The Transformation Of Demi Moore From Teen To 62 Years Old

Hollywood acting careers are known to ebb and flow — a phenomenon that has, unfortunately, been more typical with women. Such has been the case with movie star Demi Moore, who burst onto the scene during the 1980s and has remained part of the pop-culture consciousness ever since. Like most actors who've been around for a while, she's been in some of Hollywood's biggest hits while also experiencing her fair share of duds. 

That said, 2024 has been a banner year for Moore, who celebrated her 62nd birthday in November while making what has to be the year's biggest Tinseltown comeback. Not only did she star in a celebrated, provocative, and critically acclaimed horror movie predicated on how Hollywood treats aging female performers, but she also landed a role in a hugely anticipated new TV series from Taylor Sheridan, the creator of mega-hit "Yellowstone."

In addition to her acting work (and her distinctive husky voice), Moore has also been known to generate headlines via her personal life, which has included three failed marriages, two to movie stars. All told, she's experienced an amazing journey that appears to have hit a new high point at an unexpected moment in her life. To find out more, keep on reading to experience the transformation of Demi Moore from a teen to 62 years old.

Roswell, New Mexico, is not only the rumored site of a crashed UFOs but also the birthplace of Demi Moore. When she arrived in 1962, her father had already deserted her 18-year-old mother. She was all of three months old when her mom married Danny Guynes, who sold advertising for newspapers. As Moore — who grew up Demetria Guynes — told Vanity Fair, her stepfather was "a charmer, a gambling con with a great sense of humor. He was also very self-destructive, a person who couldn't allow good things to happen."

His pursuit of new job opportunities meant the family moved a lot, typically pulling up stakes and relocating every six months or so. "When you move every six months of your life, you are kind of a nothing," she said. Her parents both drank heavily, leading her to grow up with a profound sense of insecurity. That led her to take on a caretaker role with both parents. "That was my basic function. 'Let me take care of you, because then, if you're taken care of, I'll be OK," she said.

When she was 15, her mother broke up with Guynes, with mother and daughter moving to West Hollywood (he took his own life two years later). At 16, she dropped out of school and befriended a young German woman, two years older than her, who was trying to establish herself as an actor. "That girl was Nastassja Kinski," Moore recalled, citing the future star of such films as "Tess," "Cat People," and "Paris, Texas."

Inspired by neighbor Nastassja Kinski's pursuit of acting, the teenager who would eventually become known as Demi Moore decided that would be her goal as well. She began taking acting classes, but didn't last long. "I was too painfully fearful," she told Vanity Fair. "The idea of a class, being judged and failing, was overwhelming."

One of Moore's friends suggested she try modeling, so she gave it a shot. One of her earliest jobs landed her (and her cleavage) on the cover of Oui, a pornographic magazine. She eventually signed with the Elite modeling agency. "I was so the nerdy girl who felt like I was playing dress-up," Moore recalled during an appearance on "The Jennifer Hudson Show."

She experienced success as a model but acting remained her primary goal. Her big break came with a starring role in "Parasite," a low-budget 3-D horror movie released in 1982. Despite being a complete novice, she delivered an impressive performance for someone so inexperienced. "She fully came up to the challenge," her co-star, Luca Bercovici, told Entertainment Weekly. "When you meet an actor who gives as good as they get, you say, 'Yeah. There's something there.'"

In 1980, 18-year-old Demi Moore married Freddy Moore, taking the name she'd use professionally for the rest of her life. More than a decade her senior, Freddy was a musician and songwriter. The couple collaborated on writing songs; she's credited as co-writer of three songs, including "It's Not a Rumor," recorded by his band, The Nu Kats. The trippy music video in which she also appeared became briefly popular on MTV.

That marriage didn't last, with the Moores divorcing in 1985. Looking back at that union in her 2019 memoir, "Inside Out," she recalled the first hint it wouldn't work out came when she cheated on him right before the nuptials. "The night before we got married, instead of working on my vows, I was calling a guy I'd met on a movie set," she wrote, as excerpted by People. "I snuck out of my own bachelorette party and went to his apartment."

In hindsight, she came to realize that her impulsive decision to get married was a way to distract herself from the pain she was experiencing from her father's death. Understanding that she was too late to stop it, she did the next best thing. "I couldn't get out of the marriage," she wrote, "but I could sabotage it."

"Parasite" certainly wasn't a prestige project, but the experience it gave Demi Moore had left her well prepared for her next opportunity. The same year as its release, in 1982, she landed the role that would put her on Hollywood's radar: investigative reporter Jackie Templeton on hit soap opera "General Hospital."  Moore reportedly beat out 1,000 others who'd auditioned for the role, which paid her a modest $750 per episode. While the initial plan was for Moore's character to break up the marriage of recently wed Luke and Laura (Anthony Geary and Genie Francis), viewers didn't warm to that storyline, so the soap's writers shifted gears and instead hooked Jackie up with Robert Scorpio (Tristan Rogers). "It's so new and so different I can't even tell you how new and different it is," the fledgling soap star gushed in a 1982 interview with "Entertainment Tonight." 

Looking back on the experience decades later, Moore admitted she was way out of her depth at "General Hospital." "I was fully faking it until I made it," she told Interview in 2021. "I had no clue what I was doing."

Nevertheless, her character became a favorite of fans, and she remained a mainstay on the soap until departing in 1983. "But the soap opera was not where I wanted to be," she added. "It was just a starting-off point."

Her success on "General Hospital" opened the door to movies, and Demi Moore pushed her way through. Following high-profile roles in "Blame It On Rio" (starring opposite Michael Caine) and "No Small Affair" (co-starring with Jon Cryer, who briefly became her boyfriend), she became part of the ensemble cast of "St. Elmo's Fire," along with a group of fellow rising young stars including Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Mare Winningham, and Emilio Estevez. A 1985 cover story in New York magazine dubbed the actors the "Brat Pack," a nickname that stuck. "It was such an interesting, curious thing," Moore told Entertainment Weekly of being part of the infamous gang, with the media chronicling the actors' hard-partying exploits in the mid-1980s. "In general, none of us really liked the idea of being called brats, or that we weren't professionals or didn't take our work seriously," she added.

While the moniker ultimately hindered the careers of some of its members — McCarthy, for one, who directed a 2024 documentary, "Brats," in which he reconnected with the other actors — Moore felt lucky to have emerged unscathed. "I didn't have the same response to this moniker, being called the Brat Pack, in terms of how I moved forward," she explained during an appearance on "Live with Kelly and Mark."

In 1987, Demi Moore accompanied then-fiancé Emilio Estevez to a screening of his new movie, "Stakeout." It was there that she met actor Bruce Willis, and it wasn't long before she ended her engagement and started dating Willis. The couple wasted little time; four months after meeting, they got married in Las Vegas, with rock 'n' roll pioneer Little Richard officiating the nuptials. 

The following year, Moore became a mom when they welcomed their first child, daughter Rumer. "Bruce helped pull this baby out of me," Moore said at the time, as reported by People. "He was there with his hands ... He's as passionate and as excited and as driven with being a father as he is with anything else that he does." The couple had two more daughters, Scout (born in 1991) and Tallulah (arriving in 1994).

By 1990, the spouses were Hollywood's ultimate power couple, each starring in some of the biggest blockbusters of the time (Willis in "Die Hard," and Moore in "Ghost"). The following year, they shared the screen for the first time, co-starring in the 1991 thriller "Mortal Thoughts." "It was nice, considering that we have never actually worked together," Moore told the Baltimore Sun. "It was a great way for us to work together. It was good for us on a lot of levels."

Demi Moore had steady success ever since being cast in "General Hospital" nearly a decade earlier, but it was the 1990 film "Ghost" that changed everything. While appearing on the popular online talk show "Hot Ones," Moore admitted that she was initially tentative about taking on her "Ghost" role. Having never before been called upon to cry onscreen, she read the script and felt overwhelmed by the depths of despair she'd have to tap to portray a young woman grieving the tragic loss of her husband (Patrick Swayze). "Definitely 'Ghost' scared the crap out of me," she said.

Another reason for her apprehension was that the film's director, Jerry Zucker, was best known for zany comedy, particularly the 1980 hit "Airplane!" "This conceptually was a comedy, a thriller, and a romance," she told Vanity Fair. "And I thought, OK, this could be amazing, or it could really be a disaster."

As history has demonstrated, "Ghost" was far from a disaster, ultimately receiving five Academy Award nominations (including best picture) and winning Oscars for best screenplay and best supporting actress for Whoopi Goldberg. In addition, "Ghost" raked in an impressive half-billion dollars at the box office. "I'm sure there was a huge boon in pottery classes that they hadn't seen since macrame, Birkenstocks, and hairy legs were in fashion!" she joked about the film's signature scene in an interview with Glamour.

Hot off the success of her biggest box-office blockbuster, Demi Moore catapulted to the front of the line as the hottest of Hollywood stars. In the years after "Ghost," she headlined some hits ("A Few Good Men," "Indecent Proposal") and a few misses (Dan Aykroyd's "Nothing but Trouble," "The Butcher's Wife"), but had enough juice that she made Hollywood history with her 1996 drama "Striptease." Portraying a single mom who becomes an exotic dancer to make ends meet, Moore's $12.5 million salary made her the highest-paid female actor up to that point.

While that should have been the zenith of Moore's career, it actually became a low point when the film only did lukewarm at the box office and was met with scathing reviews. That, combined with Moore's astronomical earnings — which, to be fair, were on par with what male stars were routinely paid — and the film's spicy subject matter, resulted in backlash for its star. "I think anyone who had been in the position that was the first to get that kind of equality of pay would probably have taken a hit," she told The New York Times "The Interview" podcast. "But because I did a film that was dealing with the world of stripping and the body, I was extremely shamed."

Interviewed by Variety, Moore admitted that while she tried not to take it personally, the backlash still stung. "The narrative quickly became, 'Well, she's only getting paid that number because she's playing a stripper.' It hit me really hard," she said.

After 12 years of marriage, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis decided to call it quits in 1998. Anonymous sources told People that trouble had been brewing in their relationship for years, brought about by their frequent absences from each other while filming their respective movies. "They spent too much time away from each other, and they were leading separate lives," a source told the New York Post, via The Independent. Two years after their separation, their divorce was finalized in 2000. 

That year, Willis pondered what had gone wrong. "It's difficult for any couple to keep their marriage intact under the best of circumstances, and our marriage was under a huge magnifying glass all the time," he told Rolling Stone. "So it might have been a little more difficult for us." He professed to still love his ex, noting that they planned to continue raising their three daughters together. "Our friendship continues," he added. "The institution has been set aside."

That wasn't just talk; as the decades passed, Moore and Willis became something of a Hollywood unicorn: ex-spouses who not only didn't hate each other's guts but actually hung out together. "I'm incredibly grateful that both of my parents have made such an effort my entire life that I never felt like I had to choose between them," their eldest daughter, Rumer, told People. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to quarantine in 2020, Moore was joined by their daughters, their respective partners, plus Willis and his wife, Emma Heming, and their daughters, all hunkering down together as one big, unconventional family.

After two divorces, Demi Moore demonstrated she wasn't done with marriage when she wed Ashton Kutcher in 2005 after two years of dating. At the time, the bride was 42, while the groom was just 27. "I was a 40-year-old who had a big life," she said in a 2019 TV interview with journalist Diane Sawyer of ABC News. "And Ashton's adult life was just beginning — I didn't see all that because I was inside of it. I just felt like a 15-year-old girl hoping somebody liked me."

In 2011, Moore announced it was all over. "It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I have decided to end my six-year marriage to Ashton," she proclaimed in a statement to E! News. In her interview with Sawyer, Moore confirmed rumors at the time that Kutcher had been cheating on her, revealing she saw a Google alert for a tabloid report on his infidelity and immediately confronted him. "He admitted it right away," she said. "And I think my response was, 'Are you f***ing kidding me?' That was it."

Their divorce was finalized two years later. Kutcher subsequently married Mila Kunis, who'd been his co-star on "That '70s Show."

Throughout the 2010s, Demi Moore continued to star in movies — albeit ones that most people never saw. She returned to the zeitgeist, however, when she appeared in a multi-episode story arc in the hit TV drama "Empire" in 2017. In 2019, she made a bold choice to star in the horror-comedy "Corporate Animals," playing a CEO who takes her staff on a corporate retreat that goes horribly wrong when they become stranded and are forced into cannibalism to survive. 

Moore returned to the horror genre in 2024 with "The Substance." Reviews were through the roof, generating Oscar buzz for Moore's dynamic performance as Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging Hollywood celebrity who's told she's passed her sell-by date now that she's turned 50. She discovers a black-market drug that transforms her into a younger version of herself (played by actor Margaret Qualley), with unexpected and severe consequences.  

For Moore, "The Substance" came along at a time when she'd pretty much reconciled herself to the fact that her best work was behind her. "I was so grateful to have material that had these levels of unique complexities, because I don't feel like I've had material come along in quite a while that gave me an opportunity to do this kind of work," she told Vanity Fair. "If I look back to the end of 2021, there was a point where I really was at a crossroads of wondering if this part of my life was complete."

In one of those unique Hollywood comeback confluences, talk of Demi Moore receiving her first Oscar nomination at age 62 just happened to coincide with a juicy role in one of television's most talked-about new series: "Landman," in which she played the wealthy wife of a Texas oil mogul (Jon Hamm) in the Billy Bob Thornton-starring series from "Yellowstone" creator Taylor Sheridan. 

Thornton, who had a small role in Moore's "Indecent Proposal," praised his co-star. "She was so nice to me when I first met her, when I only had two scenes in a movie she was starring in, and she's just as sweet today as she was then," he told Fox News via the New York Post.

When interviewed by "Entertainment Tonight" alongside her "Landman" co-stars, Moore was asked to describe this exciting new chapter. "It's feeling damn good," she declared. "I remind myself to stay present, to be really enjoying it, because not everything is always up."