Julianne Moore has opened up about family life in a rare personal interview, as she speaks out about how her husband Bart Freundlich became "the miracle of my life".
Before she met Bart, Julianne had been married to actor and director John Gould Rubin. Her career had been thriving, as she featured in Assassins, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Nine Months, yet her personal life was in a tailspin as the couple divorced in 1995. The star was struggling personally despite her career kicking off.
It was a year after her divorce when she met Bart, who had persuaded her to read for a part in his film, The Myth of Fingerprints. She was 35 and he was 26. Not long after, they had their first child, Cal, in 1997 and got married in 2003.
She continued that being with Bart has enriched her personal life, which has helped her as an actor. "I don’t think I could be happy as an actor if I didn’t have a really fulfilling personal life," she said to The Cut.
"That’s the great thing about having a real life and having a creative life: You can have both," she continued. "I don’t like those narratives that say somehow you have to give up being a human being to be a creative person."
Julianne explained that when Cal and Liv were growing up, she would take jobs that worked around the family schedule, prioritising her kids before anything else.
She had similarly told Harper's Bazaar that she "didn't travel outside New York because I needed to be there while they were in school. So if I did a little movie, it had to be shot in the city, and if it was a bigger thing, we’d have to move it to summertime so we could all go. Being able to make those decisions and have that kind of flexibility in my life has been amazing."
Now, her children are all grown up: Liv is set to graduate from Northwestern this year, and Cal, 26, is a musician living with his girlfriend in Manhattan. As empty nesters, Julianne and Bart got a dog, Hope, a rescue: "She’s 60 percent pit, 10 percent shepherd, 10 percent lab, and 20 percent Chow Chow,” she says, “which is a hundred percent gorgeous."
This doesn't stop her from spending as much time with her kids as possible though, as Julianne recently attended the Knicks game with Cal where the 26-year-old was the spitting image of her. Cal towered over his mom with one arm around her shoulder, having inherited her bright red hair, eyes and smile.