The “risky, absolutely unique” movie Demi Moore wasn’t sure she wanted to make
There are two things I remember vividly about the film Ghost, starring Demi Moore; firstly, that when it was released in the UK in 1990, it was a ‘15’ and my best friend and I were only 12, but managed to get into the cinema to see it, which was incredibly exciting.
The second was that the end of it was unimaginably sad, and I had to fight for my life not to cry, and thus lose face in front of my friend for being pathetic, because when I looked over, he seemed fine.
If you want a third fact, it’s that the film was absolutely huge when it was released, almost everyone went to see it, and the main song from the movie, ‘Unchained Melody’ by The Righteous Brothers, topped the charts for seemingly months on end. The pottery scene in the movie became one of the most famous and most parodied of the era, and lots of women wanted a husband like Patrick Swayze, only alive, obviously.
And it also made a global star of Demi Moore, who was a known face from the mid-’80s as part of the ‘Brat Pack’ but was yet to have a breakout hit before signing on to the film. For the uninitiated, Ghost tells the story of a young couple living in New York who are on a night out when Swayze’s character is mugged and murdered, leaving Moore distraught and Swayze, who is now a ghost, trying to work out what happened and keep her safe.
Thanks to a very amusing turn from Whoopi Goldberg as a rubbish psychic, things start to fall into place, and eventually Swayze is allowed to go off to heaven after giving Moore his blessing to have a great life without him, which was the moment at which I definitely didn’t cry in the cinema.
Moore wasn’t sure about whether to take the role of bereaved artist ‘Molly Jensen’ initially, however, saying at the time: “I think it’s a totally risky, absolutely unique film. I deliberated for a month before I made the decision to do it… If they asked you to do a love story about a dead guy, I think you’d be a little wary. There were a lot of elements for me that were scary, and I think that they really pulled it off. They really made it work.”
She was probably pretty happy she did, however, given the movie made half a billion dollars, was nominated for five Oscars, including a win for Goldberg, and made her one of the most in-demand female stars of the early ‘90s, leading to her appearing in blockbuster movies like Indecent Proposal, A Few Good Men and Disclosure.
Things only started to go slightly awry for Moore when she took on a then-record fee to star in the soft porn-ish Striptease in 1995 and then the fairly panned action movie G.I. Jane a year later.
Although she had several years in the wilderness, she came back in some style last year with the astonishing Substance, a ‘leave it all on the field’ performance that won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress and introduced her to a new generation of film fans.
Aside from her recent TV work alongside Billy Bob Thornton in the neo-Western Landman on Paramount Plus, Moore is also working on a sci-fi comedy called I Love Boosters and a space-related movie called Strange Arrivals, which tells the tale of an American interracial couple in America who claimed they had been abducted by aliens. Sure.
