Demi Moore (born Demetria Gene Guynes on November 11, 1962) is an American actress. She became well-known after a string of 1980s teen-oriented movies, and was one of the best known actresses of 1990s Hollywood. She is married to actor Ashton Kutcher, and her legal name is Demi Kutcher.

Early life

Moore was born Demetria Gene Guynes in Roswell, New Mexico, and spent many of her childhood years in Rogers Manor, Pennsylvania, a small town south of Pittsburgh. As a child, Moore had a difficult and unstable home life. Her biological father, Charles Harmon, left her mother, Virginia King (November 27 1943 – July 2 1998), after a two-month marriage, before Moore was born. As a result, Moore had the surname of her stepfather, Danny Guynes (March 9 1943 – October 1980), on her birth certificate. Danny Guynes, who committed suicide in 1980, frequently changed jobs; as a result the family moved a total of forty times. Moore's parents were also alcoholics and often fought and beat each other. Moore was cross-eyed as a child, and wore an eye patch in an attempt to correct the problem until it was eventually corrected by two surgeries. During this time, she also suffered from kidney dysfunction.

Moore's family settled in Los Angeles in 1976. When Moore was sixteen, her friend, actress Nastassja Kinski, persuaded her to drop out of Hollywood's Fairfax High School, where her schoolmates included Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis and actor Timothy Hutton, to become an actress. In 1979, she met and married her first husband, songwriter Freddy Moore. Though they divorced in 1985, she kept the last name Moore.

Career

After quitting school, Moore went to work as a pin-up girl, modelled for European photographers, and worked at a collection agency. In the early 1980s, Moore posed for a series of photographs for Christopher Marrin featuring full frontal nudity. These photos went unnoticed until after she became a star, and were eventually published in a German magazine and later in North America. Moore's film debut was in the 1982 3-D science fiction/horror film, Parasite, which was a hit on the drive-in circuit, ultimately grossing $7 million. However, Moore was not widely known until she played the part of Jackie Templeton on the ABC soap opera, General Hospital, from 1982-1983. Appropriately, she also had an uncredited cameo at the end of the 1982 spoof Young Doctors in Love.

In the mid-1980s, she appeared in the youth-oriented films St. Elmo's Fire and About Last Night, and she was often listed as one of the Brat Pack, a name the media dubbed a certain group of top young actors at the time. After the commercial success of Ghost, Moore was given more prominent roles in A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal, Disclosure and The Hunchback of Notre Dame for which she was the first actress to reach the $10 million salary mark. She never duplicated the success of Ghost and had a string of flops like The Scarlet Letter and The Juror. She then took more risks like shocking her fans with several breast enhanced topless scenes in Striptease, and shaving her head for G.I. Jane. They too failed at the box office and garnered mixed reviews. Meanwhile, Moore's Passion of Mind co-star Joss Ackland lambasted Moore by describing her as being "not very bright or talented". At the same time she produced and starred in a TV mini-series called If These Walls Could Talk, written by Nancy Savoca. A three-part series on abortion, Savoca directed two segments, including the one in which Moore played a single woman in the 1950s seeking a back-alley abortion. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress for that role.