Demi Moore is a Hollywood survivor who has more than earned an Oscar | Canada Voices

“Thirty years ago I had a producer tell me I was a popcorn actress… and I made that mean this was something I wasn’t allowed to have,” Demi Moore said, with a vulnerable catch in her voice, when she won her Golden Globe earlier this year – and if you think an awards speech can’t have lasting repercussions, you are not from Hollywood.

Every actor in that room related to her – their raw vulnerabilities are the reason they are able to do what they do – and I am certain that on the strength of that speech, Oscar voters who hadn’t seen Moore’s film The Substance went home and dug out their screeners. They subsequently nominated not only Moore for Best Actress, but also Coralie Fargeat for director (only the ninth woman in history to make that category), as well as original screenplay, makeup & hairstyling and Best Picture. I’m betting Moore will win.

Any acting Oscar is a combination of role, timing and backstory, and Moore simply has the best story: the rags-to-riches American dream, re-dressed in the language of wellness. It began in Roswell, N.M., when her 18-year-old mother, Virginia Guynes, was abandoned by the man who impregnated her. Virginia named her baby girl after a beauty product she saw in a magazine; later she would be arrested for drunk driving and arson, and when Moore was famous, do parody versions of her photos and films. (They would reconcile just before Virginia’s death.) Moore’s stepfather, Danny Guynes, who married and divorced Virginia twice, struggled with alcohol and uprooted the family umpteen times, prompting Moore to have, she has said, “an essence in my life that I was nothing.”

After Virginia’s second divorce from Guynes, Moore moved with her mother to a West Hollywood apartment, where she, age 15, was raped by her landlord. At 16 she dropped out of Fairfax High; she tried and quit acting classes, too. But at 18 she landed on General Hospital, and she just kept plugging, through a booze-and-drugs era, three divorces (from singer Freddy Moore and actors Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher), and a mountain of sniping. (Go back and read Nancy Collins’s Vanity Fair article from 1991, the one with the famous Annie Leibovitz photo of Moore, nude and pregnant, on the cover. It is so casually demeaning, it will take your breath away.)

Smash-cut to Moore having the last laugh, because now she lives in a stunning modern aerie in the hills of Beverly, all massive windows and horizontal beams of stained natural wood, surrounded by greenery both landscaped and wild. In the documentary Brats, she leads a self-doubting Andrew McCarthy past stunning rooms, then sits him down by the pool and cures him with her Yoda-like wisdom. Her three children seem to like as well as love her, she’s been a rock throughout Willis’s frontotemporal dementia, and her fitness/diet/plastic surgery combo is the envy of her industry.

Not to mention that, collectively, 21 of her films have grossed US$1.65-billion. Which is why every actor in that Golden Globes audience nodded empathically when she said that she could be in movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but she couldn’t be acknowledged. Such a quiet but pointed reminder that actors also make other people rich.

Though the camera could always see into her, Moore was never a cerebral actress like Cate Blanchett or a true America’s sweetheart like Julia Roberts; she led with her body, and was therefore easily dismissed. She posed naked for Vanity Fair, she shaved her head for G.I. Jane, she had that husky bedroom voice. She bared her breasts for Striptease, commanding US$12.5 million for it – which made her the highest-paid actress in history at the time, and earned her the snarky nickname Gimme Moore. At 40, she rocked a tiny black bikini for Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. (“I begged them not to shoot my butt,” she demurred on Drew Barrymore’s talk show.) Even the enormous success of Ghost can be boiled down to a physical gesture: that moment where Moore lifts her chin and a single tear slides down her cheek.

And now, in her early 60s, her body – what it used to be, what she’s willed it to be, still – is the star of The Substance. She plays Elisabeth Sparkle, who’s fired from her long-running TV-host gig after she makes the woeful mistake of turning 50. Desperate, she seeks out and ingests the mysterious potion of the title, which creates a younger, “better” version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley). The two share a consciousness and are supposed to split their time living in public, but things go bloodily awry. Along the way, Moore does two things that most actors would consider brave: She stares at her reflection long enough to let pain and self-loathing show; and she permits the camera to linger on her bare backside. It looks fantastic, shapely and fit – until it’s replaced by a shot of Qualley’s 29-year-old version. My audience gasped.

So here’s the part of Moore’s speech that will seal her win: “In those moments,” she said, “when we don’t think we’re smart enough, we’re pretty enough, we’re skinny enough, we’re successful enough or basically just not enough, I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’ And so today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me.”

If you don’t speak Hollywood, your head may explode trying to parse those sentences, and to reconcile her words with her visuals. Because it seems awfully contradictory: A woman with a studiously unlined face, a thinner, cheek-bonier face than the one she had in Ghost, with lustrous ingenue hair and a rigorously maintained body, collarbones in full relief, who’s clearly lived by and succeeded via the measuring stick, up there testifying to her wholeness.

But if you do speak Hollywood, what you see is a survivor, someone who did the hard work she had to do to get there and stay there. And if that means multiple facelifts and never not being on a diet, if it means spending half your life in the gym and the other half at the salon, if it means tugging on the Spanx and injecting yourself with a semaglutide and pouring yourself into a dress that is part Oscar statuette, part armour – just to be considered “worthy” of vying for your next job – then, by god, good for her, I hope it does somehow add up to feeling like wholeness. If she wins the Oscar on March 2, the entire room will rise to meet her.

Special to The Globe and Mail

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