I‘m not one to actively condone typecasting an actor or actress, doomed to repeat variations on a similar or iconic role ad nauseum, but you’ve got to admit, several actors seemingly are gravitated to certain types of parts. Street Kings, Speed and Point Break aside, how many films starring Keanu Reeves have a science fiction slant? Heck, even the Korean romantic comedy remake, The Lake House, or the animated druggie-slacker picture A Scanner Darkly plays the ‘Whoa! Existence!’ factor. Now, some character actors you tend to seen playing the same role again and again. Need a senator or official military type? Fred Thompson is just a phone call away (well that is if he isn’t campaigning for office). Need a seedy and all around surly bad fellow? Prior to 1998, J.T. Walsh was your man. Need a nebbish intellectual or stammering well-meaning dad or academic? Bob Balaban should be available if he isn’t collaborating with Christopher Guest.

Take Julianne Moore, who has been the lead in enough films to not really qualify her as a character actor, yet certainly is not an ‘Above the Marquee’ woman in the same way Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones or Jodie Foster are. She splits her time between studio and indie projects and has directors she likes to collaborate with (in particular Todd Haynes and P.T. Anderson). She crosses nearly all genres of film from romantic-comedy, drama, and the occasional horror film and I’ll make no bones that I’m cherry picking her C.V. here to make a point or two.

There must be something about her red-head, ethereal complexion that inspires directors to maximize a hermetically sealed feeling about the roles she has played. Diseased women (or women surrounded by disease), slightly unhinged and smart women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Heck, even in a quirky over-the-top comedy like The Big Lebowski her mod-cut feminist boarding school accent/demeanor gives off the impression that she doesn’t go outside in the sunshine much, prescribing a physician with the efficient and ask-no-questions manner of, “He’s a good man. And thorough.”

So is it really surprising that in the upcoming disease epidemic, Fernando Meirelles adaptation of the prize winning novel Blindness that Moore is smack dab in the middle of disease ridden misery? Todd Haynes made her ‘allergic to the 20th century’ in Safe, perhaps the ultimate of the fragile roles that she has ever played. Where a simple nosebleed in a hair salon comes across as the monster reveal in Alien. Or for that matter a hacking cough while driving behind a smoke-belching cube-van is played out like a thriller set-piece.

Then P.T. Anderson, in Magnolia, a few years later would cast her as a pill popping, woefully high-strung trophy wife who is working her way (badly) through the slow cancerous death of her rich husband, who she has actually fallen in love with after her initial play for his money, and feels the crush weight of strange guilt threatening to snuff her out. An offhand (and perhaps slightly out-of-line) comment from the pharmacist while picking up a prescription sets her off in a fit of frustrated Tourettes-expressed rage. Anderson also made good use of bravado and fragility in her turn as porn-actress Amber Waves in Boogie Nights where her character’s drug-fueled lifestyle prevents her from getting custody of her child. A memorable thread in the film is the downward spiral at being denied her own offspring and her surrogate mothering of another damaged sex-starlet.

On a similar note, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men sees Ms. Moore struggling in a near future world with the death of her son, and her inability (along with the rest of the female population) to have children. While she is undeniably a strong-willed woman and revolutionary leader in the film, her unwillingness to acknowledge the past with her former husband (and father of the dead child) strikes as a vulnerability in common with the rest of her genetic/disease/pharmaceutical hampered characters.

I’ll stretch my argument razor thin that even in conventional big studio films such as Steven Spielberg’s geneticists-gone-wild sci-fi action picture Jurassic Park II, Ivan Reitman’s riff on his own Ghostbusters – the alien mutating comedy/action picture Evolution, the aptly named ghost-thriller Forgotten and the even more forgettable Hannibal where Moore was woefully miscast considering the previous stories growth of the character (played then to an academy award by Jodie Foster); although her proximity to all manner of mentally diseased men suggest (at least on paper) otherwise. This smattering of examples all play to one degree or another off vulnerabilities which make-up artists have had a field day with Moore’s pale complexion.

Is Julianne Moore capable of more than just a person rotting from within and surrounded by disease or wonky genetics? Of course. Her turn in Far From Heaven is sublime as the housewife challenging the political perceptions around her. She shone as the wily villain in the 1999′s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play An Ideal husband, as well in the overlooked The Shipping News as a Newfoundlander single mother. But personally, her more memorable roles (including an unmentioned -until now- turn in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts) express a fragility of body and spirit, or one hiding behind a brave exterior. Here is hoping that one of the current top-shelf actors of today keeps playing different spins on this theme. She shines a flickering light through a darkened multiplex, simultaneously stubborn and tentatively wavering.

Blindness opens in September (Rowthree Review).