She's been chased by dinosaurs and paparazzi, appeared in 40 movies, and been nominated for four oscars. Yet what really fascinates Julianne Moore's children about their mom has nothing to do with her career. "They ask me, 'What are those?'" she says, laughing and pointing at the hundreds of red freckles that cover her arms. "And it's true—they're extreme—looking! My kids want to know what happened to me."
The curiosity of her children, Cal and Liv, helped inspire Moore to write her first kids' book, Freckleface Strawberry. It's the story of a flame-haired girl who loathes her flame-colored freckles, and it takes its title from the nickname given to Moore by playmates when she was a kid in Omaha, Nebraska. Combining nostalgic illustrations by LeUyen Pham with a plucky kid's voice, the book ends happily, but it doesn't follow the usual child-hates-feature-but-learns-to-love-it arc. "The idea behind the book is that you never love your freckles—I still hate them," says the actress, who wrote the story's first draft in her Filofax on a plane before pitching it to publishers. "But you start to have more important things to worry about."
At the top of her priority list today are her children and her husband, film director Bart Freundlich, and their life together in New York City's West Village. Although Moore has been one of the most prolific actresses of the last two decades (appearing in everything from Short Cuts and Magnolia to Boogie Nights and the Jurassic Park sequel), these days she spends nine months a year knee-deep in the stuff of parenting: walking the kids to school, taking them to guitar lessons and gymnastics classes, cooking dinner. She picks roles in movies that film during the summer, so her family can accompany her. "My husband and I are very fortunate, because we have flexible jobs," Moore says. "If you talk to parents, that's what they're trying to do—have as much flexibility as possible."
Next Page: "There's this whole notion about motherhood and how it changes you, and that's just baloney."
