From Striptease to Oscar favorite: Demi Moore caps Hollywood comeback with Academy Award nomination
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Moore, once the highest paid actress in the world, is earning the best reviews of her career thanks to ‘The Substance’. “Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress,’” Moore recalled when she accepted a Golden Globe, the first major honor of her career, earlier this month. “And at that time, I made that mean that this wasn’t something that I was allowed to have. That I could do movies that were successful that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged. And I bought in and I believed that.”.
Moore, who grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, was catapulted to fame first as a soap star on General Hospital in 1982 and then in a string of films alongside the 1980s “Brat Pack,” including St Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night..., opposite Rob Lowe. By 1990 she had established herself as one of the most bankable stars in the movie business thanks to her role in supernatural romance Ghost, the highest-grossing film of the year. Her hot streak continued with A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal and Disclosure, and in 1996 she became the highest-paid actress in film history when she received an unprecedented $12.5 million paycheck to star in the crime comedy Striptease.
For all her success, she was haunted by the “popcorn actress” tag that, as she said at the Globes, “corroded me over time.” She was a pop culture phenomenon, married to fellow box office star Bruce Willis and appearing on a much-discussed cover of Vanity Fair in 1991 while nude and seven months pregnant, but she had come to believe she’d never be truly accepted or venerated for her craft. By the end of the decade, her star already seemed to be waning, with films like The Scarlet Letter and GI Jane underperforming with audiences and critics alike.
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