Of course, being like everyone else wasn't always high on Moore's wish list. "I'm very ambitious and very driven," she told Vanity Fair in 1991. "I want (stardom). I'm not like, 'Oh, yes, well, if it happens, it happens.' I really want this." But proving herself a box office draw wasn't the only thing she wanted. As she once told The New York Times, "To me, being a movie star without being respected as an actress would be nothing."

Unfortunately her work in 1995's The Scarlet Letter earned her more hoots than hosannas. But even she knew that rewriting Nathaniel Hawthorne's bleak morality tale to provide a happy ending was a risk. It was the tanking of 1996's much ballyhooed Striptease -- for which she bared almost all of her body for a then-unprecedented $12.5 million -- that seemed to hit home. When she arrived on the set of G.I. Jane later that summer, says one of the film's producers, "she was determined to do an exceptional job because her professional career was in jeopardy after Striptease." Though another Jane producer, Nigel Wooll, as well as some critics, thought Moore "gave a fantastic performance," it earned a modest $48 million, only slightly more than it cost to make. By the time she tried a John Travolta-like rebirth in Passion of Mind in 1998, for a fraction of her standard fee, she was in serious damage-control mode. "She was trying to regain credibility," says Passion casting director Sarah Halley Finn, "to reinvent herself and reestablish herself as a serious actress."

Most colleagues understand her decision to put off that task. The product of a chaotic home life -- her hard-drinking parents, Virginia and Danny Guynes (both now deceased), married and divorced each other twice and moved Demi and her half brother Morgan Guynes, now 33, some 30 times before settling in a run-down section of L.A. when Demi was 14 -- Moore seems determined to protect her own family. Says Julia Roberts's former agent and current partner at Revolution Studios, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas: "Good for her. I think it's incredibly empowering to take time for yourself and your kids and your life. I don't know how many people out there could say no to the seduction of the amounts of money being thrown at these superstars." As Hollywood historian Molly Haskell points out, not since Greta Garbo has a star chosen to leave fame and fortune behind: "It is highly unusual to walk out on your career."