When the Oscar nominations are announced in Los Angeles on Tuesday, only one actor stands a realistic chance of receiving multiple nominations. Even in an unusually unpredictable year Julianne Moore appears a certainty to figure on the Best Actress shortlist for her hypnotic, emotionally wrenching performance in Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair.
And she is very likely to make it a double by being nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category for her portrayal of a troubled woman struggling to deal with the imminent death of her husband, a much older man played by Jason Robards, in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia.
The well-earned international recognition and respect Julianne Moore is finally receiving is long overdue, but talking to the actor on her visit to Dublin last week, it's clear that she is wholly philosophical about the way her career has progressed, regardless of perceptions of how protracted that progress might seem. Slowly, patiently, she has worked her way up through one of the most precarious and competitive of professions over the past 20 years, taking any work that came her way - and unusually for many actors when they make it, making no attempt whatsoever to airbrush less flattering credits from her resume. She has paid her dues and she's proud of the fact, declaring she has no regrets.
Tenacity is an essential requirement for an actor, she said at her Dublin hotel on the morning after the Irish premiere of The End of the Affair. "I remember when I was first in acting school and some of the kids there had done summer programmes in drama and had already worked in the theatre," she says. "I came straight there from high school and I had done nothing. People were always talking about the attrition involved and how hard it was for young actors.
"As an actor you have to have an extreme amount of sensitivity and hardheadedness. I'd say to young actors now if they want to know how they are going to achieve anything: If you really stick it out and you really work hard, chances are you'll do OK. You need to concentrate and focus. I worked on everything. I spent my 20s doing soap operas and off-off-Broadway and movies of the week on television - doing whatever came along because it's all experience and it's all worth it."
Now 38, she was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and raised "all over America", wherever her father's work as a military judge took the family, and when she was in her teens he was stationed with the US troops in Germany. "So I went to high school in Frankfurt," she says. "It was a great time to be 16 and to be in Europe."
After graduating from Boston University in performing arts, she went to New York and landed a dual role in As the World Turns, the long-running daytime TV soap which also helped launch the careers of Meg Ryan and Marisa Tomei. "Quite a few people started out on that show," she says. "I played twins in it, one English and one American. One looked like me and for the other I wore a dark wig and dark contact lenses. It was good experience. It's such hard work, you know. They were long days, shooting from seven in the morning until seven or eight at night, every day, and if you're what they call front-burner, you could have up to 20 or 30 pages of dialogue every day."
Did her characters meet a horrible demise when she finally left the soap after three years? "No," she says, "but I was replaced by two actresses, which was quite flattering. I went on to do a lot of off-off-Broadway theatre and a whole lot of regional theatre, and quite a few TV movies." She was about to turn 30 when she landed her first significant film role in 1992, playing the unfortunate friend of the Annabella Sciorra character in Curtis Hanson's slick nanny-from-Hell picture, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.
So prolific was Julianne Moore's output over the next eight years that a recent survey of the busiest screen actors of the 1990s ranked her in joint 11th place with Robert De Niro, each with 24 movies to their credit during the decade, both trailing chart-topper Samuel L. Jackson, who clocked up 36 films.
Moore moved with ease between the most mainstream commercial movies and the most exciting independent productions - from the light comedy of Nine Months with Hugh Grant, the rudimentary action of Assassins with Sylvester Stallone, and the high-tech, effects-driven adventure of The Lost World to shining in Robert Altman's brilliant, multi-charactered Short Cuts, movingly playing the longsuffering Yelena in Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street and unforgettably capturing the searing pain of a middle-class woman's breakdown in Todd Haynes's Safe.
"I lost 10 lbs for Safe, which may not seem very much, but I'm not a very big person," she says. "It was extreme, and I'll never do it again. I wanted her to look like she was really ill. But I was terribly sick as a result." Working on Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World, could hardly be more different. "Although it was very demanding physically, too, with all that running through the jungle and splashing through rivers," she says. "It was much more interesting than I expected. You learn something about the shape of a thriller or an adventure movie. I think it's all worth doing. I really do."
Spielberg cast her, having noted her years earlier in the movie of The Fugitive. "That was hysterical, because I know Steven really well now. But back then he hadn't seen Vanya. He hadn't seen Safe. None of the films I had done except The Fugitive. I had this role as the doctor in the hospital who stops Harrison Ford. Basically, I just say, `Hey, you, come back'. And that's what Steven saw and he remembered me from that when he was casting The Lost World."
She insists that she will continue to straddle the mainstream and the indie sectors, unlike many established actors who only feel comfortable with custom-made, big-budget star vehicles. "I don't know why they don't do other things," she says. "People say their agent won't let them do it. But whenever you hear actors saying that and blaming someone else, they're lying! Because it's your life, it's your career, you can do whatever you want. "I remember when I did my boyfriend's film, The Myth of Fingerprints. I get a lot of scripts but when I picked up that script I loved it. It was beautiful, so articulate and deeply felt, and I really wanted to do it. I was told it was such a small film and I didn't really need to do it. But I decided to do it. I basically do what I like if something moves me. And, of course, it changed my life because that's how I met Brad and we've been together ever since."
She and that film's director, Brad Freundlich, have a two-year-old son, Cal. "Oh, yes, that's the ultimate, the most transforming thing a person can experience," she says. "It's great. I have a different sense of the world now. And I really miss my son, having been away from him for five days."
When she was in London two years ago, playing the scheming Mrs Cheveley with relish in the Oscar Wilde adaptation, An Ideal Husband, Julianne Moore read Neil Jordan's screenplay based on Graham Greene's novel, The End of the Affair. Eyebrows were raised when she, an American, was cast by Jordan in the role of the quintessentially English woman, Sarah Miles, who lives in a sexless marriage with a civil servant (played by Stephen Rea) and becomes involved in a passionate, adulterous affair with a novelist (Ralph Fiennes).
"I was surprised, too, when Neil cast me," she says. "The novel was so famous that everyone assumed an English actress would play Sarah, and I can understand that. I was so thrilled just to be tested for the part. I read Neil's script, and I wrote to him in Dublin, saying how much I wanted to do it. I left it at that and went to California to do another film. And then I got a call asking me to test for Neil's film."
She describes the character of Sarah as "this ordinary middle-class woman who becomes extraordinary when she becomes involved in this relationship. It's always interesting to see how people deal with things when they are tested by circumstances, and she really is vulnerable behind this facade of hers. All three characters are like that, in the sense that they are all pretending to be something they're not. They're all quite ordinary people really."
Interviewed in this newspaper recently, Neil Jordan noted how Julianne Moore "manages that move from the carnal to the mystical without a blip". Told about this, she pauses and describes it as "a beautiful turn of phrase. In terms of the character, that's what I liked about her - her personal nobility that manages that transition. Her journey is really about learning how physical love and emotional love translate into spiritual love.
"People ask me about the religious elements of the film and I don't feel qualified to talk about any of that. But one of the tenets of Christianity is that God is love. That's what Jesus said evidently. That He is God's son. That means God is here on Earth and is present in all of us. So what she's experiencing through her romantic love for this man is a surrender to the notion that love is that big and that important after all, and her journey from the carnal to the mystical is through this very earthly love - which, I think, is important for all of us."
She, in turn, describes Jordan as "extremely straightforward in his direction. He's hyper-sensitive as a person, as a director and as a writer. He's got such sensitivity for language and for the way actors work. If there's something he wants you to do he never fails to communicate it to you. He is so clear and so direct. And his language is gorgeous. To be able to distil a great novel like this with the skill he has adapted it is remarkable."
Their collaboration on The End of the Affair has led to Jordan casting Moore in Not I for the imminent cycle of filmed Beckett plays. "I saw a tape of Billie Whitelaw performing it," she says, "It's astonishing and it's a challenge. Neil and I have already done some rehearsal on it."
The recent Magnolia renewed her collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson, whose Boogie Nights earned her first Oscar nomination, for her vibrant performance as a porn star named Amber Waves. "Paul has a great talent and he has so many interesting ideas about human relationships. And that's what Magnolia is about - it follows these eight characters over 24 hours. I play this kind of trophy wife who's married to this older man and she's trying to deal with the fact that he's dying.
"The interesting thing about her is that there's virtually no subtext to her. Every emotion she experiences is open - as she speaks she's trying to feel her way and figure things out and everything about her is so up-front. I've never in my life played someone like that."
Julianne Moore's next feature film will be Unbreakable, for M. Night Shyamalan, the young director of the critical and commercial hit, The Sixth Sense. "I am playing this woman married to a man who never gets hurt physically no matter what he does." He will be played by Bruce Willis and third key role will be taken by the ubiquitous Samuel L. Jackson. "We shoot for three months from April," she says, "and we will be working in Philadelphia, which is nice because it's only an hour or two away from home."
The End of the Affair opened yesterday. Magnolia will be released here on March 24th