Celebrity
Demi Moore Reflects On Her 1991 Pregnancy Photoshoot For Vanity Fair
The actor said she “felt very empowered as a woman.”
In 1991, Demi Moore announced her pregnancy with a nude photoshoot on the cover of Vanity Fair, which caused uproarious backlash. Looking back now, she still thinks of the photoshoot as an “empowering” moment.
During an Oct. 13 event at the Hamptons International Film Festival — at which she was honored with the Career Achievement in Acting Award — Moore spoke about her decades-long career, from Ghost, G.I. Jane and Indecent Proposal to this fall’s The Substance.
When asked about the Vanity Fair shoot, for the magazine’s August 1991 issue, she said, “The thing that really struck me when there was so much back and forth about it, and part of what I felt in just showing up to do the shoot, was an honest expression of how I was feeling at that time. I felt very empowered as a woman. I felt sexy.”
Shot by Annie Leibovitz, the nude photos weren’t intended for editorial purposes, but for the actor’s personal use. The photographer later called Moore and asked if she’d be comfortable using them for the cover.
“An interesting thing that existed [and] that, thank God, we’ve grown and evolved [from], is that you were celebrated when you find out you’re pregnant, and you’re celebrated when the baby was born,” said Moore, who’d used the shoot to announce her pregnancy with her second daughter, Scout. “But in the in-between, you’re not supposed to remind anybody that you’ve ever had sex.”
Moore also shared some wisdom that Scout, now 33, has imparted on her.
“Scout said at one point, ‘I want to quit wasting time focusing on all that I’m not when I could be celebrating all that I am,’” Moore, who’s 61, recalled. “There are things I found wrong at 20, at 30, at 40, 50, and I can still look [for flaws]. The difference today is my ability to catch and reframe that [thinking, so I place value on] who I am, not what I do or how I look.”
