*By Alex Morris*It's been a breathtaking year for gay rights. Now, in their new movie Freeheld, Julianne Moore and Ellen Page pay a very personal tribute to two women who paved the way.
"Detective Laurel Hester and Stacie Andree had the courage to stand up and demand to be treated like everyone else.… It is incredibly powerful to see Ellen Page and Julianne Moore bring their struggle to the big screen." —Edith Windsor, 86, who won a landmark case for gay marriage, and her attorney, Roberta Kaplan
Seven years ago, while filming the movie Whip It, Ellen Page was in a Detroit hotel room with her then girlfriend when she received an email that would galvanize her fight for gay rights. "I was super closeted at the time," says Page, 28. But the message contained a link to the trailer for Freeheld, a short documentary about New Jersey police lieutenant Laurel Hester, who, while dying of lung cancer, fought to pass on her pension benefits to her domestic partner, Stacie Andree, and won her case just weeks before her death, in 2006. Would Page be interested in playing Andree in a feature film based on the story, its producers wanted to know? After watching three minutes, Page—an Oscar nominee that year for Juno—was in tears. "I was moved, so unbelievably moved," she says. "I wanted to be involved."
Six years later, Julianne Moore, approached to play Hester, had the same reaction: "I just sat there," she says, "and wept."
Little did they know the film, out next month, would be released on the heels of the summer's historic Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, cementing the legacy of the story it tells. "These women were forerunners of this year's case," says Moore, 54, who took home the best actress Oscar this year for Still Alice. "They were very regular people. Laurel was a detective, and Stacie a mechanic. And for the first time in their lives, they were public about their sexuality in a way that they hadn't wanted to be. So what they did was major. They really put themselves on the line."
