Julianne Moore: Closer to heaven

It sounded the perfect assignment for Charlotte O'Sullivan. Meet Julianne Moore, the actress who doesn't play by Hollywood rules. An outsider, poised, maybe a little serious. But she hadn't reckoned on Ms Moore's fiery side...

Getting up close and personal with the stars can be disconcerting. Standing at the reception desk at Claridge's in London, a huddle of glossy bodies – including George Clooney's – rush by. "Great," says the woman next to me, "that's another illusion shattered. I thought he was tall." In the same hotel, waiting to interview Julianne Moore about her new film, I find myself chatting to the hair and make-up people. I ask the "hair" man if he was impressed by her lustrous locks in Far From Heaven. He adopts the tender manner of one used to dealing with the small of brain. "It's a wig."

Ah well, love is blind. Finally getting to meet the 42-year-old actress is a dream come true for me. And, like all fantasists, I have an ideal scenario: imagining that (big hair or no) she and I will soon be chuckling away together like old friends.

Things don't start too badly. On the way to the interview room, we hear a panicked cry of "Is this the way to the toilet?" It's Moore, attired in party shoes, a short dress and a little suit jacket, looking for all the world like a child who's lost her mum. The PR sends her off in the right direction and Moore totters back a few minutes later, shakes my hand warmly and, in her sing-song Southern voice, says it's been a long day. If she falls asleep, she suggests, I should just write it into the piece. She provides a suitably dramatic line: "Then her head hit the coffee table..."

Moore's days are long right now because she's become weirdly big news: Oscar-nominated not only for her supporting turn in Stephen Daldry's The Hours, but also her lead role in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven. In both she plays a Fifties housewife with a husband who doesn't understand her, a housewife in love with someone she can't have (Laura Brown adores a woman; Cathy Whitaker a black man). Watching these women drift around in their curvaceous old cars, you might decide the award Moore really deserves is for Best Recycling Job; needless to say, you'd be wrong. Both women are as sweet as ice cream: but where The Hours' Laura melts early on, Far From Heaven's Cathy holds it together. Like Nigella Lawson, she's a domestic goddess, a yummy-mummy with a practical streak. The miracle is that you feel so much for her; that, given all Cathy's privilege, you feel the urge not to throw stink bombs but to protect her from harm. It's Moore's face that does it – a face that registers night-of-the-soul terror without ever spelling it out.

What's weird is that this triumph looks set to be acknowledged, because the Oscars are a glitzy business, and Moore is not a typically glitzy gal. Where her rival Nicole Kidman seems sexy to the bone, with Moore you always feel something inside is clenched. It's not that she's prudish. She's happy for photographers to drape her around sofas, odalisque-style, and show off her white-bright skin. She regularly strips in her movies (Short Cuts, Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, The End of the Affair). It's more that, as with Catherine Deneuve, she's innately serious. She has the look of a woman oppressed by her bourgeois cloister, fearful of experimentation but determined to see it through, and that sort of grimness (or blasted poise – Moore is very good at playing druggies) tends to sit awkwardly in the mainstream. Moore has already been nominated for the best actress Oscar twice. You wonder if she keeps losing because she's just not good enough at simulating fun. And whether, if she wins, this will be pegged as the year the ceremony got just a tad perverse.

She says she's never felt as if she "fitted" and, half jokingly, blames this on her red hair. "When you're a kid," she grimaces, "it sets you apart." Really? "Yeah," she laughs, "it's like, I'm never going to be in a room full of people with red hair!" It was bad enough, she says, that she was short, clumsy, wore glasses and loved books (one of her earliest memories is of being taken to the library by her mother). But to be a carrot-top, too... That's why she insisted on Far From Heaven's Cathy being a blonde. "Todd had written her as a redhead, and I was like 'It's not right!' It came to me while I was running around the track somewhere and I just thought, it's not ideal enough. I didn't want Cathy to have even a moment of being marginal."

Insider-status, however, is something Moore herself doesn't covet. She made a decision early on in her career, for example, to live in New York rather than Los Angeles, and has never regretted it. Hollywood, she says, offers the illusion that prejudice can be escaped – that because you are "exalted", you can have it all. But really, it's a business. "The way these people think," she says, then sighs.

When was the last time she witnessed something that shocked her? "Oh," she says excitedly, "I can tell you something that's very good. You'll like it!" Her long-term partner and soon-to-be-husband, Bart Freundlich, is currently directing a film called Catch That Kid for Fox studios. Freundlich wanted Moore to play a walk-on part as the mother of one of the kids, but because the boy concerned was black, the studios balked. "They said it would be too confusing without an explanation. I thought, 'I cannot believe this!'" I actually look very like this little boy's mother, you know, because his mother has red hair. But they just didn't get it. Whenever you talk about a 'couple' the expectation is that they're a man and a woman, and the same race." (The scene, in the end, got scrapped.)

Has she ever experienced prejudice – real prejudice – herself? "I think where you do feel it, where we feel it," she says, nodding in my direction, "is in terms of gender politics. That's when you feel lesser – because you know you're a woman. And I think, 'My god, if I feel like that, what must it feel like to belong to an ethnic minority and be a woman?'"

She gets up and brings a bottle of water back to the table. I pour her a glass and she laughs and says, "Thank you, mother!" Oh my. It's all going so well. And then, like a fool, I bring up Dennis Haysbert.

Haysbert (the President in the TV series 24) plays the black gardener in Far From Heaven, the man who sends such tremors through Cathy's world. I've read an interview in which he talks about the fact that while Hollywood is increasingly happy to show white males hooking up with black females, it's still unwilling to show passionate black male/white female relationships. He notes: "In Monster's Ball you see [a white man and a black woman] having full-on passionate sex, whereas [in Far From Heaven] you don't even get to see them holding hands. I don't agree with that. I'm really tired of seeing it done just one way..." He ends his piece with the juicy cry, "Let me have a love scene between me and Julianne Moore!"

I'd thought this an interesting take on the subject (how many black male/white female couplings – Mike Figgis's One Night Stand aside – can you think of?). I thought Moore would find it interesting, too. Far From Heaven has done surprisingly well in the States. Maybe this is because for all its sophistication – or indeed, because of its sophistication – it conforms to one of the industry's unspoken rules. Moore frowns. "No, we didn't talk about that." She starts combing that long, super-straight red hair with her nails. Maybe Haysbert would find it hard to broach that subject with her. An even bigger frown. "No, I don't think so." She winds her hair into a bun, then digs a grip through it. "His point is well made," she says. "And I mean, I would be totally happy to have a love scene with Dennis in the right movie. But..." an impatient sigh "...we don't live in a colour-blind world. That's exactly why this movie has so much relevance, it's exactly what we're saying."

I wonder aloud if he was thinking of the bigger picture. "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah," she says, as if I'm finally seeing sense, "he was talking about something else." That wasn't quite what I meant. So I have one last go. Maybe this is something Haysbert thought about after making the film, when he was able to put it in a wider... This is the last straw for Jules. "I would have to know what the context of the quote was and what Dennis was talking about," she snaps. "I don't know, I mean, you just gave me a phrase. He might be talking about something else entirely – in another movie." She looks at me with stony eyes. "I think we were all very much on page about what we were doing on this particular film."

She's obviously drawn to fiery parts. Her next project is a film version of the Wallace Shawn play Maria and Bruce, about a couple in New York, and the big fight they have one summer's day. It'll be shot on DVD, probably this year. Moore (who's producing) will play the woman, Matthew Broderick the man, and some English bloke called Tom will direct. "Not Bart?" I say without thinking. And she replies, exasperated, "No!" Why? "Because he's working on other stuff. Just because I live with him doesn't mean I always work with him!" I contemplate bursting into tears.

"What does your boyfriend do?" she demands, obviously all set to ask if I'd want to work with him. Well, I say, he's a journalist. And coincidentally, he interviewed her and Bart for The Myth of Fingerprints and came home saying what a giggly pair they were. Her face melts. "Oh, that's so funny. Oh, that was such a strange day. The car that was meant to take us to the airport from Deauville ran out of gas – just ppft! – and the driver was shouting in French and we missed our plane and loads of stuff had to be cancelled."

She looks absolutely tickled by the memory. That was six years ago, when Bart was 27 and Moore 36. It was his first feature film and no doubt – thanks to its reception at Sundance and elsewhere – he felt he was on the brink of great things. Since then he's made World Traveler (also starring Moore), which was torn apart by the press, and their careers seem to be going in opposite directions.

Maybe his other half is defensive because she feels guilty she hasn't been of more use. As it turns out, the couple do plan to make another feature next year, based on a book, Unraveling, written by Moore's brother. But all she'll say – albeit more gently this time – is that it's not something she feels compelled to do. "Every once in a while wouldn't bother me, but I have no desire to be like a working-together couple. No! Uh-uh! I think that's death." But doesn't she miss him when he's away? "Well, right now, he leaves the house at six in the morning, and I don't see him... he's home at 10 or something, because he's directing. But when he's editing I'll see more of him. And then I'll go to work, and he won't see me. You know, it's a little... but it's what it is."

Whatever the tensions, it's clear she dotes on him. She tells me that when she was little she always wanted to have black hair and dark eyes, ("that's what I liked to look at"), then notes, "Bart has dark hair and dark eyes. Now I have him to look at!" It's as if, through him, she's edging closer towards her own ideal. Their baby daughter, Liv, has just lost her baby hair, and now the real stuff is growing. "It's dark, dark, dark auburn," whispers Moore, "it's kind of amazing. She's gonna have the colouring that I wanted to have."

Maybe having a family has relaxed her, maybe not. It occurs to me that Moore's the most fidgety person I've ever interviewed. She keeps tugging the skirt over her knees, makes strange diagonal lunges, pulling her jacket collar towards her as if she feels too much flesh is on display. That laugh, too, is so tightly wound – even when she's being naughty, or boisterous. She tells me that her five-year-old son, Caleb, makes her "laugh hysterically", and, in a lovely voice, sings me a song he made up recently ("it goes 'little waggy tail – doo doo doo!'"). Half of me is so pleased by this impromptu performance I want to clap. The other half gets stuck on the word "hysterically". I remember a comment by Ellen Barkin that I read somewhere, that Moore (a close friend) is "always hysterical about the fact that she will never work again". Clearly, she's one of those people whose nerves are easily touched.

I ask Moore how she'd feel if she wins the best actress award and she gives an alarmed whinny as she murmurs, "Oh, that would be nice." I ask where she'd put the award and she says "my closet – the closet in my office", then, when I say "the closet?", cries, "No, I probably wouldn't, it would be too exciting. I'd put it on my desk. It would be an exciting thing to have." Most actors have their easygoing spiel, and stick to it as casually as they can. Not her – if she thinks she's being attacked, she presents a united front and goes for your jugular; otherwise she's disarmingly, ever so politely, scrambled.

It's time to go. As I move towards the door she calls out, "Hey! Say hi to your boyfriend!"

At home, I check something she said about a trip to the cinema with her mother. She and her younger sister were taken to see a remake of Wuthering Heights, but they all had to leave because the girls were so frightened by Cathy's ghost. Moore must have been 10 years old at the time. Conventional wisdom would suggest that 10 is a bit old to be scared of ghosts, but Julianne Moore is not conventional. She's not afraid of seeming fearful. As a woman, that may cause her problems; as an actress, it's what gives her the edge.

'Far From Heaven' is on general release