Julianne Moore - Early Life

Early Life

Moore was born Julie Anne Smith on December 3, 1960, at the Fort Bragg army base in North Carolina. Her father, Peter Moore Smith, was a paratrooper in the American army, and later a colonel and military judge. Her mother, Anne McNeil McLean (née Love), was a psychiatrist and social worker who emigrated from Scotland to the United States as a child. Moore has a younger sister, Valerie, and a younger brother, novelist Peter Moore Smith III. She is a dual citizen of Britain and America, by way of her Scottish ancestry. Moore applied for British citizenship in 2011 to honor her deceased mother ("it would have meant the world to her").

Moore frequently moved around the country as a child, due to her father's profession. She was close to 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. Moving regularly made her an insecure child, and she struggled to establish friendships, but Moore has remarked that an itinerant lifestyle was beneficial to her future career: "What you learn from moving through different cultures is that behavior changes, but people are essentially the same, so you learn—how do I behave here, what do I do, what are the rules, how do people dress, how do people talk?"

When Moore was 16, the family moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where she attended Frankfurt American High School. She was an avid reader, and it was this hobby that led her to begin acting at the school—"it was an extension of reading", she has said. She appeared in several plays, including Tartuffe and Medea, and upon the encouragement of her English teacher she chose to pursue a theatrical career. Moore's parents supported her decision, but asked that she train at university "so that if it didn't work out, I'd have a college degree, I'd have a rescue plan." She was accepted to Boston University, and graduated with a BFA in Theatre in 1983.