After becoming a household name in the 80s, Demi Moore's A-list status was basically revoked
following some ill-fated movies a decade later.
While she's worked on some films here and there, she's become best known for her relationship
dramas.
Here are some of Demi Moore's saddest confessions about her life.
Pressured into drugs
While Moore has become more open about her personal life in recent years, she's always
been a bit of a sharer.
When she spoke to the Lawrence Journal-World back in 1985, the up-and-coming starlet revealed
that she started messing around with drugs when she first arrived in Tinseltown.
She explained,
"I moved out of my mother's house when I was 15.
I traveled a lot as a kid...and I never felt I had any roots, any friends.
So I became obsessed with the idea of being liked."
According to Moore, she found the "sudden burst of fame" that General Hospital gave
her very difficult to navigate.
But she wasn't used to being around Hollywood types, and so she did what she felt she had
to do in order to be accepted.
She confessed,
"I got involved with drugs because I was young and didn't know how to become part of the
crowd."
Body value
Using her General Hospital exposure to book some movie gigs, Moore appeared in 1984's
Blame It on Rio and 1986's About Last Night, though those early roles weren't exactly empowering,
as Moore was little more than eye candy.
"Well you know how it is, Dad.
When you're hot, you're hot."
She told The New York Times in 2019,
"When I was younger, I was obligated to be of service.
I wouldn't be loved if I wasn't, if I didn't give of myself.
My value was tied into my body."
On Good Morning America, she recalled one studio executive from her past saying:
"If there wasn't going to be a sex scene, then you know, why was I in it?"
A decade after About Last Night came out, Moore was starring in a now infamous movie
called Striptease, but this time she was taking her clothes off because she wanted to.
Moore later confessed to The Guardian that she'd always been "uncomfortable" with her
body.
She took on the role of an FBI secretary-turned-stripper in Striptease because she wanted to feel,
quote, "female and seductive" for the first time.
She added,
"It was difficult for me to do the dancing and the stripping, and the gain from it was
different to what I would have imagined.
While the public perception was hyper-focused on what I was being paid for taking my clothes
off, for me it was the intense focus of connecting with my body and myself in a sensual, sexual
way, in a way that I've never felt before."
Equal pay
Moore was reportedly paid $12.5 million for Striptease, according to The Guardian.
While that's still a considerable sum for any actress, back in the mid-90s, a woman
commanding this kind of fee was pretty much unheard of.
However, Moore knew that she was a hot property and understandably wanted to be paid accordingly.
The Striptease fee became a point of contention among critics, but the fact of the matter
is her husband at the time, Bruce Willis, was earning just as much per picture, if not
more.
She's considered a trailblazer today, but Moore has claimed that her equal pay demands
got her the cold shoulder in Hollywood.
She told The New York Times,
"With that came a lot of negativity and a lot of judgment towards me."
She went on to say that she's happy to have suffered through this if it made a difference
in terms of gender equality in the long run.
According to fellow actress Gwyneth Paltrow, it most definitely made a difference.
Paltrow said of Moore,
"She became a movie star in this time where women didn't naturally fit into the system.
She was really the first person who fought for pay equality and got it, and really suffered
a backlash from it.
We all certainly benefited from her."
A "crushing" failure
Unfortunately, Moore's performance in Striptease earned her a Golden Raspberry Award for worst
actress.
And when her next big movie, G.I.
Jane, failed to impress, the actress was forced to take a hard look at herself.
She told The Guardian,
"I took a lot of criticism, a lot of heat.
[I] got hit really hard for both of these films, I think because there was a lot of
money attached to it…Both these movies combined to give me some big lessons.
I feel I betrayed women with Striptease and men with G.I.
Jane."
Moore played the first woman to go through Navy SEAL training in director Ridley Scott's
G.I.
Jane.
To her credit, she did her research for the role, but the film was still called out for
inaccuracies by military veterans.
Retired SEAL Tom Hawkins told The Baltimore Sun,
"The way they present training is bloody way off the mark."
When Moore sat down with The New York Times in 2019, she was still sore about the harsh
criticism that G.I.
Jane received.
She said,
"They weren't going to let me win.
That, to the little girl in me, that was crushing."
Unhealthy obsession
During her candid 2007 interview with The Guardian, Moore revealed that she developed
an unhealthy obsession with working out and dieting around the time she was making Striptease
and G.I.
Jane.
Both pictures required her to be in peak physical condition, but she found herself going way
beyond the call of duty while training.
"And I, like, cross the finish line, literally take a right turn, puke my guts out, get back
in there."
Eventually, it caught up with her.
She explained,
"After G.I.
Jane I was burnt out.
I stopped work and I stopped exercising.
I realized I needed to come from the inside and find a sense of peace.
I realized being thin did not equal happiness."
When she sat down with Elle UK in 2011, Moore claimed that she was finally happy with her
body, revealing that her, quote, "extreme obsession" with it was finally over.
She explained,
"I made it a measure of my own value.
I tried to dominate it, which I did, and I changed it multiple times over.
But it never lasted and ultimately it didn't bring me anything but temporary happiness."
The actress went on to say that being thin doesn't "resolve anything."
Health trouble
Around the same time she spoke about that obsession, the press linked Moore's dramatic
weight loss to her turbulent personal life.
When she stepped out for the premiere of the movie Margin Call reportedly looking, as the
New York Daily News put it, "even more gaunt than usual," people were quick to blame it
on then-husband Ashton Kutcher's alleged infidelity.
He was said to have allegedly spent the night of his and Moore's sixth wedding anniversary
at a hotel with a 22-year-old blonde, who, according to the Daily Mail, sold her story
to the tabloids.
The stress of all the headlines was most likely a factor, but when she talked with The New
York Times to promote her memoir, Inside Out, in 2019, Moore revealed what was really going
on.
The actress was experiencing autoimmune and digestive problems, and things got pretty
serious.
She explained,
"Something was going on, including my organs slowly shutting down.
The root was a major heavy viral load."
Luckily, she was able to recover.
Blaming herself
Moore makes a number of confessions in her tell all memoir, Inside Out, but the most
painful of the lot has to do with her and Kutcher.
She and her younger former husband finalized their divorce in 2013.
However, it wasn't until six years later that Moore revealed she was once pregnant with
Kutcher's child, something she'd dreamed about since the pair got together.
When The Guardian asked if she wanted kids with Kutcher back in 2007, she said,
"We would love that.
It would be just fantastic.
We are doing lots of practicing.
And you can't complain about practicing with him."
What Moore didn't reveal was that she had already been pregnant with Kutcher's baby.
It happened not long after they first started hooking up in 2003, though sadly she suffered
a miscarriage six months into the pregnancy, losing their little girl.
She told The New York Times that she and Kutcher would later seek fertility treatments, but
it just wasn't meant to be for them.
Moore reportedly blamed herself and turned to alcohol and Vicodin to help deal with the
loss of her unborn child.
Battling ageism
As of 2019, Moore is in her 50s, but she's actually been struggling with Hollywood ageism
for years.
When she spoke to Red magazine back in 2007, the actress confessed that she was coming
off "a challenging few years" in the industry.
She explained,
"I am not 20, not 30.
There aren't that many good roles for women over 40.
A lot of them don't have much substance, other than being someone's mother or wife."
Moore wasn't ready to play those kinds of roles, and that unfortunately meant no roles
at all.
She made a big comeback in the 2003 reboot of Charlie's Angels, but she started booking
less and less parts as the years went by.
She told The New York Times,
"They'd say they don't really know what to do with you, where to place you.
I was like, 'Oh, well is that supposed to flatter me?'"
Losing teeth
Moore has been pretty open and honest about her health issues, both the physical and the
mental ones.
In 2017, she told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that she'd been suffering from stress
so much that she ended up losing her two front teeth as a result.
"I think it's, literally, probably after heart disease, one of the biggest killers in America,
which is stress.
Stress sheared off my front tooth."
Mental health issues remain close to Moore's heart.
When she was named Woman of the Year by the Los Angeles-based women's recovery center
Friendly House in 2018, the actress reminded those there to honor her that everyone struggles
from time to time.
According to Variety, she said,
"Life is certainly not a straight line.
I know that in a moment of great struggle for me, I reached out to a wise teacher and
I expressed my fear that I wasn't good enough and she said, 'You will never be good enough
but you can know that value of your worth.
Put down the measuring stick.'"
According to Moore, receiving this award was all the acknowledgement she needed.
Family lies
When Moore was 15, she found out that the man who raised her wasn't her real father,
and the revelation rocked her world.
While speaking to The Guardian in 2007, she said that she would never keep such a huge
secret from her own children.
She added,
"If I didn't step out of how hurtful that was, it would have been mind-twisting for
me."
The movie star also told the British newspaper that she often had to play the parent at home,
claiming she, quote, "took it all on."
Things only got worse when her stepfather took his own life.
Her mother hit the bottle hard in an attempt to cope with the loss, but Moore didn't let
the experience break her.
She explained,
"You could either be trapped by what was going on around you, or you could find a way out.
I think that everything, even if it is scary or good, comes into our life to help elevate
and expand us as human beings."
Saving mom
Losing one parent to suicide is bad enough, but in Moore's case, it could have quite easily
been two.
According to The New York Times, Moore's mother would make regular attempts to take her own
life, and her stepdad would often seek Moore's help in those situations.
When she spoke to Harper's Bazaar for a cover story interview in 2019, Moore recalled a
harrowing incident in which she had to save her mother from an overdose, saying,
"I remember...using my fingers, the small fingers of a child, to dig the pills my mother
had tried to swallow out of her mouth while my father held it open and told me what to
do.
Something very deep inside me shifted then, and it never shifted back.
My childhood was over."
The pair reconciled later in life, but they didn't get to spend as much time together
as they would have liked.
According to Fox News, Moore's mother died of a brain tumor in New Mexico in 1998.
If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).