Demi Moore: Will she finally receive an Oscar for her radical comeback?

At 62, Demi Moore has finally given up the pursuit of perfection. And she is finally getting the recognition that was denied to her for so long. For her role in the horror film "The Substance" she received her first Golden Globe, her first Oscar nomination, the SAG Award - and maybe even her first golden boy on March 3rd.

Fittingly, the film is also about the pursuit of perfection - external, youthful perfection that every woman is subject to, not just in Hollywood. As Elizabeth Sparkle, Moore fights against the aging that threatens to push her out of her career under the direction of Coralie Fargeat (48). What particularly interested her about the role was "the circumstances of a woman in the entertainment industry who is faced with rejection and deep despair. Everything that seemed to matter in her life is ripped away," she told the Guardian in 2024. The parallels to her own career are obvious.

Admired for her beauty, ridiculed for her ambitions

Demi Moore is a living example of the sexism that Hollywood has experienced over the last few decades. In the 80s and 90s, she became a superstar with films such as "Ghost" and "Indecent Proposal" - admired for her beauty, ridiculed for her ambitions. In "A Few Good Men" and "The Jane Files" she played women who had to fight against male power structures - and had to listen to a producer say: "If Tom [Cruise, her colleague in "A Few Good Men"] and Demi don't sleep together, then why is Demi a woman?"

But Moore had to contend with sexist double standards not only on screen, but also in her real life. Her pregnant body on the cover of "Vanity Fair" was described as pornographic in 1991 and sparked a scandal. Her fee of twelve million dollars for "Striptease" - at the time the highest sum ever negotiated by an actress - was met with derision. While her then husband Bruce Willis (69) received almost twice as much for "Die Hard", she had to put up with headlines like "Gimme Moore".

But Moore has been through worse. In her 2019 biography "Inside Out," she described her dark childhood with a suicidal mother and a violent father, a rape by a "family friend," as well as alcohol and cocaine problems and eating disorders. She was sober for 20 years until Ashton Kutcher (47) came into her life, questioned the "concept" of alcohol addiction and made her drink again. The couple's marriage - also accompanied by malicious headlines about the 16-year age difference - ended after six years with the next low point in Moore's life. Kutcher had cheated on and humiliated Moore, she had once again "lost herself," as she describes in an interview with "People." And again the fight began: against the public's opinion of her, against her addictions, against her own body.

Finally no longer beautiful

In the midst of this low point came the script of "The Substance". You can see this struggle in her acting performance in "The Substance". With the body horror film, she frees herself for the first time from the pressure of having to be beautiful. Her role ages ever faster and more terribly, while her young alter ego, played by Margaret Qualley (30), mimics the radiant beauty. A liberation, as Moore told the "Guardian": "I was degraded the whole time, and I knew from the beginning that I would not be shown in the most glamorous way, without soft focus. Rather the opposite was the case. But there was something liberating about that."

After decades of expecting perfection, Demi Moore is showing herself unvarnished for the first time - and is being celebrated for exactly that. In January 2025, she accepted the Golden Globe for "Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy" (which should not be misleading given the brutal satire). In her speech, she said that a producer had once disparagingly given her the title "popcorn actress" and that she had long believed that there was nothing more in it for her. 30 years later, she has proven the opposite - not only to him, but above all to herself.

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