Julianne Moore

Moore was born Julie Anne Smith on December 3, 1960, at the Fort Bragg army installation in North Carolina. Her father, Peter Moore Smith, a paratrooper in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, attained the rank of colonel and became a military judge. Her mother, Anne (née Love 1940–2009), was a British psychologist and social worker from Greenock, Scotland, who had migrated with her family to the United States in 1951. Moore has a younger sister, Valerie Smith, and a younger brother, the novelist Peter Moore Smith. Having a Scottish mother, Moore claimed British citizenship in 2011 in honor of her. Because of her father's occupation, Moore frequently moved around the United States as a child. She was close with her family as a result, but says she never had the feeling of coming from one particular place. The family lived in multiple locations, including Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Panama, Nebraska, Alaska, New York, and Virginia, and Moore attended nine different schools. The constant relocating made her an insecure child, and she struggled to establish friendships. In spite of these difficulties, Moore later remarked that an itinerant lifestyle was beneficial to her future career: "When you move around a lot, you learn that behavior is mutable. I would change, depending on where I was ... It teaches you to watch, to reinvent, that character can change." When Moore was 16, the family moved from Falls Church, Virginia, where Moore was attending J.E.B. Stuart High School, to Frankfurt, West Germany, where she attended Frankfurt American High School. She was clever and studious, a self-proclaimed "good girl", and she planned to become a doctor. She had never considered performing, or even attended the theater, but she was an avid reader and it was this hobby that led her to begin acting at the school. Moore appeared in several plays, including Tartuffe and Medea, and with the encouragement of her English teacher, she chose to pursue a theatrical career. Her parents supported her decision, but asked that she train at university to provide the added security of a college degree. She was accepted into Boston University and graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre.