Beautiful, husky-voiced brunette Demi Moore (Demetria Gene Guynes) was born 1962 in Roswell, New Mexico. Her father left her mother, Victoria, before Demi was born. Her stepfather, Danny Guynes, didn't add much stability to her life, either. He frequently changed jobs and made the family move a total of 40 times. The parents kept on drinking, arguing and beating, until Guynes finally committed suicide.

Demi quit school at the age of 16 to work as a pin-up-girl. At 18, she married rock musician Freddie Moore; the marriage lasted four years. At 19, she became a regular on the TV show "General Hospital" (1963). From the first salaries, she started partying and sniffing cocaine. That lasted more than 3 years, until director Joel Schumacher fired her from the set of St. Elmo's Fire (1985) when she turned up high. She got a withdrawal treatment and returned clean after a week... and stayed clean.

Moore debuted on the big screen in 1981's Choices Roles in Parasite and Young Doctors in Love did nothing to advance her career, and she was almost in visible as Michael Caine's daughter in Blame It on Rio (1984). She finally got parts that commanded attention in No Small Affair (1984), St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and One Crazy Summer (both 1986), but aside from her voice, there seemed nothing exceptional about her. She won top billing in a supernatural thriller, The Seventh Sign (1988), and then managed to hold her own with more accomplished costars Robert De Niro and Sean Penn in We're No Angels (1989), prompting speculation-in some quarters, anyway-that hers was a talent worth developing.

Ghost (1990) paired her with Patrick Swayze, and gave her ample opportunity to emote. The film's enormous box-office success boosted Moore's stock in Hollywood and, to her credit, she gambled her newly bolstered popularity on Mortal Thoughts (1991), a small-scale, downbeat melodrama which she coproduced and costarred in (with husband Bruce Willis). As a working-class woman implicated in murder, Moore took on her biggest acting challenge-with impressive results. The all-star, lamebrain comedy Nothing But Trouble (1991) was a career setback if ever there was one, and The Butcher's Wife (1991), a full-fledged Moore vehicle, tried hard-perhaps too hard-to be a whimsical, low-key romantic comedy. Moore gave a spirited performance as a Navy lawyer in A Few Good Men (1992) opposite Tom Cruise, then did the best she could amid the silliness of Indecent Proposal (1993) as the devoted wife who sleeps with Robert Redford in order to earn a million bucks. She scored as a voracious high-tech executive in the thriller Disclosure (1994), then tackled the demanding role of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1995).

With determination and a skill for publicity stunts, like the nude appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair while pregnant, she made her way to fame. Since the huge commercial success of Ghost (1990) and the controversial pictures Indecent Proposal (1993) and Disclosure (1994), she's one of Hollywood's most sought-after and most expensive actresses.