There are people, seemingly fragile, who have impressive strength. This is the case of Demi Moore who, with her character of Lieutenant O’Neill, showed us an energy and power that went unnoticed in Ghost. Today, at sixty-two years old, the actress is better than everthanks to The substance, the film in which he stars alongside Margaret QualleyAndy MacDowell’s daughter who impacted Once upon a time in Hollywood. In these weeks of promotion and premiere of The substance, Demi Moore has revealed personal details, many of them until now little known, about her valiant fight, which almost cost her her life, against an eating disorder which developed as soon as felt pressure from producers and agents to lose weight.
In those first Hollywood moments, he stopped loving himself and respecting his body. She did everything she could to become someone she wasn’t by harming herself. This battle to meet the expectations of others, and conform to established beauty canons, has been fought by many other stars from the world of entertainment, catwalks and even royalty: from Victoria of Sweden to Demi Lovato, passing by Mary-Kate Olsen, Lady Gaga, Kate Moss, Jessica Alba, Christina Ricci or Christina Aguilera, to name just a few; All of them are the best indication of the incidence of those disorders that cause a rejection of your own body. Demi Moore, in an act of bravery, has looked back, acknowledged her suffering and given an inspiring speech so that those who are going through those dark moments know that there is a way out and that it necessarily passes. for accepting oneself as one isbeyond the comments, often viperine or insensitive, of others.
© GETTY IMAGESDemi Moore or how to overcome humiliation
In a recent interview with Elle Magazine, Demi Moore has recalled the humiliation she felt when a producer called her repeatedly to strongly suggest that I had to lose weight. “I internalized it,” he revealed. Those comments caused her to go into continuous conflict with his figure and she unconsciously thought that her value as a person lay in molding the perfect silhouette, one that suited the Hollywood taste of those years: “It took me to a point of torture and hardness against myself, of really extreme behavior, in which almost everyone value of what I was depended on my body being a certain way.
When Demi Moore wrote her memoirs, Inside Out, published in 2019, he did not hesitate to affirm that “for years I was spiraling on a path of self-destruction.” To be fair, Hollywood was not solely responsible for this rocky path. The actress’s difficult childhood did not help at all: an absent father, an alcoholic mother, endemic instability and one delicate health –she underwent two operations to correct her strabismus and suffered kidney dysfunction–, was accompanied by a traumatic episode of sexual abuse when she was a teenager.
Nothing suggested that Demi Moore would rise again and that, like the Phoenix, she would be able to be reborn from her ashes again and again. Bruce Willis gave him the security he needed and it also gave him the most important thing in his life: his three daughters. Then there would be separation, divorce and eternal friendship with one of the actors harder of Hollwood. Obsessed with staying relevant in a relentless industry, fell in love with Ashton Kutcher. She felt that her relationship with an actor sixteen years younger than her gave her a second chance not only in her wounded heart, but also in the Mecca of Cinema. With Ashton she became the ‘queen’ of the networks, at the very beginning of establishing their empire, but everything went to hell. Demi Moore, with the weight of unforgiving age, continued to fight alone to reinvent herself and remain current.
© GETTY IMAGESThroughout his career, he has overcome serious episodes of a rampant ED (Eating Disorder). In the eighties, some producer, as we told at the beginning of these lines, insisted on his fatness, after his role in Do you remember last night (1986), and that deeply humiliated her. A decade later, after rigorous training and torturous diets, his body seemed to have been molded with a chisel to star. the most discussed Striptease. This film, of dubious quality, was, however, a milestone for actresses in the film industry: for the first time, Demi Moore’s astronomical salary (twelve and a half million dollars) was equal to that of her male peers. But she still had more barriers to overcome and taboos to break: her pregnant nude in 1991 earned so many fierce criticisms that the actress barely managed to overcome the trauma.
However, in Demi Moore’s life there is a leitmotiv: what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. And she grows with difficulties. If Hollywood rejected her because of her physique, and then because of her age, she triumphs at sixty-two years old with a film that talks precisely about that: about aesthetic pressure. If she suffered first-hand fierce criticism for her nudity in the nineties, in 2019 she did it again and silenced more than one. If her married life with Bruce Willis was always in question, her beautiful story of friendship and unconditionality with her “ex” moves everyone.
Demi Moore, from the vantage point of sixty-two years, defies the passage of time in her body, although her statements and performances are increasingly wiser. If after her pregnancies she was able to cycle almost one hundred kilometers a day to lose weight: “The mere idea of what I did to my body is crazy. It’s ridiculous!”
© GETTY IMAGESAssume insecurities
All of the above does not mean that overnight Demi Moore has managed to overcome her insecurities and continually laugh at herself. He’s made a lot of progress, but it’s a long journey and, as with everything, some relapses are part of the process: “Some days I look at myself and think, ‘Wow, this is pretty good.’ Other days I catch myself analyzing, concentrating too much on what I see and I don’t like (…) The difference is that now I can realize it. I can say, ‘Yeah, I don’t like this sagging skin,’ but you know: it is what it is. Today I am going to take advantage of the best I have instead of pursuing what I don’t like.”
She is by no means the first nor the last to face these problems. According to recent studies, between one and two percent of adolescents – we cannot forget that it is not just a female health problem – suffer from eating disorders. Therefore, although there are millions of people who know first-hand what this self-destructive relationship with your body entails, the most famous faces are those who have made the problem better visible and provide a note of hope to those who are immersed in them: no matter how As difficult as it may seem, these disorders are overcome.
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© GETTY IMAGESHow can we forget Audrey Hepburn and her extreme thinness? As she was, discreet and elegant, He dealt with anorexia nervosa. He soon learned that part of his success lay in that delicate silhouette, almost like a flower stem, that the public liked so much: “If in the past I managed to survive with hardly any food, I could also do it now. I was forced to control my food intake.” Decades later, another of the most elegant actresses that the Seventh Art has produced, Jessica Albawho in a meeting organized by Gwyneth Paltrow, confessed that at the beginning of her career “she stopped eating,” but not to get a role but because of the fear she felt in front of male gazes.
In 2017, Lily Collinsbefore becoming famous for Emily in Paris, starred in the film to the bones. It was not difficult for the actress to play the role of a young anorexic woman because, as a teenager, she began “to starve, to exercise obsessively. I became addicted to diet pills and laxatives. “I couldn’t handle the pain and confusion after my father’s divorce.” Lady Gagachampion of the recording industry, also told of his bitter experience with lto anorexia and bulimia since the age of fifteen. “In high school she wanted to be a slim, little dancer, but in reality she was a little, voluptuous Italian girl who her father fed meatballs every night.”
Years ago, Demi Moore said: “When we are angry, hurt or bitter, we grow old.” Or what is the same when we don’t love ourselves, we harm ourselves. The great ladies of cinema and music come clean so that no one goes through everything they went through.