For a woman who spends her professional life pretending to be someone else, Julianne Moore has a very clearly defined sense of exactly who she is, and it has nothing to do with the sort of attention that comes with a posse of paparazzi. "People hook up with other actors and that usually raises your press profile, doesn't it? But I didn't do that, and I don't go to a lot of parties. I've never really attracted that kind of attention. I guess I'm just not interesting in that way. But I mean, that's fine, that's pretty lucky, wouldn't you say? I just don't do anything."
Although it's true that she's been scandal-free, it's not true that she does nothing. She does an awful lot. She never stops. She seems to make one film after another, with barely enough time in between to run home and see her two young children. This is the actress, after all, who was nominated for not just one but two Oscars - best supporting actress for The Hours and best actress for Far From Heaven - in one year, the kind of recognition that others are lucky to get in a lifetime. And while she didn't win then, surely it won't be long before she does. "It would be disingenuous to say that you don't think it would be nice to get one," she says. "But you know, then you have to remind yourself that all you really wanted when you started out was to get a job."
After years of doing well but not really making it to the top, perhaps Julianne Moore is making up for lost time, and when those big, juicy roles come along it's very hard to say no. Now, along with one or two others, she leads the chasing pack, and even though she jokes that she specialises in passengers on "the tragedy train", she rarely does the same thing twice.
These days she is feted and fussed over whenever she's in Hollywood, which is not too often if she can help it. "I'm very easily influenced by the places I live in, so I can't live in LA, for example, because it just makes me feel like a big fat loser," she explains. "When I'm there, I think I should be doing more, I forget who I am and I get overwhelmed by it.
"I do better in New York, where I feel like my life is kind of separate and I don't think about the industry so much." In Manhattan, she lives with her husband, the director Bart Freundlich, and their children, Caleb, 6, and two-year-old Liv Helen, and "it's fun and filled with all those things that families give each other. I feel very lucky indeed."
It wasn't always this way. In her latest film, Laws of Attraction, a romantic comedy with Pierce Brosnan, she plays a hotshot divorce lawyer who knows nothing of marriage except how to screw the opposite side for the best possible deal when it's over. For Moore's character, Audrey Miller, it's all about the work - there's no play, certainly no sex, and the biggest thrill she gets is successfully convincing a judge that her client should get the art, the house in the Hamptons to hang it in and $3 million a year in maintenance. Oh, and the children, too.
Moore could relate to the character perhaps a little better than one might think. "I was like her at a certain point in my life," she says. "I spent a lot of time in my twenties working really hard, concentrating on my profession and neglecting my personal life. And you reach a point where you say to yourself, 'Wait a minute, this isn't what I want, I'm not happy and I want something else, more than this, I want a life.'"
She had an earlier marriage, to actor John Gould Rubin, when she was just 22. They grew apart and divorced ten years later, then, just when Moore decided she was going to change her life around, she found herself falling in love with Freundlich. It was work that brought them together, when she agreed to appear in one of his films, The Myth of Fingerprints, in 1996.
"Within a week we were having an affair. I think people do tend to jump into things, but whether they will work out, we don't know. This sure worked out for me. I mean, we talk about love at first sight and we think that means you are with someone for the rest of your life. But it could be love at first sight and you have a great couple of weeks - that happens to people, too. But I do think that we tend to be immediately attracted to some people, for one reason or another." With Freundlich, for instance, she immediately liked his sense of humour. "I always notice that. I think it shows how aware a man is, how aware of the world and how intelligent he is."
When filming ended they were still together, then she became pregnant with their son, Cal, who was born at the end of 1997. They eventually married last year. The age difference between them - she is 43 and he is 34 - is only an issue when mentioned by impertinent journalists. "I really think it doesn't matter who you are with, as long as you love them," she insists.
"Why does it matter what age they are? It was never an issue for men and I hope it's ceasing to be an issue for women. The bigger the dating pool the better. Bart and I got married because we wanted to and we felt it was the right time. It didn't have anything to do with outside pressures, but the great thing is that now I don't have to answer questions about why I'm not married."
Her relationship with Freundlich marked the beginning of the most productive and satisfying period of her career to date. Before then, she'd been doing well, but most people would have been pushed to put a name to her face. There were certainly some interesting performances - doing the ironing, naked from the waist down, as she confessed to an affair in Robert Altman's Short Cuts was memorable to say the least; playing Tommy Lee Jones's sidekick in The Fugitive was a decent part in a very well-received hit; battling to survive the dinosaurs in The Lost World: Jurassic Park was a big hit at the box office even if the CGI raptors were the real stars.
There were some turkeys, too, although it was hardly her fault that the Madonna vehicle Body of Evidence was so bad. But quite what possessed her to take a part in Assassins with Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas remains a mystery. Perhaps her best performance was for director Todd Haynes - who would cast her again seven years later in Far From Heaven - playing a housewife who develops an allergic reaction to her environment in Safe.
