Demi Moore

St. Elmo's Fire in 1985 put Demi Moore inside the group of young actors the press insisted on calling the Brat Pack, a label she has never had much time for. About Last Night the following year did more for her than the group did, and by the end of the decade she was no longer being cast as somebody's friend. Then came Ghost in 1990, which grossed around $505 million and finished as the highest-grossing film of the year. Nobody involved had expected that.

The run that followed was commercially relentless. A Few Good Men in 1992, Indecent Proposal in 1993, Disclosure in 1994 - three films built around exactly the kind of adult subject matter the industry has since stopped making. In between, in August 1991, Annie Leibovitz photographed her seven months pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair, and the image did something the films could not. It changed how a pregnant body was allowed to be shown in public, and it is still being copied.

In 1996 she was paid $12.5 million for Striptease, which made her the highest-paid actress in the business to that point. The film was mauled. At the Golden Raspberry ceremony in March 1997 she was named Worst Actress for it, and for The Juror. G.I. Jane arrived later that year, she shaved her head for it in front of the cameras, and then her output dropped away sharply. The record-breaking fee and the Razzie sit about nine months apart.

This is where the then-and-now comparison stops being about appearance. The 2024 film The Substance handed her a character built out of precisely what Hollywood had done to her - a woman discarded for ageing - and she played it without flinching. In 2025 it brought a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild award and her first Academy Award nomination, at sixty-two. The peak years made her famous. It took three decades for the work to be taken seriously.