Actress, producer. Born Demetria Gene Guynes, on November 11, 1962, in Roswell, New Mexico. Raised in a poor family that was constantly on the move, Demi never knew her real father, whom her mother, Virginia, left months before Demi was born; she instead grew up believing that her stepfather, Danny Guynes, was her biological dad. As a teenager, she was shocked to learn the truth about Danny Guynes, and was also faced with the tragedy of his suicide several years later. The family was living in West Hollywood in 1978, when Demi dropped out of school at age 16 to pursue a modeling career. In 1981, she married Freddy Moore, a rock musician. Their marriage lasted only two years, but in that time Demi Moore launched her acting career, beating out a thousand other hopefuls to win a role on the daytime soap opera General Hospital in 1982. She made several forgettable films (including 1982’s Parasite) during her tenure on the popular soap but left the show when she won a supporting role in Blame it on Rio (1984), starring Michael Caine. By the time Moore got her first major film role in 1984, as a vivacious young cocaine addict in St. Elmo’s Fire, she herself was battling a serious drug addiction. The film’s director, Joel Schumacher, threatened to fire her if she didn’t clean up her act, and Moore quit using drugs during the filming. When St. Elmo’s Fire was released, it became one of the quintessential movies of the eighties, and its attractive young cast—including Moore, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, and Ally Sheedy—became known as the “Brat Pack.” Moore starred in a few other, less successful movies during the next several years, including About Last Night… (1986), Wisdom (1986), and We’re No Angels (1989), starring Robert De Niro and Sean Penn.

Moore’s three-year relationship and on-again, off-again engagement with Estevez, begun during the filming of St. Elmo’s Fire, ended in 1987. Shortly thereafter, Moore met actor Bruce Willis, then the charming star of TV’s Moonlighting. After a whirlwind three-month courtship, Moore and Willis were married in November 1987.

Less than three years later, both Moore and Willis had made the leap to A-list Hollywood stardom—Willis with his role as the wisecracking cop in the blockbuster action film Die Hard (1988) and Moore with the smashing success of Ghost (1990), a weepy supernatural romantic drama costarring Patrick Swayze and Whoopi Goldberg.