Born Julie Anne Smith, Big was born December 30, 1961, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The daughter of a social psychiatrist and a military judge, a young Julianne lived the nomadic lifestyle that often characterizes army families, and called nearly two dozen places home throughout her formative years.

Abrupt moves between such distinct locales as Panama, Germany and Alaska made for a childhood of perpetual transition, but one static element in Julianne's life was her passion for acting. A love of reading had instilled in her a sense of fiction, and being raised by a psychiatrist and a judge had given her a window into the world of emotional drama. Theater clubs and school productions were a constant for Julianne, regardless of location, and upon her high-school graduation, she had settled upon pursuing an acting career.

Julianne's parents initially balked at the notion of her entering the insecure acting job market, but a compromise was reached whereby she would attend university, majoring in drama but benefitting from a well-rounded education. By 1983, Julianne had fulfilled her part of the bargain, receiving her B.F.A. from Boston University's School of the Performing Arts. Still intent on becoming a professional actor, Julianne moved to New York City to seek work. It didn't take her long to find it, and she was soon appearing in a number of off-Broadway theater productions.

In 1984, Julianne landed her first television gig on the series The Edge of the Night, and shortly thereafter won a regular role on the daytime soap As the World Turns, which proved to be a turning point in the careers of fellow thespians like Martin Sheen, Courteney Coxand Lauryn Hill -- and the case was no different for Julianne. In 1988, she was awarded a Daytime Emmy for her work on As the World Turns, and her visibility as an actor was upped considerably.

After a three-year stint, Julianne left the soap opera world, seeking to extend her resume to the big screen. Her first few movie roles in Slaughterhouse 2 (1988), Tales from the Darkside (1990) and the Madonna vehicle Body of Evidence (1992) -- were forgettable. A bit role in the 1992 thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle garnered Julianne some attention, but it wasn't until the next year that she really broke out on the big screen with two significant performances. Her role as a suspicious doctor in The Fugitive -- albeit a small one -- caught a number of eyes, amongst them those of Steven Spielberg, who was sufficiently impressed with Julianne to cast her in Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World (released in 1997) without an audition.

A second part, in Robert Altman's 1993 film Short Cuts, and one monologue in particular, would prove to be particularly memorable. In conjunction, these two roles established Julianne as an actress of great depth and range, and the job offers began to pour in.

The combination of a driven work ethic and a plethora of casting calls would make Julianne one of the hardest working actors of the '90s. Between 1990 and 2000, she appeared in 24 different films, tying her for eleventh place on the list for the decade with Robert De Niro.

In spite of the opportunity for career blunders that taking on such a large number of roles invited, Julianne's performances and the films that framed them, were often critically acclaimed. In 1994, Julianne received the Boston Film Critics' Society's Best Actress Award for her work in Vanya on 42nd Street. Her rendition of the character Amber Waves in 1997's Boogie Nights won her Supporting Actress awards from both the Los Angeles and the National Film Critics' Associations, as well as a Golden Satellite Award and an Academy Award nomination.

In 1999, she was rewarded with the National Board of Review's Best Supporting Actress Award for her parts in Magnolia, An Ideal Husband, Cookie's Fortune and A Map of the World. She received a second Oscar nomination for 1999's The End of the Affair, and garnered further respect for her roles in Gus Van Sant's remake of the classic Hitchcock thriller Psycho (1998), Hannibal (2001) and The Shipping News (2001). She also showed her comedic versatility in a cameo in The Ladies Man and the ill-fated Evolution.

In 1997, while working on the film The Myth of Fingerprints, Julianne began seeing writer-director Bart Freundlich. Soon thereafter, over the course of 37 hours of labor that spanned Julianne's birthday, she gave birth to the couple's first child, Caleb. While Julianne has already been married to actor John Gould Rubin from 1984 to 1995, she is still happily involved with Freundlich; the couple recently welcomed their daughter, Liv, into the world.

But don't expect motherhood to slow Julianne down -- she's slated to appear in a number of upcoming films, including Far From Heaven and Paris Underground.