Since breaking through in the mid-Eighties, she has done hourglass, gamine, hardbody, Rubenesque and now beanpole. She admits to having had breast implants, knee-flap lifts and collagen jabs costing around �250,000 ? and to harbouring an ?extreme obsession? about her body.
?I tried to dominate it,? she explained last year, ?which I did for a while, and changed it multiple times. But, ultimately, it never brought me anything other than temporary happiness.?
Now it looks as though the body?s escaped again. Perhaps it?s as confused as she is. ?Give me a clue,? it pleads as Demi schemes its next transformation. In what the movie business calls the ?mature? phase of an actress?s career, it may be time for her to figure out not only what she wants to look like, but who she really is.
At the peak of her fame, in the early Nineties, Demi looked like a woman who had finally bucked the old Hollywood tyranny. Movies like Ghost, Indecent Proposal, and A Few Good Men turned her into a huge star ? the first who could plausibly demand equality of pay and billing with the biggest male names.
She wasn?t Ingrid Bergman, exactly, but she delivered the goods to the mass market audiences in the multiplexes, and was married to the equally popular Bruce Willis, a slab-chopped ex-barman turned celluloid action hero. Both of them came from unpromising, blue-collar backgrounds, and their success seemed to say something reassuring about the broader possibilities of American life.
Demi clearly enjoyed her stardom. And all the things that went with it ? the junkets, the private planes and bloated entourages. As tales of her excessive demands did the rounds, old Hollywood hands took to calling her ?Gimme Moore?, and warning that it would all end in tears.
Behind the scenes, she was warned about overexposure, bad movie choices and so-so acting. And that was just by Bruce, who ? as nice a chap off the screen as he was tough on it ? worried that his wife was collecting too many enemies.
Things duly started to go wrong with Striptease, the 1996 box-office flop for which she was paid a record $12.5?million. Optimistically billed as ?a family values comedy?, the movie?s core selling point was Ms Moore, as a Miami lap-dancer, taking her clothes off.
At this stage of its progression, the body was well worth seeing, but too many of the punters had seen it all before; on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, where she had posed naked and heavily pregnant, and in steamy scenes from her earlier movies.
This was followed by the debacle of G.I. Jane ? a film about a female Special Forces officer that the Disney Corporation appeared reluctant even to release. As the studio agonised, one of its senior executives told Newsweek magazine that Demi?s star-power was shot. ?We don?t know what to do,? he said. ?People just don?t want to see her. We would have to drag them kicking and screaming to see this movie.?
Demi sensibly went off to ?rest?, although the body gamely kept up its demanding schedule. There would be regular sightings of it looking either too full or not full enough, and replete with interesting refinements. Two years ago, the American fashion glossy W had to deny retouching a cover photo of Demi to make her look skinnier.
History suggests that it is almost impossible for an actress to come back from a major career bust. Yet Demi?s fall from grace had an interesting consequence.
Banished to the backwoods of Idaho, where she raised her three daughters with Bruce, she came to symbolise all the woes that afflict female movie stars ? the requirement to be young, beautiful, submissive and shaped to order. And, slowly, people started to like her again.
She claims that the image of wretched excess was always a misperception. ?Part of it was the times we were living in,? she said recently. ?They were very excessive.?
Hers was the experience of the outsider. She had been raised in Roswell, New Mexico, a small, desert town best known as the site of the world?s most celebrated UFO incident.
The story goes that a spacecraft crashed nearby in 1947, and that the bodies of aliens were recovered. Whatever the truth of the Roswell Incident, the town had no trouble alienating Demi, who dropped out of school at 16, fled her unstable family, and landed a part in the TV soap, General Hospital.
Ashton, currently filling the Charlie Sheen role in the hit comedy Two-and-a-Half Men, denies everything. His wife of six years is keeping quiet. Demi has a career to rebuild, although it won?t be like the old one. Smaller movies. Smaller parts. Smaller body. For once, it all fits nicely.
Harpo Marx Zeppo Marx Walter Matthau Ethel Merman Paul McCartney
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