Demi Moore Interview on "The Butcher's Wife" (October 22, 1991)
Demi Gene Moore[n 1] (/dəˈmiː/ də-MEE;[12] née Guynes; born November 11, 1962)[13] is an American actress. She made her film debut in 1981 and appeared on the soap opera General Hospital (1982–1983) before coming to prominence as a member of the Brat Pack with roles in Blame It on Rio (1984), St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and About Last Night... (1986).[14] While the lattermost made Moore a star, she established herself as a bankable performer with Ghost, the highest-grossing film of 1990. Her performance was praised and earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination.
She had further box-office success in the early 1990s, with the films A Few Good Men (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), and Disclosure (1994). In 1996, Moore became the highest-paid actress in film history when she received an unprecedented $12.5 million to star in Striptease.[15] The large-budget starring vehicles The Scarlet Letter (1995), The Juror (1996) and G.I. Jane (1997) were commercially unsuccessful and contributed to a downturn in her career.[16][17] She has since held sporadic leading roles in the arthouse dramas Passion of Mind (2000), Flawless (2008), and Blind (2017), as well as supporting roles in such films as Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Bobby (2006), Mr. Brooks (2007), and Margin Call (2011).[18] Moore's television work includes the Emmy Award-nominated cable anthology If These Walls Could Talk (1996) and the streaming series Brave New World (2020).
Moore has been married thrice, to the musician Freddy Moore and the actors Bruce Willis[22] and Ashton Kutcher. She has three daughters with Willis.
Early life
Childhood and family
Moore was born November 11, 1962, in Roswell, New Mexico. Her biological father, Air Force airman Charles Foster Harmon Sr.,[23] left her then 18-year-old mother, Virginia (née King),[24] after a two-month marriage before Moore was born.[25] Charles came from Lanett, Alabama, and Virginia was born in Richmond, California, but had grown up in Roswell.[26] Moore's maternal grandmother was raised on a farm in Elida, New Mexico.[26] Moore has deep roots in the South Central and Southern United States, particularly Oklahoma, Arkansas and Georgia. When Moore was three months old, her mother married Dan Guynes, a newspaper advertising salesman who frequently changed jobs; as a result, the family moved many times.[27] In 1967 they had Moore's half-brother Morgan.
Moore's stepfather Dan Guynes married and divorced Virginia twice.[30] On October 20, 1980, a year after their second divorce from each other, Guynes died by suicide.[25][31] Her biological father Harmon died in 1997 from liver cancer in Brazoria, Texas.[32][33] Moore's mother had a long arrest record which included drunk driving and arson.[34] Moore broke off contact with her in 1989, when Guynes walked away halfway through a rehab stay Moore had financed at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota.[2] Virginia Guynes posed nude for the magazine High Society in 1993,[35] where she spoofed Moore's Vanity Fair pregnancy and bodypaint covers and parodied her clay scene from Ghost. Moore and Guynes reconciled shortly before Guynes died of a brain tumor on July 2, 1998.[36]
Moore spent her early childhood in Roswell, and later, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.[37] Bob Gardner, a photographer for the Monongahela Daily Herald when Dan Guynes was head of advertising, recalled that Moore "looked malnourished and not so much abused as neglected. That haunting look as a child made me feel uneasy."[38] She suffered from strabismus, which was corrected by two operations, as well as kidney dysfunction.[27] Moore learned that Guynes was not her real father at age 13, when she discovered a marriage certificate and inquired about the circumstances since she "saw my parents were married in February 1963. I was born in '62."[25]
The Butcher's Wife is a 1991 American romantic comedy film, directed by Terry Hughes and starring Demi Moore and Jeff Daniels.
The film concerns a clairvoyant woman (Moore) thinks that she's met her future husband, whom she has seen in her dreams, and who is a butcher in New York City. They marry and move to the city, where her powers tend to influence everyone she meets while working in the shop. Through her advice, she helps others and eventually finds the true man of her dreams in a psychiatrist (Daniels).
The Butcher's Wife was a critical and commercial failure, grossing only $9 million at the box office. According to her 2019 memoir Inside Out, Moore regretted starring in the film, saying she only did it to increase her fee after the success of Ghost.
Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote "Too much of the film is spent matching up lovers who must almost literally get their stars uncrossed in order to find happiness. But a lot of it is enjoyably buoyant, even when it's several shades too broad."[3]
