DATE: Sunday, May 25, 1997                  TAG: 9705230197

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E16  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   80 lines

MOORE TRAVELS LONG ROAD TO STARDOM

LAST YEAR, with appearances in Robert Altman's ``Short Cuts'' and Louis Malle's adaptation of ``Vanya on 42nd Street,'' Julianne Moore was the darling of the art-house circuit.

This week, the redhead is screaming a lot and carrying a baby dinosaur. She's Steven Spielberg's leading lady - paleontologist Sarah Harding - in the rush-to-see mainstream screecher, ``The Lost World: Jurassic Park.''

It's quite a metamorphosis.

``I didn't grow up wanting to be a movie star,'' Moore said. ``Greer Garson and Bette Davis never seemed like real people to me. My father was a military judge in the Army and I grew up living on 23 bases everywhere, including Virginia. I got hooked on the theater in Frankfurt, Germany, when, as a teen-ager, I did `Tartuffe' and `Barefoot in the Park.' It grew from that.''

She was sitting near the steps of Universal Studios' Site B: the destroyed laboratory in ``Lost World'' where the dinosaurs were created. Soon, trams of tourists will start riding through it.

``I hung off a cliff right over there,'' Moore said, pointing across the Universal lot. ``Actually, I was just a few feet off the ground.''

In that same harrowing scene, Moore falls on a glass window above the rocks and pounding surf. The audience gasps when the glass starts cracking.

``I was held by a harness,'' she said. ``The studio was freezing. They had to keep it cold so all the machinery would work. Don't ask. I never understood what was going on. The cracks in the glass were all done digitally later.''

Most of ``The Lost World'' was filmed on the Universal back lot. There were four days of exterior shots in Hawaii. The San Diego scenes were shot in Burbank.

``Steven saw me in `The Fugitive' a few years ago,'' Moore recalled. ``I don't know what he could have seen in me. I was only in the film for about three minutes. He had me flown out to Hollywood to do a test.

``Then, it was years before I got the call for this. The main question Steven had was, `Are you athletic?' There was lots of running. I'm 5-3 and both the leading men (Jeff Goldblum and Vince Vaughn) are over 6-3. I was always having to play catch-up with them.''

The toughest part of filming, she said, was carrying that baby dinosaur. ``It weighed 65 pounds and it kept kicking me in the stomach. It was operated by remote control by a team of puppeteers. It was a living being to me. I forgot that I could have asked the puppeteer guys to have it stop kicking me.''

She had a not-to-be-forgotten scene in ``Short Cuts,'' appearing bottomless while she carried on a lengthy breakfast conversation with Matthew Modine. She got the part after Madeleine Stowe hesitated. ``If you saw me in `Short Cuts,' then you know I'm a real redhead,'' she said, laughing.

Audiences will see more of Moore in ``Boogie Nights,'' an expose of the 1970s porn industry opening in August. She plays an actress named Amber Waves. ``She's a very poignant character. It's a good part,'' Moore said.

Currently, she's finishing ``The Big Lebowski,'' the Coen brothers' first film since ``Fargo.'' Jeff Bridges and John Goodman co-star. ``The Coens are the most together guys,'' Moore said. ``One finishes the other's sentence. It's a movie about mistaken identities. It's their version of `The Big Sleep.' ''

Stardom is a long way from the waitress job Moore had when she first went to New York. After getting a drama degree from Boston University, she got a job on the daytime drama, ``As the World Turns,'' as good and evil twins Frannie and Sabrina. Hollywood quickly called and she had scene-stealing roles in ``The Hand that Rocks the Cradle'' and ``Benny and Joon.''

People magazine hailed her as the next Julia Roberts, but her mainstream films, the Hugh Grant comedy ``Nine Months'' and the Sylvester Stallone action flick ``Assassins,'' fizzled.

Until now.

``Making a Spielberg movie may be physically challenging, but it's a luxury - like being in an independent movie, even though it's big,'' Moore said. ``The main thing I like about my part is that she's an independent woman. She's not a wimp.

``Little girls can go to the movie and want to be like her. She's fearless. Roles like that don't come along for women too often.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

Julianne Moore, center, stars in ``The Lost World: Jurassic Park.''

Moore says she likes that her paleontologist character in the movie

is an ``independent woman.'' KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY MOVIES

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu