Actress. Born Julie Anne Smith, on December 3, 1960, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her family moved around a great deal to accommodate her father’s career as a military judge, living in South America, Germany, Paris, and Alaska, among other places. Moore (she took her father’s middle name as her surname in order to distinguish herself when she registered at Actor’s Equity) studied acting at Boston University’s School of the Performing Arts, earning her BFA in 1983. She moved to New York City and began acting off-Broadway and on television, eventually landing a part on the daytime soap opera As the World Turns, from 1985 to 1988. For her dual performance as half-sisters, Moore won a daytime Emmy Award in 1988 as Outstanding Ingenue.
After a number of appearances in TV movies (including the 1987 miniseries I’ll Take Manhattan, co-starring Valerie Bertinelli, and 1989’s Money, Power, Murder) and a debut feature role in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), Moore gained notice as the sleek and suspicious real estate agent who meets a gruesome end in the 1992 thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. In 1993, she won praise for small roles in the Harrison Ford-Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster The Fugitive and Benny and Joon and appeared with Madonna and Willem Dafoe in the poorly received Body of Evidence. That same year, she turned in a much-talked about performance as an adulterous wife in the ensemble film Short Cuts, directed by Robert Altman, in which she delivers an entire angry monologue naked from the waist down. In addition to her budding film career, Moore continued her work in theater, appearing with Al Pacino in a 1993 workshop production of The Father. After appearing onstage in director Andre Gregory’s production of the Anton Chekhov play Uncle Vanya in the early 1990s, Moore reprised her role in Gregory’s acclaimed film version, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), co-starring Wallace Shawn. In 1995, she landed her first starring role in a film, as the emotionally disintegrating housewife in writer-director Todd Haynes’ disturbing Safe. In addition to that critically lauded performance, Moore appeared alongside Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas in the big-budget action film Assassins and with Hugh Grant in the comedy Nine Months, both of which had only mediocre success.