Art imitates life for Julianne Moore in a scene from her new film, Spirit Untamed.
In the animated epic, her character urges her niece to embrace the spirit of her dead mother to achieve her goals in life – and it is advice the actress herself is heeding.
Julianne learnt at the knee of her Scots-born mother, Anne Love Smith, the importance of female equality and never taking it for granted.
Anne also instilled in Julianne and her younger sister and brother, Valerie and Peter, a deep connection with their Celtic roots.
Julianne, 60, even took up British citizenship in 2011 to honour her mother after her death.
Anne, born in Greenock, always made Julianne aware of her heritage.
The actress says: “There are a lot of us in America who are first-generation Americans, and I’ve noticed that a lot of us talk a lot about assimilation – about people coming here and immediately becoming American.
“But that was not my experience. My mother used to tell me all the time that we were not 100% American.
“My grandparents were very Scottish. My siblings and I all had
kilts and we grew up with a very strong identity of being part Scottish.”
Julianne even wrote a book about national identity called My Mom Is A Foreigner But Not To Me, based on her own memories.
She says: “I wanted to write this book as a tribute to my mother and to all the other foreign mothers, as well as to the kids growing up in a situation where the person who seems very foreign to the rest of the world is the most familiar person in the world to them.”
This awareness of a strong cultural identity is uppermost in Julianne’s mind when she meets new people.
“I can always recognise someone who is first-generation American by the little things they do,” she says.
“For instance, when my daughter was little, I fixed her hair in two braids because that’s how my own mother did my hair.
“But when she went to school there was only one other girl in her class who wore her hair that way, and that little girl’s mother was from Spain – but for fully American little girls, their mothers didn’t do that.”
Anne, a psychologist and social worker, moved to the US in 1951.
Julianne was born on an army base in North Carolina. Her father, Peter Moore Smith, was a paratrooper during the Vietnam War.
He attained the rank of colonel and later became a military judge. His job meant the family moved all over the US including Alabama, Georgia and Texas. Julianne attended nine different schools and found it difficult to make friends.
But she says her itinerant childhood has made her a better actress: “When you move around a lot, you learn that behaviour is mutable. I would change, depending on where I was. It teaches you to watch, to
reinvent, that character can change.”
When she was 16, the family moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where Julianne attended an American high school.
She intended to study medicine while enjoying amateur dramatics in her spare time. But soon drama took centre stage and she switched to theatre studies then moved to New York.
There she worked as a waitress until she got her big break in 1986, with a role in a long-running American soap, As the World Turns. A series of film roles followed, including in Boogie Nights, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Jurassic Park and The Hunger Games, along with an Oscar, two Golden Globes, a BAFTA, and two Emmys.
Julianne has also established a career as a children’s author and her first book, Freckleface Strawberry, became a New York Times bestseller.
Her two children with director husband Bart Freundlich have recently graduated – Liv, 19, from high school in New York and Caleb, 23, from Davidson College in North Carolina.
Julianne has raised them to stand on their own two feet. She says: “As far as college went, I kept saying to both my son and my daughter, ‘This is about you now’.
“As parents, you just try to stay in the background as a support.”
And that included giving regular talks on equal rights at her daughter’s school. Like her Scottish roots, her feminism comes from her mother.
“She didn’t have the advantages growing up that I had,” Julianne says.
“She would point out all the things that had changed in my lifetime – that birth control was available, that I could have a credit card in my own name, that she and my father were saving money for me to go to college.
“Sometimes we don’t learn things until we’re really ready to hear them.
“But my mother was the one who said to me, ‘We’ve gained all these advantages for women, and you’re living them’. And she was right!”
- Spirit Untamed, in cinemas now
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