At 62, Demi Moore Wins Best Actress at SAG Awards and Marches Toward Potential Oscar Win

After 47 years of acting in $1.6 billion worth of hit films, yet earning no major acting awards whatsoever, at 62 The Substance star Demi Moore is on a winning streak that just won’t stop. “There’s been beauty and joy in each moment,” she said at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Feb. 23, where she won outstanding performance by a female actor in a lead role (i.e., Best Actress). She also won the best actress awards at the Golden Globes — the first major acting award of her life — on Jan. 5, at the Critics Choice Awards Feb. 7, and also at AARP’s Movies for Grownups Awards (telecast Feb. 23). Most Hollywood pundits predict that she’ll win at the Oscars on March 2.

Moore told the SAG audience she joined the actors union at 15. “It changed my life because it gave me meaning. It gave me purpose. It gave direction. I was a kid on my own who had no blueprint for life. I knew nothing about acting, but I watched and I listened and I learned from all of you. You have all been my greatest teachers. I am so grateful that I have continued over these so many years to be able to try and sometime succeed and sometimes fail and to be able to keep going.”

At AARP’s Movies for Grownups Awards, Moore said, "You know, if you had told me in my 20s that my 60s would be the best moments of my life, I wouldn't have believed it. You couldn't pay me to be 21 again." She said The Substance, about an actress who takes an anti-aging drug with calamitous consequences, "forces us to look at the way society views beauty, aging and self worth. But the more important question really is not what society is doing to us, but what we're doing to ourselves." She argued that The Substance isn't just a horror hit, it's a movie to change attitudes, starting with every one of us. "I truly believe that the world outside will change with us, and it can't happen the other way around."

When her winning streak began at the Golden Globes, she said, “Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress.’ And at that time, I made that to mean that (an award) wasn’t something that I was allowed to have. That I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged. I bought in, and I believed that, and that corroded me over time, to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it.”

Moore almost quit the business, but decided to take the role in The Substance and keep on going. She offered this advice to other grownups, whether they’re actors or not: “In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough or basically just not enough, I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’”