There is a joke doing the rounds about Demi Moore, the highest-paid actress in Hollywood: she shaved her head to play G I Jane in Ridley Scott's new movie because there was nothing else left for her to take off.
Moore's fleshfest Striptease is playing at a cinema near you - in fact, it is on at almost every cinema in town (Hong Kong, remember, is the only place outside Italy where the diabolical Showgirls turned a profit). Moore, as has been well-reported, was paid a then-record US$12.5 million (HK$97.5 million) to take her clothes off and star as a stripper in a sleazy Florida bar called the Eager Beaver. There was an immediate howl of protest: the first time an actress comes close to getting the salary of a leading man in Hollywood, and she is being paid to strip.
Moore, 33, mother-of-three, muscles positively rippling under a white T-shirt, does not see it that way, of course. 'It was for all women in the industry,' she says. 'It's perpetuating the positive influence women are having in film and therefore more movies will be made with women in the lead. They were willing to pay what they feel is in balance to what I'm bringing to the film, so they could guarantee a certain level of box office success.' The only problem was 'they' (producers Castle Rock) did not get that success. After 11 weeks of play in the United States, Striptease has brought in a weak US$32 million (in the same period of time, John Travolta's critically-panned Phenomenon raked in US$100 million). But the critics did not just pan Striptease - they savaged Moore.
USA Today called it a 'mess with breasts; Moore's body is in better shape than her acting'. The Washington Post opined: 'Moore seems to think she's striking a blow for feminism . . . talk about pulling yourself up by your bra straps'. The New York Times decided that Moore's desperate single mum in Striptease 'looks about as helpless as a live grenade'.
After a few high-profile flops (her revisionist The Scarlet Letter, where Hester Prynne was transformed into a rampant exhibitionist and The Juror, co-starring Alec Baldwin), the wisdom in Hollywood is that Moore is washed up, unless Scott can make her G I Jane work box-office magic. And she cannot look to her sisters for help; all the above reviews were written by women, and even Julia Roberts, recently paid US$12.5 million to star in My Best Friend's Sister, smirked: 'Whatever I've been paid, it's a lot, and, um, I've got my clothes on.' Why is everyone being so mean to Moore? Was it her sashay across talk show host David Letterman's desk in a G-string that turned her from the successful actress in Ghost, Indecent Proposal and A Few Good Men to what Allure magazine called 'the famously buff mother-of-three despised by unbuff mothers-of-three everywhere'? Did the sexual predator she played opposite Michael Douglas in 1994's Disclosure stick? Was it the two Vanity Fair covers, one shot when she was heavily pregnant? Or could it be that the marriage to mega action star Bruce Willis has now lasted way beyond expectations and produced three children, the oldest of which, Rumer, co-stars in Striptease ? Whatever Moore does, it seems to spell s-e-x. Even when she voiced Esmerelda, the heroine of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the cartoonists were inspired to draw the first Disney heroine with heaving breasts.
But she says: 'I think the perception is I have extreme confidence and comfort with my body. The truth is just the opposite. It's my discomfort with my body that has made me want to overcome that. So I've created situations for myself that have challenged me to remove my own self-imposed limitations towards my own body. It's about outside perception and what I feel about myself on the inside; it has been an ongoing effort to change that.