation to get something out of me – if I can give it without that situation. It doesn’t work at all.

What kind of situation?

Someone who will try to make me angry or create a situation that is not related to my character in order to put me in the state of the character. It’s 100 percent counter productive. Either I will get mad and I won’t be good or – and most of the time this is what happens – I will laugh. I cannot take it seriously.

Why not?

Because I can see the trick and I need authenticity. I need to be on the same page as the director. It happened once that the guy was doing things and he would ask me to do things that I didn’t expect, but I liked it because it fit with the movie. I was never slapped in the face, but some of my fellow actors have had this experience. That wouldn’t work for me at all. I need to be part of the process – and the trust.

Are you more self-confident now than you used to be?

No. I think it’s part of myself. Insecurity is very common among actors. When I started giving interviews and talking to people that I didn’t know, it was a nightmare. I’ve learned how to deal with interviews and insecurity; I’ve gotten used to it. But it’s always weird when you have to talk to someone you don’t know, someone who asks questions about yourself. It’s kind of a weird process. But I feel good. I love to discover and jump into the unknown and there is no security there.

Is that why you work in Europe and in Hollywood?

That was totally by luck. I had never thought I could work outside of my country, especially in the United States. I am from this generation where the American, the U.S. movies are part of our culture, so the American movies fed my dream to be an actress, but I never thought that I could one day work in an American movie. So I feel very, very lucky.

Well it doesn’t hurt that you won an Oscar for your performance in La Vie en Rose.

I feel lucky that this crazy Olivier Dahan thought I could be Édith Piaf. He changed my life. As an actress I always wanted to do movies and I never dreamt about doing movies in America just because I didn’t think it was possible. It was never a part of my dream. My dream was pretty simple. I just wanted to tell stories, make movies. I already consider myself very lucky to be able to do what I love to do.

But many French actors and filmmakers choose not to work in America, even though they could. French director François Ozon told us, “Americans respect you when you stay in your country, but when you arrive in America it’s finished.”

I was in Cannes one year with a French actress and she is very talented, very beautiful, and my American agent grabbed my dress and said, “Introduce me to her. I want to meet her!” So I went to see her and said, “My American agent wants to meet with you.” And she was like, “I don’t care! I don’t speak English and I don’t want to do any movies there.” I was surprised, but she absolutely refused to meet with my agent. She’s my generation, she could have everything, and she totally refused. And I was begging her! I said, “It’s an experience, you never know…” So you know, it’s very personal. Some people are just not interested. But it was not my goal and I don’t consider it as a big achievement to act in America. I just always wanted to be an actress.

Always?

My parents are actors and so I was surrounded by actors. I was surrounded by great energy and storytellers all my childhood. And that was fascinating. When I was very young I saw plays that are not for kids and I have a very, very vivid memory of those moments. Usually it was when the nanny didn’t come and my mom had to take my brothers and I to a three-hour play about ancient Greece or something. We would go crazy – she would go crazy, too. (Laughs) I remember the actors who were friends with my parents being normal people that I knew and then on stage they were cats or dogs. That was crazy. As far as I remember I always wanted to be an actress.

What was it like the first time you were on stage?

I was very young, I think I was like four or five. My mother was doing this play and the director asked me to do something. I remember exactly the location, the theater. There was a big piano, there was this woman on the floor and she was supposed to be my mother. But my mother was on stage, too. And I remember the confusion. I didn’t understand why they were saying such crazy things, pretending that my mother was there lying down while my mother was over there! That was my first time on stage.

Do you bring your son on set with you like your mother took you to the theater?

Yes, but you need a very good make up artist. (Laughs) You don’t sleep anymore, but at the same time you have this strength that comes from this life that has just arrived. It’s a big cliché how your priorities change, but every parent knows that sometimes there’s a thunderstorm and you look at his eyes and everything is all right. It is a revolution of everything you feel. It increases strength. It increases everything – except nighttime.

Original source: http://the-talks.com/interviews/marion-cotillard/

Next Year’s Oscar Race Is Already On: Will Redmayne & Inarritu Return For Round 2?

Re-posted from Deadline.com. Great article to read about upcoming movies of this year. Enjoy, my dear followers!

By Pete Hammond
With the 2014 Oscar race fading further into memory, I say it’s never too early to look ahead to what’s in store for the nascent 2015 contest. It s
hould start coming into the beginnings of focus when Cannes starts in May, or maybe even at CinemaCon in late April (though that National Association of Theatre Owners confab usually highlights more obviously commercial stuff, not necessarily Oscar bait). It’s interesting to note that by this time last year, three of the eight eventual Best Picture Oscar nominees already had premiered, and that was a bit unusual. The 2014 Sundance Film Fest in January gave us Boyhood and Whiplash, which went on to earn a total of 11 nominations and four Oscars between them. And then after its smash Berlin debut, Fox Searchlight opened Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel exactly one year ago this weekend. With nine nominations and eventually four Oscar wins, it also became the first film to be released beforeMay to get a Best Picture Oscar nomination since Erin Brockovich in 2000. So anything on the horizon now that could match that impressive record at this point so near the ides of March? Hmmmm.

Out of Sundance this year Fox Searchlight — the reigning Best Picture distributor two years running with 12 Years A Slave and Birdman (along with 12 Best Pic noms overall) — grabbed two promising awards prospects in Brooklyn starring, Domhnall Gleeson and Saoirse Ronan, as well as Me And Earl And The Dying Girl, with Thomas Mann and RJ Cyler. The latter film won two prizes at Sundance, emulating what Whiplash did the year before. A24 Films also has awards hope for James Ponsoldt’s Sundancer The End Of The Tour, which opens in July, the same time period in which Boyhood successfully launched.

Looking at the landscape so far this year, I would venture to say we won’t have a repeat where nearly half the Best Picture nominees already had been seen by this date. From the Sundance buzz, though, Brooklyn would seem like the perfect recipe to go all the way, and Searchlight this week dated it for the Oscar-friendliest of weekends, November 6. Also this week Focus Features came out with a Thanksgiving weekend date of November 27 for The Danish Girl, a movie currently in production that has a pure Oscar pedigree as it comes from The King’s Speech Oscar winner Tom Hooper and stars newly minted Best Actor winner Eddie Redmayne. I even heard early in the 2014 season that Hooper joked to a friend that it would be fine for Redmayne to be nominated forThe Theory Of Everything but he was going to win  for his movie. Redmayne’s triumph at the Dolby after an exhausting campaign season has changed the stakes on that plan, and now Focus will be trying to position him for the rare feat of back-to-back Best Actor wins, something not accomplished since Tom Hanks in 1993 and 1994 for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. Even though cameras are still rolling the Danish Girl campaign seems to be on, with Focus releasing an early photo of Redmayne as transgender pioneer Einar Wegener. It’s a role right out of the current zeitgeist for Redmayne and obvious catnip for Academy voters. The part originally was meant to be played by Nicole Kidman.

Another big 2014 Oscar winner, Alejandro G. Inarritu, also went straight from the Dolby — after winning three Oscars for Birdman — back to the set of another highly ambitious film. It’s The Revenant  from big Fox and New Regency, which are looking for three in a row and might find themselves with a major contender with this Leonardo DiCaprio-starring film. Big Fox also could be giving its overachieving specialty division, Searchlight (which also has Far From The Madding Crowd, True Story and A Bigger Splash on its crowded schedule), a run for the Oscar money also with David O. Russell’s Joy, starring Jennifer Lawrence as the creator of the Miracle Mop, and Ridley Scott’s November release The Martian. Fox also is involved internationally with Steven Spielberg’s promising DreamWorks entry St. James Place starring Hanks, which Touchstone Pictures will release domestically. DreamWorks (and Participant Films) also could have director Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans, starring Michael Fassbender, in the mix.

Although they aren’t likely Best Picture fodder like Grand Budapest Hotel, two March releases — Disney’s Cinderella and the Al Pacino starrer Danny Collins — have some level of awards potential. Singing for the first time, Pacino plays an aging rock star, which could find him in the Comedy or Musical category at the Golden Globes (his support cast including a superb Christopher Plummer, Annette Bening, Jennifer Garner and Bobby Cannavale is exceptional as well). Costumes and production design are distinct possibilities for Cinderella, though I have to say I was enchanted by Cate Blanchett’s evil stepmother. She’s probably a better bet for later in the year with the Weinstein Company’sCarol, though.

Going down the list –always a fool’s errand at this point in the game, with release dates uncertain and movies sight unseen– Warner Bros could be back in action big time next awards season with several films including David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis, starring Sandra Bullock; Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, with a startling transformation of Johnny Depp into Whitey Bulger; and Ron Howard’s big Christmas picture In The Heart Of The Sea, which was moved from spring into prime Oscar-season territory. There’s also Mud director Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special, reuniting him with Michael Shannon, who also is great in Broad Green Pictures’ pickup 99 Homes, a film co-starring Andrew Garfield and Laura Dern that played the fall festival circuit already but has yet to open in theaters.

Universal, which held out high Best Picture hopes last season for Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, only to come up short when Oscar nominations were announced, has Jolie’s next directorial effort opposite husband Brad Pitt, in the marriage tale By The Sea. U also has Steve Jobs, the biopic from Oscar winners Danny Boyle and writer Aaron Sorkin, which hopscotched from Sony to Universal and stars Fassbender (again) in what should be a definite contender if things work out. And though it’s listed for February 2016, I wouldn’t be shocked to see The Coen Brothers back with their Hollywood tale, Hail Caesar. With Working Title, there’s also Tom Hardy as the Kray twins in Brian Helgeland’s Legend, and Everest, one of many titles starring Jake Gyllenhaal, so egregiously overlooked by Oscar for his great performance in Nightcrawler. Perhaps the Academy can make it up to him with this mountain-climbing tale, another Searchlight entry called Demolition or the summertime Weinstein Co. Antoine Fuqua boxing tale Southpaw, in which he truly transforms himself again, putting on all the weight he lost for Nightcrawler.

Speaking of the quintessential Oscar player, Harvey Weinstein, he has several films including the aforementioned Todd Haynes film, Carol (headed for Cannes?) with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara; the Margot Robbie starrer Suite Francaise; the Helen Mirren-Ryan Reynolds true drama Woman In Gold; Regression with Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson; Macbeth with Fassbender (again) and Marion Cotillard; and of course, Quentin Tarantino’s currently shooting Western The Hateful Eight. For Tarantino’s last film, Django Unchained, Weinstein Co teamed with Sony, but thatever-so-troubled studio, which drew a blank at the 2014 Oscars — outside of specialty division Sony Pictures Classics, of course, which had multiple nominees — could have a big comeback at the 2016 Academy Awards, at least in theory, with such possible entries as Will Smith starring in the football picture Concussion; George Clooney’s very promising Money Monster, directed by Jodie Foster; newly rebooted TriStar’s The Walk, which was shepherded by new Sony Pictures boss Tom Rothman; and even summer entry Ricki And The Flash, which stars Meryl Streep as an aging rock star (shades of Pacino?). Never count out Streep. SPC always manages a strong slate of Oscar contenders one way or another, and it inevitably will have a lot of titles this coming year. But right now it can count especially on its Sundance pickup Grandma, starring an exceptional Lily Tomlin, as well as its annual Woody Allen film, this time being Irrational Man with Joaquin Phoenix.

Paramount always seems to manage to elbow its way into the race, and this year it should have Martin Scorsese back on board with his passion project Silence – if Scorsese chooses to have it ready in time. With Oscar-friendly Annapurna, Paramount also has Rick Linklater’s post-Boyhood project That’s What I’m Talking About. Disney, of course, has the Star Wars reboot, but the Academy hasn’t nominated a Star Wars film for Best Picture since the first in 1977, when it awarded that landmark blockbuster seven Oscars but gave Best Pic to Allen’s Annie Hall. Disney, with Pixar, also has Pete Docter’s highly anticipated Inside Out, and word I have heard is that it, like Docter’s Up, is headed for Cannes in advance of its June 19 release. I’ve also heard it is strong Best Picture fodder. We’ll wait and see if this animated flick can be the one that proves a game changer for the Academy’s history of treating toons.

Among the indies I am looking forward to seeing possibly in the race, there is new player Bleecker Street’s Trumbo, starring Bryan Cranston as the famed blacklisted screenwriter. The same new company also has Danny Collins and a Blythe Danner vehicle, I’ll See You In My Dreams, bought at Sundance, that could give her a shot at a Best Actress nomination. And Oliver Stone’s Snowden, going out in December via Open Road, could continue the Academy’s newfound love affair with the infamous whistle blower. It gave CitizenFour the Best Documentary Oscar this year, so why not consider what Stone is cooking up? And there is 2013’s Best Actor winner Matthew McConaughey’s cerebral turn in Gus Van Sant’s Sea Of Trees, which also is worth watching out for. 45 Years, with juicy roles for vets Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, is one to look out for from Sundance Selects. And I’m eagerly looking forward to Robert Redford playing Dan Rather in James Vanderbilt’s intriguing-sounding Truth.No list of hopefuls would be complete without my personal most anticipated film of 2015 — or whenever — Warren Beatty’s untitled Howard Hughes drama, which still is without a U.S. distributor. But going by the best of Beatty, the only filmmaker nominated twice in two different years in four different Oscar categories, we can’t wait.

And of course there probably are many other possibilities not listed here. Some of these movies won’t even make it out this year, if the past is any indication, and others we aren’t anticipating quite yet will. But overall, on paper at least, 2015 looks like a winner with new films from so many Oscar-winning major directors. Good thing, because as Peter Sellers says in Being There, “I like to watch.”

http://deadline.com/2015/03/oscars-race-redmayne-inarritu-back-1201386935/

Successful Actor: DAVID OYELOWO

Re-posted from The Talks blog. Great interview and very inspiring. Enjoy the read.

Mr. Oyelowo, how do you approach playing a historical character?

It’s a very tricky thing because of course you have to be evocative of who they were, how they moved, how they spoke. You have to make people relax and say, “Okay, he feels like him enough that I can just go on this journey with this character.” But if it becomes an imitation, if it’s about mimicry, if all people were saying is, “Oh, yeah, he really got the voice,” you’re dead! That’s the worst compliment you can pay.

Really, why?

Because when you go to see a movie, there is a spiritual exchange between the audience and what you’re watching. There is something metaphysical going on, where through the eyes, through what that person is exuding, you go, “I understand who they are. I have a sense of what they’re feeling when they’re not even talking.” There is an embodiment that is total so that you forget all of that. People shouldn’t be looking at the mechanics of what you did.

What should they be looking at?

How you did it emotionally. I believe that we go to the movies to see ourselves. “How would I react?” If all you’re seeing is a superhuman human being who had answers for everything, then you’re just watching in awe and it’s just like, “Okay, wow, he’s him and I’m me.” So I think it’s important that we can see ourselves on screen and I think that also means that we’re looking for the greatness in ourselves.

Is it important for your work to inspire people to be better?

It is important to me! I want to do films that hopefully inspire people to be the best version of themselves. If you look at the films I do, all of them, in some way… the remit I set myself is, “How does this enrich people’s lives?” You know, what’s meaningful? I want films that, when my kids see them, they understand why daddy did those films. They understand how it correlates with the way I’m trying to raise them.

Did you gain that perspective when you became a father?

Being a father teaches you very quickly that you are not the center of your own universe. That’s one of the gifts of having to wipe poop! (Laughs) Other people’s poop… Four times, with four children! I’ll be on a plane tomorrow back to my kids, lock my door, and it’ll all be about poop again! (Laughs) That’s the life I lead.

I’m sure that makes it easier to focus on the important things in life.

The fact of the matter is that every actor’s career has highs and lows. When success as an actor comes early, it’s very easy to believe the hype. But to me, it’s about how consistently you do the work – whether it’s celebrated or it’s not. I’ve been in movies with huge movie stars who have been crucified when there are failures and who have been adulated when there are successes.

In the last few years you’ve been in The Help, Lincoln, The Butler, and most recently you portrayed Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. Why is it so important for you to make films about African-American history?

We need those films. Up until recently, films that deal with civil rights and racial unrest have mostly been told through white characters, through white protagonists. Malcolm X is probably the only film I can think of where you have an indisputable black American leader as the focus of the film. What you’ve tended to have is Mississippi Burning or you have Glory or you have these films that are all through white protagonists. Great films – but a different point of view. You can’t have a film about Dr. King and it be all about Lyndon Johnson in my opinion.

Why do you think there are so many films about African Americans coming out of Hollywood lately?

I think it’s synonymous with Barack Obama’s presidency. I think having a black president means that for a lot of white people there is an opportunity to not just focus on what’s negative about the past, but we have clear indications of progress, so it becomes easier to go: “How did we get here, historically? How have we got to the point where we have a black president?” All these films, they were just not getting made before his presidency. I actually saw President Obama about two weeks ago when we took Selma to the White House, and I thanked him for my career.

What was his reaction?

He went, “Ah, I don’t know about that.” But I told him, “Trust me. I can track when these films came my way!” I can chart it because it’s synonymous with when I moved to L.A. I’ve been in five of those movies! So I think that’s what it is.

And last year 12 Years a Slave even won the Oscar for Best Picture.

But a film about a slave is different than a film about a leader. Black people have been celebrated as slaves and butlers… The very first black person to win an Oscar was for playing a maid in Gone With The Wind, Hattie McDaniel. So, you know, that’s not an issue. We’ve been celebrated as subservient people forever. Great! Fabulous! As leaders? No, not so much. Barely ever.

To quote Dr. King, do you believe that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice in the end?

I think it does – if love is where you’re operating from. I think if you have anger and bitterness in your heart, and you just decide to lash out against it, all you do is you feed prejudice because prejudice exists on the basis that you are lesser than. If you prove that you are lesser than, you are only going to perpetuate that myth. I think there is a reason why the phrase is moral because to be moral is to absolutely embrace the fact that there is a right and there is a wrong. So the only way it bends towards justice is to be part of the solution as opposed to being part of problem.

http://the-talks.com/interviews/david-oyelowo/

Julianne Moore Believes in Therapy, Not God

This story first appeared in the Feb. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

In her early 30s, Julianne Moore felt lost. Her professional life was soaring, her personal life shrinking. "I was lonely," she admits. "I don't think I felt happy. I didn't have the kind of personal life I wanted. I'd spent my 20s working hard and trying to get to wherever there was, which wasn't really anywhere. It was just a job, and I really wanted a family."

Unsure what to do, Moore turned to a therapist, who got straight to the point: She must give her private life its due. "I discovered that was as important as my professional life," says the actress. "I didn't spend the time; I didn't invest. One thing I used to tell my women friends was, 'There's an expectation that your personal life is going to happen to you, but you're going to have to make your career happen. And that's not true: You have to make your personal life happen as much as your career.' "

Since then, Moore, almost miraculously, has managed both. Choosing to live in New York, she has built an enviable private life, with a 19-year (and counting) relationship and two kids. On the career front, she has defied one of the truisms of Hollywood — that an actress is finished at 40 — and has done much of her best work since then: 2002's Far From Heaven and The Hoursand 2006's Children of Men. Like Meryl Streep, she seamlessly mixes commercial work such asThe Hunger Games with independent films. Moore also has established herself as a beauty and fashion icon, signing seven-figure deals with such brands as L'Oreal and Bulgari.

And so, at age 54, she finds herself very comfortable in the spotlight. She already has racked up Golden Globe and SAG Awards for her performance in Still Alice as a college professor suffering from early-onset dementia, and many Academy Awards prognosticators pick her as the favorite for best actress, which would be her first win in five career nominations.

None of this is by luck alone.

"The idea that you're the center of your own narrative and that you can create your life is a great idea," she says, referring to a notion in one of her favorite books, Little Women. "I totally believe it. I've been really lucky, but I feel I've completely created my own life."

 Sitting over lunch in Palm Springs one early January afternoon, she radiates joy, laughs easily and chats openly about everything from novelist Margaret Atwood to Scandinavian furniture to a new app for foreign languages. ("The last time I went to Berlin with Hunger Games, I spent the entire flight doing my pidgin German — it was so pathetic!" she says.)

When she's at her home in New York, her life is one of studied ordinariness. She usually rises around 6.30 a.m. and does yoga three times a week. She reads constantly, including Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and Amy Bloom's Lucky Us. "And I read Amy Poehler's Yes Please. I loved it," she says. She's a writer, too: In 2007, she published the best-selling children's book Freckleface Strawberry, and she now has a five-book contract with Random House (all works for children), with the first, Backpacks, due out in July.

She's a lover of home decor and frequently dips into such websites as 1stdibs andRemodelista. "I'm fascinated by the idea that we are compelled to decorate ourselves and our environments," she says.

She appreciates humor and relates a story about her Hunger Games co-star Jennifer Lawrence. "She's very funny," notes Moore. "When I first met her, I was sitting in the makeup trailer, and our makeup artist was testing something, and Jennifer came in. I said, 'Oh, let me get up.' She goes, 'No, no, no. You sit there. And I'll secretly resent you.' "

She says she makes friends readily. "I fell in love with Ellen Page," she notes of her co-star in the upcoming Freeheld. "She's a new friend. Ellen Barkin is an old friend. Anybody named Ellen."

Despite her ease, she doesn't want for strong opinions and has drawn angry responses to her tweets in favor of Planned Parenthood and gun control. "I get more reactions on Twitter about gun safety than anything else," she says. "I don't understand how we're threatening the Second Amendment because we're talking about gun safety rules. That, to me, is really shocking."

All this is so frighteningly normal, you almost want to scream. Is it possible that an artist of Moore's caliber can exist in simplicity rather than complexity?

"She's good at playing regular," says her Still Alice co-star Kristen Stewart. "But there's so many sides of her — there's nothing regular about her at all."

Turbulence is not unknown to her; she acknowledges that a peripatetic childhood left its share of instability, and she returns over and over to the theme of impermanence. She says she doesn't believe in God and has a strong sense that meaning is imposed on a chaotic world.

"I learned when my mother died five years ago that there is no 'there' there," she reflects. "Structure, it's all imposed. We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos."

When Moore, fresh out of Boston University, spent three years on the soap opera As the World Turns, she had her daily routine perfected: She'd get up at precisely the same time, down two cups of coffee in precisely the same way and take the same route to work. If that sounds like a person with a smattering of obsessive-compulsiveness, well, yes.

"I probably have a touch of it," she admits. "I like things to be clean. I can't think unless things are in a certain kind of order. I have to finish stuff. I need to get things done. I can't relax until I've done the work I know I need to do."

Well into her career, she felt adrift. Even though she had found work out of the gate as an actress, moving from As the World Turns to such movies as 1993's Short Cuts and 1994's Vanya on 42nd Street, she felt lost and without anchor.

An early marriage to actor-director John Gould Rubin had ended, and now, single, she turned to the therapist. "One of the things she said was that everybody always knows the answer," recalls Moore. "She said, 'We all know the answer.' And I think we all do, don't we?"

Within a few years, Moore had met her future partner and husband, director Bart Freundlich, on his movie The Myth of Fingerprints. Their children, Cal and Liv, are 17 and 12.

"We were shooting about a week before we became involved," says Moore. "It seemed unlikely that it would last when we met, but that was almost 19 years ago."

Though Freundlich, nearly a decade her junior ("Nine years!" she corrects with a laugh), has not seen his own career reach the heights of hers (he recently has directed episodes of Mozart in the Jungle and Californication), she says: "He's an extraordinary individual, and he's always made me feel good about myself and about my work, and I hope I make him feel good, too."

She was living in Los Angeles at the time they become involved, but chose to relocate to New York. "I wanted to leave the city after my first marriage broke up," she explains. "When our son was born in 1997, we decided to move back. Our families are on the East Coast." The two now live in Manhattan's West Village with their dogs (a black Lab, Cherry, and a Chihuahua mix, Milly).

Moore says her work has proved surprisingly accommodating. "When my kids were babies, they traveled all over the world with me and came to work with me every day, and it was never frowned upon. I am very fortunate in that I can afford to have child care, and I always hired someone who was young and very flexible — so that was always my 'entourage': my kids and my babysitter." She adds: "We're both available as parents, and we're a pretty great unit. And that's not to say it's all been a breeze, because it never is. There's always stuff."

Stewart laughs about visiting them at home, where "Bart was joking, 'I'll come and eat Indian food with you while the powerhouse is off doing her thing.' "

The powerhouse and the domestic goddess reign in tandem.

"One of my nicknames for myself is 'Bougie Julie,' " says Moore. "I'm as bourgeois as it gets. I like having order." But is that because an element of disorder lurks inside?

She pauses. "I have that duality in my personality," she admits.

An element of disorder hung over Moore's early life. She was born in Fort Bragg, N.C., but "we were only there six months or so because my father was in the 82nd Airborne Division," she says. "He was a helicopter pilot and a paratrooper. And so we moved a lot. We were in the [Panama] Canal Zone for a while, and then my dad was in Vietnam, and we went to New Jersey to live with my grandparents."

Though she was in kindergarten, Moore still remembers the anxiety that gripped her family during Vietnam. "You feel the fear through the adults," she says. "It's a very scary feeling."

The family's name was Smith, and Julianne then was just Julie. She had two siblings, a sister, Valerie (a year younger), and a brother, Peter (four years younger).

After Vietnam, their father left the Army and uprooted the family again, to Nebraska, where he attended law school. After Nebraska, the next stop was Alaska, where he worked as a lawyer in private practice in aviation law. He followed that with a stint in New York before going back in the Army as an attorney and later a military judge. "I went to nine different schools between the ages of 5 and 18," says Moore. That concluded in Germany, where she spent two years in her late teens before returning to the U.S. to attend college.

Moore stresses the positive side of these moves: They made her "mutable" and quick to adapt. "How you behave, how you act, is not necessarily who you are," she says.

She was devastated by her mother's death from septic shock in 2009 at age 68. "We don't know why it happened. She went to bed, and it turned out she had a huge bacterial infection." Recently, Moore took dual citizenship in honor of her mother, who was born in Scotland and moved to the U.S. at age 10. "Getting my [British] passport was a big deal," she says.

When Moore was in her teens, she discovered acting. She was a "nerd," not very good at sports and "not particularly popular," but she came alive onstage and was told by a teacher that she might consider acting professionally. The young girl was thrilled; her parents were not.

"They were worried and said, 'Well, you have to go to college,' " she recalls, "and so I applied to a few schools. My mother said it was too scary for me to live in New York, so I auditioned for Boston University and Carnegie Mellon and chose BU, arbitrarily."

There, she discovered the loneliness of life away from home, with no money to visit her family in Germany. At 22, she moved to New York and, after a few months as a waitress, found work in regional theater in Buffalo.

Now she had to change her name. "When I went to join SAG as Julie Smith, they were like, 'There's a Julie Smith, there's a Julie Anne Smith. You have to choose another name,' " she says. "My dad's name was Peter Moore Smith, and my mother's name was Anne Smith, and I used both their names so I wouldn't hurt anybody's feelings." In her mind, she remains Julie Smith. "I mean, everyone calls me Julie — everyone," she says.

She landed her first professional role in 1983, in regional theater, then got As the World Turnstwo years later and has barely stopped since. Even last year, along with Still Alice and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1, she could be seen in two indie releases (Non-Stop andSeventh Son) as well as Maps to the Stars, David Cronenberg's voyage through a dystopian Hollywood.

She gravitates to auteur directors like Cronenberg rather than more commercial Hollywood filmmakers, and says her longtime manager, Evelyn O'Neill, shares her tastes: "I have always been drawn to the work of writer-directors and have had so much luck with them because their stories are usually very personal and they have a strong vision and point of view."

Liberal politically, Moore developed a degree of human sympathy for Sarah Palin, whom she played in HBO's 2012 adaptation of the real-life political thriller Game Change, a role that won her an Emmy. As to Palin's response, "She was very scornful of it; she claims she never saw it, but we're virtually certain she did," says John Heilemann, co-author of Game Change

When writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland showed Moore the script for Still Alice, she fell in love.

"About a year before we started shooting in March, they said, 'We want to be in production by next September,' " says Moore, "and I was like, 'No way.' My whole business is independent film. Things fall apart."

They were even more complicated by Glatzer's ALS. "At New Year's, I was still driving," he says by email, referring to one year ago. "By April, I could no longer dress myself. My arms were shot, my legs starting to weaken." During the shoot, he communicated with Moore by using "one finger on an iPad."

"When I first spoke to him, he had difficulty speaking, but he still had his voice," says Moore. "But by the time we shot, his symptoms were pretty advanced. Initially I thought it would be daunting, but the force of his intellect and personality is so strong, it's easy."

Astonishingly, the filmmakers quickly found the money from French backers, and suddenly the movie was a go. But now there was another hitch: Moore was committed to the Hunger Gamesshoot and had to extricate herself in order to spend 3½ weeks filming Alice in New York.

Lionsgate proved supportive, and then Moore turned to The Judy Fund for help with research. "They set up Skype calls with women who've been diagnosed with 'younger onset,' which means under 65," says Moore. "The youngest, Sandy Oltz, was 45 when she was diagnosed."

At the same time, Moore went to meet with Dr. Mary Sano, the head of Alzheimer's research at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. "I took the memory test that a neuropsychiatrist gave me. You listen to a story. Then you put the story aside, and the doctor gives you a list of 30 words and immediately asks you to repeat the list. And then she'll say, 'How many animals can you name in a minute?' And then she goes back to, 'Now tell me about the story that you read.' "

Moore waited for the results with trepidation. "They told me my results were normal," she says.

She laughs, with the ease and, well, normality that have become her mark. "We'd all like [to hear that we're brilliant], but the medical world doesn't work like that. You're either normal or you're not."

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