December 3
Julianne Moore
On this date in 1960, actress Julianne Moore (née Julie Anne Smith) was born in Fayetteville, N.C. Her mother was a Scottish social worker and her father an American military judge. She traveled around the world with her parents, graduating from Frankfurt American High School in Germany in 1979. Julianne earned her bachelor of fine arts degree from the School of the Performing Arts in Boston University in 1983.
After appearing in theater, TV soaps, miniseries and TV movies, she caught directors’ eyes when appearing in supporting roles in several movies, including “The Fugitive” (1993). Her breakthrough role was in “Safe” (1995), followed by movies such as “Nine Months” (1995), “Assassins” (1995), “Surviving Picasso” (1996), playing Dora Maar, “Boogie Nights” (1997), “The Big Lebowski” (1998), “An Ideal Husband” (1999), “Magnolia” (1999), “End of the Affair” (1999), “Evolution” (2001), “The Hours” (2002), “Far From Heaven” (2002), “The Kids Are All Right” (2010) and “Crazy, Stupid, Love” (2011).
Moore went on to give an Academy Award-winning Best Actress performance in 2014 as an Alzheimer’s patient in “Still Alice” and was named Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for “Maps to the Stars,” also in 2014. She also appeared in the final two films of “The Hunger Games” series and starred in the spy film “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” (2017). She is a pro-choice advocate who is active with Planned Parenthood.
She co-starred with Tilda Swinton in “The Room Next Door” in 2024, Pedro Almodóvar‘s first English-language feature film which won the Golden Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
Moore married actor and stage director John Gould Rubin in 1986, and after a 1995 divorce started a relationship in 1996 with Bart Freundlich, her director on “The Myth of Fingerprints.” They have a son, Caleb, born in 1997, and a daughter, Liv, born in 2002. Moore and Freundlich married in August 2003.
PHOTO: Moore in London at the premiere of “The Room Next Door” in 2024; photo by Raph_PH under CC 2.0.
“She says she doesn’t believe in God and has a strong sense that meaning is imposed on a chaotic world. ‘I learned when my mother died five years ago that there is no there there.’ ”
— Interview, "Julianne Moore Believes in Therapy, Not God," The Hollywood Reporter (Jan. 28, 2015)
Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Joseph Conrad
On this date in 1857, author Joseph Conrad, né Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski, was born in Russian-occupied Poland. His father, a writer and poet, was exiled with his family to Russia for working for Polish independence. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1865, and his father of the same disease in 1869. The teenager went to live with his uncle until signing up as a seaman in the French merchant navy at age 17.
His many adventures included gun-running. He eventually spent 16 years in the British merchant navy and saw Australia, Malaysia, South America, the Congo and the South Pacific. His eastern travels later became favorite settings for his novels. Conrad became a naturalized British citizen in 1884 and settled down at age 36 to write. Although English was his third language, he wrote in that tongue to great acclaim. His first novel, Almayer’s Folly, set in Malaysia, came out in 1895, followed by Lord Jim (1900), the novella Heart of Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and many other books.
In her review of Jeffrey Meyers’ biography of Conrad, Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “Though he was born Roman Catholic, Conrad acknowledged no religion and wrote of the supernatural only as superstition. … His masters were Flaubert, Turgenev and Henry James.” (“The Man Who Detested the Sea,” New York Times, April 14, 1991)
Conrad himself wrote, in a Dec. 22, 1902, letter to Edward Garnett, “I always, from the age of fourteen, disliked the Christian religion, its doctrines, ceremonies and festivals.” (The Conradian, the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society, 2005)
At age 39 in 1896, he married Jessie George, a working-class Englishwoman 16 years his junior. They had two sons, Borys and John. Conrad died at home in 1924 of an apparent heart attack. Jessie, who had grown to be morbidly obese during their marriage, died 12 years later and was interred with him. (D. 1924)
“The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.”
— Conrad, "A Personal Record" (1912)
Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Amanda Seyfried
On this date in 1985, actress Amanda Michelle Seyfried was born in Allentown, Pa., to Ann (née Sander) and Jack Seyfried. Her mother was an occupational therapist and her father was a pharmacist. She signed a modeling contract in Allentown at age 8, took piano, vocal and acting lessons and became involved in high school theater productions, particularly ones in which she got to sing.
“I went to church when I was a kid every Sunday, and as boring as it was for me, it was still nice to gather and make music. I didn’t necessarily agree with everything, but it was nice to be with my family and my grandparents and friends and something to look forward to.” (New York Times, Dec. 20, 2025)
Her acting career started as a teen as an extra in the soap opera “Guiding Light,” with recurring roles in the soaps “As the World Turns” and “All My Children.” The teen comedy “Mean Girls” (2004) was her debut film appearance. She worked regularly in films and television for several years. (As of this writing in 2025 she had 78 acting credits on IMDb.)
Seyfried (pronounced SIGH-fred) appeared on 11 episodes in 2004-06 of “Veronica Mars” with Kristen Bell in the title role. After other movie and TV roles, she appeared in 44 episodes of HBO’s “Big Love” (2006-11) as a daughter in a polygamous Mormon family in Utah. In the rom-com film “Mamma Mia!” (2008) with an ensemble cast including Meryl Streep, Seyfried’s vocal talents were showcased and the soundtrack was Grammy-nominated.
Those talents were also displayed in “Les Misérables” (2012) and the sequel “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” in 2018. She married actor Thomas Sadoski after they eloped in March 2017. Their daughter Nina was born that year and a son Thomas followed in 2020.
She struggled with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder and started taking the medication Lexapro long-term when she was 19. In her 30s, she decided to “explore my spirituality in a different way with Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher, and meditate, climb mountains and just sit with myself, which I had never done. That really opened up something for me, like a complete spiritual awakening, for sure.” (Ibid., New York Times)
Seyfried gave a musical tour-de-force performance in “The Testament of Ann Lee” (2025), not a traditional musical but one in which music and dancing are integral to the film. It is based on the 18th-century life of Lee, who founded a Quaker spinoff in England called the Quaking Shakers because of the music and ecstatic dancing that characterized their worship. Many followers saw “Mother Lee” as the female equivalent to Christ.
After serving several jail terms for breaking the Sabbath and blasphemy, Lee brought the sect to New York state in 1774 and had four children who all died in infancy. The Shakers slowly expanded in New England and grew to about 6,000 members. (Due to its doctrine of celibacy, by 2025, only three known members were left.)
Lee came to believe that sexual lust had caused the fall of humankind and only through celibacy could God’s earthly kingdom be furthered. The song “Come Life, Shaker Life” includes the lyric “Shake, shake out of me, all that is carnal.” The song was rewritten slightly by Richie Havens without attribution in 1968.
“Life is hard, which is why we search for a higher power — whether it be God or Mother Nature, Jesus — it doesn’t really matter who your higher power is … whether it’s a woman or a man or an elephant or a fucking cat. It’s that these entities make you feel safe,” Seyfried told Religion News Service. (Dec. 22, 2025)
“What [Lee] preached was community and compassion and kindness,” Seyfried said. “She created a — not a cult, not like a religious movement — but more like a utopia” based on total equality of the sexes and races. (Yahoo.com, Dec. 24, 2025)
PHOTO: Seyfried’s voice roles included one as Ellie in “Family Guy” in 2018; photo under CC 3.0.
“I’m not a religious person. No, I see it as that she didn’t eat and she was hallucinating — she was dying, and she hallucinated seeing Adam and Eve and seeing the devil.”
— Seyfried, on whether Ann Lee was truly a prophet or subject to other influences. (Variety, Dec. 12, 2025)
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
