Demi Moore

Demi Gene Moore (/dəˈmiː/ də-MEE; née Guynes; born November 11, 1962) is an American actress. After rising to prominence in the early 1980s, she became the world's highest-paid actress by 1995. Her accolades include a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and nominations for an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and an Emmy Award. In 2025, she appeared on Time's 100 most influential people in the world list.

Moore began her career as a model and joined the cast of the soap opera General Hospital in 1981. After departing the show in 1983, she rose to prominence as a member of the Brat Pack, with roles in the films Blame It on Rio (1984), St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and About Last Night... (1986). She emerged a star with her portrayal of a grieving girlfriend in the romance film Ghost (1990), had further box office success with A Few Good Men (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), and Disclosure (1994), and received a then-unprecedented $12.5 million to star in Striptease (1996). Her output decreased significantly after The Scarlet Letter (1995), The Juror (1996), and G.I. Jane (1997) fell below commercial expectations.

Moore has sporadically held leading roles in arthouse films; supporting roles in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Bobby (2006), Mr. Brooks (2007), Margin Call (2011), and Rough Night (2017); as well as television credits in If These Walls Could Talk (1996), Empire (2017–2018), Feud: Capote vs. The Swans (2024), and Landman (2024–present). She received renewed recognition for her performance as an aging celebrity in the body horror film The Substance (2024), which earned her a Golden Globe and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Moore has been married three times. From 1981 to 1985, she was married to musician Freddy Moore. From 1987 to 2000, she was married to Bruce Willis, with whom she has three daughters. She was married to Ashton Kutcher from 2005 to 2013. Her memoir, Inside Out (2019), became a New York Times Best Seller.

Demi Moore was born Demi Gene Guynes on November 11, 1962, in Roswell, New Mexico. Her biological father, Air Force airman Charles Foster Harmon Sr., deserted her then-18-year-old mother, Virginia (née King), after a two-month marriage before Moore's birth. Charles came from Lanett, Alabama, and Virginia was born in Richmond, California but had grown up in Roswell. Moore's maternal grandmother was raised on a farm in Elida, New Mexico. 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. In 1967 they had Moore's half-brother Morgan. Moore said in 1991, "My dad is Dan Guynes. He raised me. There is a man who would be considered my biological father who I don't really have a relationship with." Moore has half-siblings from Charlie Harmon's other marriages, but she does not keep in touch with them either.

Moore's stepfather Dan Guynes married and divorced Virginia twice. On October 20, 1980, a year after their second divorce from each other, Guynes committed suicide. Her biological father Harmon died in 1997 from liver cancer in Brazoria, Texas. Moore's mother had a long arrest record which included drunk driving and arson. Moore broke off contact with her mother in 1989, when she walked away halfway through a rehab stay Moore had financed at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota. Virginia Guynes posed nude for the magazine High Society in 1993, 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.

Moore spent her early childhood in Roswell, and later, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. 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." She suffered from strabismus, which was corrected by two operations, as well as kidney dysfunction. 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."

At age 14, Moore returned to her hometown of Roswell and lived with her grandmother for six months before relocating to Washington state, where her recently separated mother was residing near Seattle. Several months later, the family moved again to West Hollywood, California, where Moore's mother took a job working for a magazine distribution company. Moore attended Fairfax High School there. In 2019, she stated she was raped at 15 by landlord Basil Doumas, then 49. Doumas claimed he had paid Moore's mother to get access to Moore to rape her, although Moore said it is unclear if this were true.

In November 1978, Moore moved in with 28-year-old guitarist Tom Dunston, quitting high school in her junior year to work as a receptionist at 20th Century Fox —a job she secured through Dunston's mother, who was an executive assistant to producer Douglas S. Cramer. She signed with the Elite Modeling Agency, then enrolled in acting classes after being inspired by her next-door neighbor, 17-year-old German starlet Nastassja Kinski. Moore's first and second roles as a professional actress were guest spots on the TV shows W.E.B. and Kaz (though neither is listed in her IMDb filmography). In August 1979, three months before her 17th birthday, Moore met musician Freddy Moore, at the time leader of the band Boy, at the Los Angeles nightclub The Troubadour. He obtained a divorce in late 1980 and married Demi six weeks later.

Moore co-wrote three songs with Freddy Moore and appeared in the music video for their selection It's Not a Rumor, performed by his band, the Nu-Kats. She continues to receive royalty checks from her songwriting work (1980–1981).

Moore appeared on the cover of the January 1981 issue of the adult magazine Oui, taken from a photo session in which she had posed nude. In a 1988 interview, Moore said she "only posed for the cover of Oui —I was 16; I told them I was 18." Interviewer Alan Carter said, "However, some peekaboo shots did appear inside. And later, nude shots of her turned up in Celebrity Sleuth —photos that she once said 'were for a European fashion magazine'." In 1990, she told another interviewer, "I was 17 years old. I was underage. It was just the cover."

Moore made her film debut as the protagonist's girlfriend in Choices (1981), a sports drama directed by Silvio Narizzano. It did not garner much attention until after Moore became a household name, with home video releases heavily hyping up her appearance. Her second feature was the 3-D sci-fi horror Parasite (1982), for which director Charles Band had instructed casting director Johanna Ray to "find me the next Karen Allen". It proved to be a minor hit on the drive-in circuit, ultimately grossing $7 million. Moore had already joined the cast of the ABC soap opera General Hospital several months before the film's release, playing the role of investigative reporter Jackie Templeton through 1983. During her tenure on the series, she made an uncredited cameo appearance in the 1982 spoof Young Doctors in Love.

Moore's film career took off in 1984 following her appearance as the teenage daughter of a businessman (played by Michael Caine) in the sex comedy Blame It on Rio. In No Small Affair (1984), she played the love interest of an amateur photographer, opposite Jon Cryer. Sheila Benson of Los Angeles Times called her "the movie's revelation", asserting that she was "gamine, molten, wild, tragicomic and genuinely affecting." Her commercial breakthrough came with her role as an uninhibited banker in Joel Schumacher's yuppie drama St. Elmo's Fire (1985). Having lobbied for her casting, the director urged her to go to rehab before shooting and hired a full-time sober companion during production. The film received negative reviews, but was a box office success and brought her widespread recognition. Because of her association with that film, she was often listed as part of the Brat Pack, a label she felt was "demeaning".

Moore progressed to more serious material with the romantic dramedy About Last Night... (1986), in which she played one half of a Chicago couple, alongside Rob Lowe. It marked a positive turning point in her career, as Moore noted that, following its release, she began seeing better scripts. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and praised her performance, writing, "There isn't a romantic note she isn't required to play in this movie, and she plays them all flawlessly." The success of About Last Night... was unrivaled by Moore's other two 1986 releases, One Crazy Summer and Wisdom, the last youth-oriented films in which she would star.

Moore made her professional stage debut in an off-Broadway production of The Early Girl, which ran at the Circle Repertory Company in fall 1986. Mel Gussow of The New York Times deemed it a "striking debut" and observed that she "has exactly the right combination of naivete and know-how, and[…] is unabashed about the demands of the performance." In 1988, Moore starred as a prophecy-bearing mother in the apocalyptic drama The Seventh Sign —her first outing as a solo film star— and in 1989, she played the quick-witted local laundress and part-time prostitute in Neil Jordan's Depression-era allegory We're No Angels, opposite Robert De Niro and Sean Penn.

Moore's most successful film to date is the supernatural romantic melodrama Ghost, which grossed over $505 million at the box office and was the highest-grossing film of 1990, as well as the most rented videocassette of 1991. She played a young woman in jeopardy to be protected by the ghost of her murdered boyfriend through the help of a reluctant psychic. The love scene between Moore and Patrick Swayze that starts in front of a potter's wheel to the sound of "Unchained Melody" has become an iconic moment in cinema history. Ghost was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, while Moore's performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination and the Saturn Award for Best Actress. She started fashion trends with her uncharacteristically gamine look, and legions of women emulated the short haircut she sported throughout the film. At one point, Ghost and Die Hard 2, starring Moore's then-husband Bruce Willis, would occupy the number one and number two spots at the box office, a feat that would not be accomplished again for a married Hollywood couple until 2024.