Demi Moore

Demi Moore is an American actress whose four-decade career has produced multiple 1980s and 1990s Hollywood lead performances and substantial public visibility through her personal life. She was born Demi Gene Guynes on November 11, 1962, in Roswell, New Mexico, into a turbulent working-class family — she was raised across multiple states by her stepfather Danny Guynes (whom she initially believed to be her biological father) until his suicide when she was 18. She left high school at 16 to pursue modeling and acting in Los Angeles.

Her career-launching breakthrough came as Jackie Templeton on ABC's daytime soap opera General Hospital (1982–1983) and her transition to film with Blame It on Rio (1984). She joined the 1980s Hollywood "Brat Pack" through Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire (1985, opposite Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Mare Winningham). Her commercial peak came across the 1990–1996 period.

Major roles included Jerry Zucker's romantic supernatural drama Ghost (1990, opposite Patrick Swayze — a film that grossed over $500 million worldwide and made her the highest-grossing actress of 1990), Adrian Lyne's Indecent Proposal (1993, opposite Robert Redford and Woody Harrelson), Andrew Bergman's Striptease (1996 — for which she was paid $12.5 million, making her the highest-paid actress in Hollywood history at that time), and Ridley Scott's G.I. Jane (1997 — for which she shaved her head on camera). Her parallel 1991 Vanity Fair magazine cover, photographed by Annie Leibovitz while seven months pregnant, became one of the most-iconic American magazine covers of the 1990s.

Her career trajectory shifted in the early 2000s following her marriage to Ashton Kutcher (2005–2013). The 2024 horror film The Substance opposite Margaret Qualley won her the 2025 Best Actress Golden Globe Award and earned her first Best Actress Academy Award nomination at age 62 — making her one of the 2020s American Hollywood-comeback stories. She continues to work selectively across film and TV.

Her name Demi has multiple proposed origins, including a Greek short form of Demetria (the Greek goddess of grain) or a French "half" derivation. Demi has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.