Julianna Moore: Heaven sent

She's nominated for two Oscars for her lead in Far From Heaven and her support in The Hours. She works hard, behaves well and, all in all, is very good. Which is where, at least in the eyes of Hollywood, the problem lies...

In a fortnight's time, Julianne Moore has a rare opportunity – to snatch both the prizes for actresses at this year's Oscars, with her roles in Far From Heaven (which opened in London this weekend) and The Hours. For the same woman to be nominated as best actress and as best supporting actress has occurred only once before: in 1988, Sigourney Weaver was up for both Gorillas in the Mist and Working Girl. She lost in both categories and Ms Moore could suffer the same fate. Yet no one is surprised at her double act this year, for she is widely regarded as the most versatile, hard-working, professional actress around. Whatever roles she may lose to, count on it that Julianne Moore would have been pretty good in those, too.

It's not just that in a movie career that only began around 1990, she has already opened in 32 pictures. In the same time, she has had two children – Cal, born in 1997, Liv born in 2002 – and kept house with their father, the movie director Bart Freundlich, close to the site of the Twin Towers. (An earlier marriage, to the actor John Gould Rubin, ended in 1995.) Somehow everything has been handled; some of her roles have been among the most adventurous in recent years, and the life too has been stable and rewarding. It's proof that her own bizarre childhood was less an ordeal than a training.

Julie Anne Smith was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in December 1960, the daughter of a military judge who travelled wherever the army needed him for courts martial. Her mother (Scots by origin) was a social worker. It is reckoned that they moved as many as 25 times, with a lengthy spell in Alaska and a posting that ensured that Julie Anne graduated from the American High School in Frankfurt, Germany. From there she went to Boston (the first settled period of her life) where she got her degree at Boston University's School of the Arts.

Which isn't to say that Julianne Moore the actress might not, one day, know how to summon up the personal chaos of a woman who has led a fragmented and itinerant life. After all, she could handle the half-dressed family row in Robert Altman's Short Cuts, where the camera and the audience had time to establish that yes, she is a real redhead; she was the distraught mother in A Map of the World; she was extraordinarily soft, warm, kind and vacant as Amber Waves, the daft den mother for the pornographic movie crew in Boogie Nights; she was subtle enough to suggest that the tough Agent Starling might fall in love with Dr Lecter in the amazing Hannibal; she was so close to a breakdown all through Magnolia that you wanted to stop the film and just hold her. And so it goes on. Julianne Moore specialises in disturbing roles: for Safe (her first picture with Todd Haynes, and the clear signal that she was special), she lost weight and began to feel her body rhythms shifting as she played a woman who has to live in isolation to avoid infection, to be "safe".

But then you see her in interviews, marvel at the steady, benign distancing of herself from the psyche-damaging fuss of the process, and hear the stories of how she can do the most demanding scene and be "herself" again in an instant. Her credo is simple: trust the material and her co-workers and know that at 5.30, or on the word "cut", you have to move on and deal with all the responsibilities of being yourself. Some might argue that the work – the acting, the characters – are the secret beneficiaries of that in that they grow in ground more tested, more secure, more balanced between fertility and rock.

This theory may not be fashionable in an age foolishly fond of impetuous behaviour. And, to be sure, we have actors and actresses who have survived family wreckage, the absence of education and a less strenuous work regime, and who can sometimes be seen staggering around the environs of life, still drunk on "character". This may make good talk-show television, but it is painful and tedious in life. So I find it refreshing that the frequently inspired Ms Moore likes to keep everything at a level of practicality:

"The greatest strength you have as an actor is a great script and director, and then it's relaxing. I feel this way with Todd: I rely on him. There are so many things I don't have to think about. A director's job is not to direct the performance; people always confuse a director with being some kind of acting coach. They're not supposed to be saying, 'Do it a little sadder, you should be thinking about your dead dog.' That's baloney. It's my job to come up with that performance. If the director's like Bob Altman, Todd, Paul Thomas Anderson, and is doing his job, I can do something special."

That's where we need to measure one of the crucial talents in acting: what you choose to do – the material, the collaborating cast, the director; and even the financial set-up on the film. I said that Moore works very hard. That's true, and I'm sure there have been times where a salary offer helped the bread-winner decide. She got $3m (£1.9m) for doing Clarice in Hannibal after Jodie Foster had flinched from possible exploitation. But then consider the number of parts Moore has taken at much less than top pay on difficult projects (not all of which prospered): a list that includes Safe and Far from Heaven; Boogie Nights and Magnolia; Short Cuts and Cookie's Fortune; The Big Lebowski; A Map of the World; The Shipping News; The End of the Affair; The Myth of Fingerprints (directed by Bart Freundlich). Do you see a pattern? Julianne Moore is nearly always in "independent" pictures. Not least Far from Heaven, where she has the wisdom to realise that she does not have to do too much.

The concept of that film – the recreation of a 1950s genre – is so complete that the actress can trust the decor, the colour, the camera movements and the music to carry much of the feeling. In both her nominated films this year, it is remarkable how restrained Moore is. As Laura Brown, in The Hours, she has to embody this terrible paradox: that she is suicidal, yet too passive, too kind, too trained to let her dull husband notice it. She has the hardest role in The Hours, because her character is so excessive. But she is the link between the age of Mrs Dalloway and a modern world of women trying to live their way. Restraint may not win Oscars, this time. But Julianne Moore's turn will come – maybe in her next picture, for Bille August, Without Apparent Motive, where she plays the mother of a murdered child.

She will be 43 this December, and that is not a sweet age in Hollywood, although her cover pose on the recent edition of American Photo magazine, recreating Ingres' 1814 portrait of La Grande Odalisque, belies it. But The Hours offers an example of how talent and intelligence can get past the awkward age – Meryl Streep, a model in Moore's life. The red hair may go white one day. But Julianne Moore is as secure as the daughter of judiciousness and social benevolence could ask for. She is a tribute to care, preparation, education, hard work and responsibility. And we need those examples.