If you went to the movies anytime from the late 1980s through the 1990s, you knew the voice and the face: Demi Moore could be the grieving artsy girl (Ghost), the recent college grad out for nothing but fun (St. Elmo’s Fire), the determined Navy SEAL-type candidate who outclassed her fellow inductees, and could do just as many one-arm pushups (G.I. Jane). Her winsome hazel-brown eyes had a melting quality—but you could see fire in them, too. Her voice, like a potent, salty teardrop, was more memorable than that of many of her peers. She had a fearless, take-charge quality; when she appeared nude and very pregnant on a 1991 Vanity Fair cover, everybody, around every office water-cooler, as quaint as that sounds today, talked about it. No one had ever showed off a pregnancy like that before, and the fact that she looked more movie-star radiant than church-madonna-pure made the image even more compelling. She was an actress made for the 1990s, for the grand rush of second-wave feminism, for the first decade in which red-carpet glamour became a thing people paid serious attention to, for a pre-Kardashian era when most celebrities were famous for actually doing something.
But if her movies made money—and she made money—no one would ever have put her in the same class as, say, Meryl Streep. She was fun to watch, she had guts, but she wasn’t serious. And then her era passed; she didn’t quite disappear from the movie screen, but almost—only to come roaring back in a feminist horror movie that, before its premiere in Cannes last spring, where it became one of the most talked-about competition films, no one could have seen coming. That’s how an actress sprints—or maybe power-walks, across a decade or two—from being a presence people are happy enough to pay money to see to being considered, at last, worthy of an Oscar.
In January, Moore won a Golden Globe for her turn in Coralie Fargeat’s horror grossout The Substance. On Feb. 23, she won a SAG award;…
