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Demi Kutcher (born Demetria Gene Guynes on November 11, 1962) is an American actress. For most of her career, she has been known as Demi Moore, using the surname of her first husband, singer-songwriter Freddy Moore. (She pronounces her name "dem-EE," with the emphasis on the second syllable, just like it sounds in "Demetria"; many folks incorrectly pronounce it "DEM-ee," with the emphasis on the first syllable.) She became well-known after a string of 1980s teen-oriented movies, and was one of the best known actresses of 1990s Hollywood. Moore is also known for her husky voice. She is currently married to actor Ashton Kutcher. Once a pretty, sultry teenage model with a slightly subdued, aloof quality, Moore evolved into one of the top female screen stars of the 1990s. She began as a regular on ABC's staple of daytime drama, "General Hospital"; her husky voice and hushed line delivery seemed to lend itself well to the tense plots. Moore soon segued to features, making her debut in "Choices" (1981). She went on to appear in Charles Band's "Parasite" (1982) and Garry Marshall's "Young Doctors in Love" (1982). In 1984 she became a Hollywood mainstay, playing Michael Caine's vulnerable young daughter in "Blame It on Rio" and a callous model in "No Small Affair". Moore joined the female contingent of the "brat-pack", co-starring in "St. Elmo's Fire" (1985) and "Wisdom" (1986), a road movie directed by her then-fiancé Emilio Estevez. Moore was born Demetria Gene Guynes in Roswell, New Mexico, and spent much of her childhood years in Perryopolis, Pennsylvania, a small town south of Pittsburgh. As a child, she had a difficult and unstable home life. Her biological father, Charles Harmon, left her mother, Virginia King (27 November 1943 – 2 July 1998), after a two-month marriage, before Moore was born. As a result, Moore had the surname of her stepfather, Danny Guynes (9 March 1943 – October 1980), on her birth certificate. Danny Guynes, who committed suicide in 1980, frequently changed jobs; as a result the family moved a total of forty times. Moore's parents were also alcoholics and often fought and beat each other. Moore was cross-eyed as a child, and wore an eye patch in an attempt to correct the problem until it was eventually corrected by two surgeries. During this time, she also suffered from kidney dysfunction. Moore's family settled in Los Angeles in 1976. When Moore was sixteen, her friend, actress Nastassja Kinski, persuaded her to drop out of Hollywood's Fairfax High School, where her schoolmates included Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis and actor Timothy Hutton, to become an actress. In 1979, she met and married her first husband, songwriter Freddy Moore. Though they divorced in 1985, she kept the last name Moore. Moore graduated to adult roles as the prophecy-bearing mother in "The Seventh Sign" (1988), a foul-talking hooker in Neil Jordan's misfire "We're No Angels" (1989) and the mourning, teary-eyed lover in the surprise hit "Ghost" (1990). She gave one of her better performances and moved into production when she co-produced Alan Rudolph's intriguing "Mortal Thoughts" (1991). The extremely popular "A Few Good Men" (1992) kept her in the public eye but the military courtroom proceedings largely kept her sidelined dramatically as the more prominent male characters occupied center stage. Moore shed more tears as Woody Harrelson's wife who sleeps with Robert Redford for a million dollars in Adrian Lyne's popular "Indecent Proposal" (1993). In Barry Levinson's thriller "Disclosure" (1994), she received a chance to shed her "nice girl" image, playing a ruthless corporate executive who becomes the target of a sexual harassment suit lodged by a disappointed employee and former lover, played by Michael Douglas. While many reviewers slammed the film for its skittish treatment of the issue, its implausibility and irrelevance to real world concerns, Moore received some favorable notices for her icy turn. After quitting school, Moore went to work as a pin-up girl, modelled for European photographers, and worked at a collection agency. In the early 1980s, Moore posed for a series of photographs featuring full frontal nudity. These photos went unnoticed until after she became a star, and were eventually published in a German magazine and later in North America. Moore's film debut was in the 1982 3-D science fiction/horror film, Parasite, which was a hit on the drive-in circuit, ultimately grossing $7 million. However, Moore was not widely known until she played the part of Jackie Templeton on the ABC soap opera, General Hospital, from 1982-1983. Appropriately, she also had an uncredited cameo at the end of the 1982 spoof Young Doctors in Love. In the mid-1980s, she appeared in the youth-oriented films St. Elmo's Fire and About Last Night, and she was often listed as one of the Brat Pack, a name the media dubbed a certain group of top young actors at the time. For a time during the 1990s, Moore was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. She had a string of box-office successes, including Ghost, A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal, Disclosure and The Hunchback of Notre Dame for which she was the first actress to reach the $10 million salary mark. Among other films for which Moore was considered were Basic Instinct, Flashdance and While You Were Sleeping. Moore's reputation suffered in the mid 1990s when her starring vehicles The Scarlet Letter, The Juror, Striptease, and G.I. Jane (a movie in which Moore shaved off all her long hair on camera, leaving her head totally bald) failed at the box office and garnered mixed reviews. After a string of financial disappointments, Moore bounced back with "G.I. Jane" (1997), in which she played a female recruit training for the Navy SEALs. Receiving wildly mixed reviews, the film placed Number One at the box office. Perhaps signaling an upswing in her career, Moore also had a featured role as a psychiatrist in Woody Allen's "Deconstructing Harry" (1997) and then disappeared from movie screens for a lengthy stretch, retreating to Idaho to raise her daughters and appearing only in the public eye during media coverage of her 1998 split with Bruce Willis. Dipping her toes back into Hollywood waters in 2000, Moore took the lead role in the well-received but little-seen fantasy thriller "Passion of Mind," in which she played a woman living two entirely different lives—a widowed Rhode Island mom and a fast-track Manhattan literary agent--in two separate timelines, each dreaming about the other and neither knowing which life is actually the real one. Meanwhile, Moore's Passion of Mind co-star Joss Ackland lambasted Moore by describing her as being "not very bright or talented". Moore made her debut in a costume epic as adulteress Hester Prynne in the misconceived and unpopular adaptation of Hawthorne's classic "The Scarlet Letter" (1995) opposite Gary Oldman and then segued to more contemporary times in "Now and Then" (1995), a drama she also co-produced focusing on childhood friendships. She followed with the title role of "The Juror" (1996) as a single mother pressured to influence a jury by a gangster (Alec Baldwin). Moore could also be heard as the voice of Esmerelda in Disney's animated version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (also 1996). She solidified her stature in Hollywood with a reported $12.5 million salary to play a single mother who turns to exotic dancing in "Striptease" (also 1996), making her the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. At the same time she produced and starred in a TV mini-series called If These Walls Could Talk, written by Nancy Savoca. A three-part series on abortion, Savoca directed two segments, including the one in which Moore gave a stunning performance as a single woman in the 1950s seeking a back-street abortion. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress for that role. Demi Moore was a founding "celebrity investor" in the Planet Hollywood chain of international theme restaurants (modeled after the Hard Rock Cafe and launched in New York on October 22, 1991) along with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and then-husband Bruce Willis. Moore returned to onscreen vitality in an attempt to remake herself into a serious actress with a strong performance in “Bobby” (2006), former hubby-to-be Emilio Estevez’s engaging look at the 16 hours prior to Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as seen through the eyes of several guests and employees. She played aging lounge singer and raging alcoholic, Virginia Fallon, a role Moore was at first was reluctant to take because of the similarities to her mother, Virginia, who had a long, losing battle with booze. Starring opposite heavyweights Anthony Hopkins, William H. Macy and Helen Hunt, Moore held her own—and even stole a few scenes—with her mature and emotionally charged performance. After a nine-minute standing ovation at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, critical kudos were heaped upon the film and talk of an Oscar nod for Moore circulated. Moore continued her comeback with starring roles in “Mr. Brooks” (2007), a thriller where she played a detective investigating a serial killer (Kevin Costner), and “Flawless” (lensed 2006), where she played an executive at a London-based diamond firm who teams up with an almost-retired janitor (Michael Caine) in a plot to steal from their employers. After a break from her acting career, Moore returned to the screen as a former member of Charlie's Angels gone bad in the 2003 film Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. In 2006, she appeared in Bobby which featured an all-star cast including her husband Ashton Kutcher although they did not appear in any scenes together. On June 1, 2007, her most recent film, Mr. Brooks, was released. She appeared in Jon Bon Jovi's longform video "Destination Anywhere" as Janie. In August 1991, Moore appeared nude on the cover of Vanity Fair under the title More Demi Moore. Annie Leibovitz shot the picture while Moore was seven months pregnant with her daughter Scout LaRue, intending to portray "anti-Hollywood, anti-glitz" attitude. The cover sparked an intense controversy for Vanity Fair and Demi Moore, it was widely discussed on television, radio, and in newspaper articles. Some retailers pulled the issue from newsstands, while others only sold it in a brown paper bag. The frankness of Leibovitz' portrayal of a pregnant sex symbol led to divided opinions, ranging from complaints of sexual objectification to celebrations of the photograph as a symbol of empowerment. The photograph was subject to numerous parodies, including the Spy magazine version, which placed Moore's then husband Bruce Willis' head on her body. In Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corp., Leibovitz sued over one parody featuring Leslie Nielsen, made to promote the 1994 film Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult. In the parody, the model's body was attached to what is described as "the guilty and smirking face of Mr. Nielsen appeared above". The teaser said "Due this March". The case was dismissed in 1996 because the parody relied "for its comic effect on the contrast between the original". Moore would in August 1992 again become an artistic subject on the cover of Vanity Fair for the world's leading body painting artist, Joanne Gair in Demi's Birthday Suit. Moore's relationship with her mother Virginia King Guynes was rocky at the best of times, stemming from Moore's unhappy and difficult childhood. Mother and daughter both became alcoholics. Guynes would later talk of times when the pair shared a Hollywood flat together in 1980, where Rob Lowe, Sean Penn and Charlie Sheen would regularly come round for drinks. That era ended with Moore and Guynes checking into a drug-and-alcohol-recovery program, from which Moore emerged clean. Guynes' recovery efforts failed and at Moore's 1987 marriage to Willis, she fell off the wagon with a champagne and vodka binge. The next day, she was picked up for drunk driving and Willis and Moore refused to bail her out. In 1989, Guynes overdosed on pills and was again arrested for drunk driving. In 1990, Demi footed the bill for Guynes' eight month stay in rehab, but cut her off when Guynes sold the story of her recovery and tumultuous relationship with her daughter. Guynes embarrassed her daughter twice with pictorials in adult magazines, including her 1993 12-page spread in porn magazine High Society (after being turned down by Playboy). She posed in front of a potter's wheel, parodying Moore's sex scene with Patrick Swayze in Ghost, her translucent white panties glistening with wet clay. As well as the shoot, Guynes also alleged that her daughter's marriage to Willis was "in trouble" and that Moore called the shots. "The more famous she becomes", said Guynes, "the more bossy she becomes". She also posed in photos spoofing Moore's controversial Vanity Fair pregnancy and body paint covers and said "I don't want to hurt her. This is my story, my life." In 1993, at the premiere of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story Moore introduced her companion, Pattsy Rugg as her mother. Rugg was actually the star's Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, but Moore seemingly preferred her to play the maternal role than her mother. "It's just so stupid that Demi would say anything like that", Guynes later said, but added, "Demi's a pretty strange child. She's angry with me. This is what she does when she gets angry. What she will do is find the single most hurtful thing and do it." In 1994 Guynes pleaded no contest to a charge of setting fire to the home of a bartender who caught her swiping drinks. She was fined and ordered to go to rehab. Guynes, it seemed, was dying to be a star. Some even went as far as to say that she was trying to get back at her daughter for leaving her behind. In November 1995, a tabloid tracked her down at her then-home, a rat-infested shack in Las Vegas with a beaten-up '88 Honda Prelude (a one-time brand-new birthday present from Moore and Willis) parked out front. She was surviving on $250 a month from social security and $85 a month in food-stamps. In 1996, she was located in New Mexico, where she died two years later in 1998 at the age of fifty-four from a brain tumor. Moore later spoke of how her character in the Emilio Estevez drama Bobby made her draw on her own perception of Guynes. Her character called Virginia, like her mother, was an alcoholic. "The fact that she was called Virginia grounded the part in something that was familiar," explained Moore. "And, although there were aspects of it that were painful, it was actually very liberating for me. Emilio knew my mother and she was a pained soul. But it was a great gift being able to go to the depths of the soul that lives underneath the pain of this character." She added, "I had an unusual childhood". "I had a very young mother," Moore says. "But I know she tried to do the best she could and that in the mix of it all - and she was nutty, trust me - she really loved me. It wasn't always the kind of love I wanted but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't what I needed." Moore married singer Freddy Moore in 1980 before she was eighteen. They divorced in 1985 and in 1987 Moore met then Moonlighting star Bruce Willis. The two soon fell in love and married two months later. The star couple had three daughters together: Rumer Willis (b. 1988), Scout LaRue Willis (b. 1991) and Tallulah Belle Willis (b. 1994). The pair separated in 1998 and divorced in 2000. In 2003, Moore started dating actor Ashton Kutcher, fifteen years her junior. After much press speculation and interest, the pair married in 2005. Moore's primary residence is in Hailey, Idaho, near the famous Sun Valley resort, although she spends much time in the Los Angeles area with Kutcher. She is a practicing follower of the Rabbi Philip Berg's trendy Kabbalah Centre religion, and initiated Kutcher into the faith, having said that she "didn’t grow up Jewish, but... would say that she has been more exposed to the deeper meanings of particular rituals than any of her friends ever did". Contrary to popular belief, Moore claims she has never been a raw foodist and dispels the vegan rumors by eating a hamburger in a recent Mario Testino photoshoot. Moore legally changed her last name to Kutcher two years after marrying husband Ashton Kutcher. However, she will continue to use Moore in her professional life and her acting roles. According to the New York Times, she is "the world's most high-profile doll collector", and among her favorites is the Gene Marshall fashion doll. |
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