Modern Family - Claire/Julie#6 Raising kids is like sending a rocket -> the moon, waiting for the faint signal that they're coming back

Sweet Embrace · 03-02-2013, 07:55 AM

Welcome to the Sixth Claire Dunphy/ Julie Bowen appreciation thread!

(c) misst89

Our gorgeous Emmy winner

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I laugh at all of his jokes - with my mouth. Not with my eyes…
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One of the many things we love about her? She's an awesome mom!

About Julie:

Julie Bowen (born March 3, 1970) is an American film and television actress. She played Carol Vessey on Ed and Denise Bauer on Boston Legal. She is best known for playing Claire Dunphy on the sitcom Modern Family, for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2011. She was also nominated in 2010.
Throughout Bowen's career she has played supporting roles in films including Happy Gilmore (1996), Multiplicity (1996), Venus and Mars (2001), Joe Somebody (2001), Kids in America (2005), Sex and Death 101 (2007), Crazy on the Outside (2010), Jumping the Broom (2011), and Horrible Bosses (2011).Bowen married Scott Phillips, a real-estate investor, on September 9, 2004. Their son Oliver McLanahan Phillips was born April 10, 2007 in Los Angeles. On May 8, 2009, she gave birth to twin sons, John and Gus.

About Claire:

Claire Dunphy (née Pritchett) is a fictional character on the American television series Modern Family. She is portrayed by Julie Bowen.

Claire is the daughter of Jay, Mitchell's older sister, and the overprotective mother of the Dunphy family and its three very different kids. She was once a wild-child who made a lot of mistakes over the years, and fearful that her mistakes could be made by her children, she works hard to try and help them avoid said mistakes. She is often exhausted from stress created by her family but is still a loving mother. When it comes to her kids she has difficulty controlling Haley's independence coupled with her irresponsibility, Alex's manipulative nature, and Luke's lack of common sense. She is seen as an experienced parent by Cameron and Mitchell so she is called upon for her parenting advice. She enjoys running and reading. Claire is also the most active family member when organizing family get-togethers. As alluded to in several episodes, namely season two episode "The Kiss", as a teenager, Claire was a wild child growing up.

25 things you don't know about Julie:

1. I am not a cat person.
2. I could live on Fresca.
3. Backgammon and gin rummy are the greatest gifts my father gave me.
4. I have tried and failed to learn Spanish for three years.
5. I doubt myself as a mother every day, but I love my boys [Oliver, 4, and twins John and Gus, 23 months].
6. Men drenched in cologne make me gag.
7. I secretly wish I were a cool barfly with a wicked pool game. I am not.
8. I’m a sucker for '70s music and anything with a cello.
9. I know the words to every Schoolhouse Rock! song.
10. I was really proud when Angela Bassett referred to me as "the right white girl" for Jumping the Broom [out May 6].
11. The people I work with on Modern Family are so ridiculously talented that I feel intimidated.
12. I hate voice mail.
13. I go to bed early, but I wake up in the middle of the night and read for an hour or two.
14. As a kid, I worshipped Jodie Foster in Bugsy Malone.
15. I don't understand cool cars, but wish I did.
16. I love basketball, but I cannot catch a ball.
17. I can't sing or dance to save my life.
18. Running is the only athletic endeavor I've ever been good at.
19. I am in awe of my sisters.
20. I'm not afraid to pick up a hammer and nail. In fact, I'm partnering with the Maxwell House Drops of Good project to revitalize struggling community centers across America.
21. I love a bargain and get ridiculously excited about shoes on sale.
22. I fall asleep on the couch. A lot.
23. I don't trust mean girls.
24. I get unnaturally excited about the Sunday New York Times.
25. I label anything without a heartbeat. It gives me a (totally false) sense of control.

Bonus track!

We know she's hot. We know she's hilarious. But here are four things you may not know about Modern Family's Julie Bowen:

1. She got her start on soaps.
"It was my first paid job!" Bowen recalls of her days on ABC's Loving. "I played a sorority sister who was dumpy and unattractive.
I thought I had won the lottery, I was so grateful."

2. She didn't get the Lost finale, either.
"I got that it wasn't about the polar bears." Still, the woman who played Jack Shephard's wife jokes,
"They should have run a crawl [on] screen that said, 'We're not explaining everything.'"

3. She's the national spokesperson for the American Lung Association's "Faces of Influenza" campaign.
"Sometimes I'm an OK parent, sometimes I give too much candy. But there's one thing I know to do: Get my kids immunized."

4. She's a lot like her type A character.
"We both hate the messy junk drawer," she confesses. "But Claire has a way better blowout every day than I ever do!"

Our girl looking gorgeous and being hilarious as always:

Previous threads

http://www.fanforum.com/f369/claire-...ican-63008327/
http://www.fanforum.com/f369/claire-...deal-63014790/
http://www.fanforum.com/f369/claire-.../#post62534698

Supporters:

1. carito
2. LiVenLoVe902
3. NOLA504
4. alexis bledel the best
5. xkellyx
6. TotalDenial
7. bellagrey13
8. misst89
9. attract your dreams ♥
10. babyblue54
11. girlyshorty85
12. Sincerely, Me.
13. L i N d $ @ y
14. skje
15. kyukyu
16. xlennie
17. MPFan09
18. hlgreenie
19. maroulucky
20. BOK
21. The Dreamers
22. hlgreenie

Future Titles:
“Change doesn’t just happen. It is forged by empowered women like me, Norma Rae, and the lady from The Blind Side."

Sweet Embrace · 03-02-2013, 07:58 AM

Here's the quote that the title was adapted from:

“Raising a kid is like sending a rocket ship to the moon. You spend the early years in constant contact then one day around the teenage years, they go to the dark side and they’re gone. All you can do is wait for their faint signal that they’re coming back.”

I never watched the Oscars and I loved Julie's look! Very pretty.

I also loved it when Phil was teasing Claire about asking Haley out and how happy Claire was when Haley said yes.

carito · 03-02-2013, 04:47 PM

Thanks for the new thread!!! I love the titule

The face she made when she admites Phil had given her that analogy

Julie Bowen making facial expressions FTW!!! And I loved when she "courted" Haley, she was just so happy she's spend time with her

**fly me to the moon** · 03-02-2013, 07:16 PM

Thanks for the new thread!

***L i N d $ @ y*** · 03-03-2013, 12:24 AM

TFTNT! Love the thread title!

Yes, Julie's facial expressions for the win!

I love all of Claire's scenes with her daugthers.

Sweet Embrace · 03-03-2013, 12:52 PM

I love that the analogy was from Phil! It was kinda sciency so I loved that! And Phil was like smiling when she said it

***L i N d $ @ y*** · 03-04-2013, 12:20 AM

Happy Birthday Julie Bowen!

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**fly me to the moon** · 03-04-2013, 09:36 AM

Hopefully that she has amazing birthday!

Sweet Embrace · 03-04-2013, 02:41 PM

That's a gorgeous photoset. She's a fellow Pisces!

carito · 03-04-2013, 04:43 PM

^ I LOVE that photoset!!!

Hope this angel had the most amazing birthday!

elizas#1fan · 03-05-2013, 03:26 AM

carito · 03-06-2013, 04:50 PM

She's the cover of the april issue of Lucky magazine, I really enjoyed this interview

Quote:

Head Over Heels For Julie Bowen

Julie Bowen played the girlfriend for years. Now she plays the mom—and the sister and the daughter and the wife. In real life, she’s just as funny—and a lot more stylish.

"P-chew! P-chew! P-chew!" Julie Bowen has made her hand into a gun and is pretend-shooting age spots off my face. This is her way of telling me that yes, not only do Intense Pulsed Light facials work, they are nothing short of miraculous. “Even this one?” I ask, pointing to a pond-size formation above my right eye. Bowen takes aim and fires again. “P-chee-ew!”

Shortly after she won her second consecutive Emmy for playing high-strung, perfectionist, often acid-tongued Claire on the sitcom Modern Family, a well-known columnist blogged that Julie Bowen, and beautiful women in general, just couldn’t be funny—funniness, she wrote, was a result of having suffered at one point, and beautiful people don’t suffer. But sitting in a white booth in a white box of a Hollywood café, contemplating this mega-diss, Bowen seems more perplexed than agitated. And what throws her off isn’t being called unfunny. It’s being called beautiful. “I don’t even know what to say about that, because then, I’d have to acknowledge I was some kind of attractive ideal, and that’s just not the way I was raised. Plus, I feel like I look like the pale girl in some Flemish painting.” But she is beautiful. She’s thin with killer blonde hair and gorgeous brown eyes enhanced magically with a pencil from By Terry called Bronze Moon, which we all need to get immediately. She had a charmed childhood in Baltimore with a supportive, close family. She has a cute husband and three adorable children and, now, two Emmys and a hit show. That said, it is very clear that this columnist never had the pleasure of hearing Julie Bowen perfectly imitate the sound of an IPL facial.

Bowen talks with bright, zingy energy, and you get the sense that inside her mind ideas are playfully jostling each other to see who can get out first. I am still imagining typing up a clever, lacerating retort to Ms. Columnist, but Bowen, after ordering a black coffee, has let go, and now we are talking about shoe booties. “It took me forever to invest in new shoe booties. I had all these pairs from the ’90s, and all the other shoes in my closet were pointing at them and laughing.” We run down fashion faux pas from days gone by. I confess I had an asymmetrical bob in college and am expecting a vague “Yeah, I remember those” sort of response. Instead I’m met with a horrified, prolonged Don Rickles–esque stare.

She’s wearing a striped Vince sweater over a rust-colored Zara dress, and when I tell her I like her outfit and she wags her finger and says, “Hey, I put in a lot of effort for you today,” it’s hard to tell whether she’s joking. She really does look good, but she insists she knows nothing about fashion, before adding, “But hey, I can go there.” Laura Ashley comes up. “Oh, I went deep on Laura Ashley,” she recalls. At the fancy prep school she went to in Newport, Rhode Island, “you had to have at least three Laura Ashley dresses.” Then I tell her I wore Laura Ashley to the prom, and she gives me that Don Rickles look again.

“It took me years to break the will to be serious, years,” Bowen insists, despite the fact that nearly everything she says is, at some level, a joke. She wanted to be An Actress. So after graduating from Brown, having majored in the very actressy field of Italian Renaissance studies, Bowen came to New York to do Ibsen and Shakespeare and Brecht. Wearing black motorcycle boots and “horrible brick red lipstick” she auditioned and waitressed. “But I never got those parts. Never!” she says. Instead, Bowen climbed the prime-time TV ladder. She supportive-girlfriended her way through Ed and then ex-wifed through Lost. (She’s not surprised that no one remembers her from Lost. “Oh, that’s because I was always crying and because I looked like a man. They were good at jungle makeup on that show but [my scenes] weren’t in the jungle, and I was like, ‘Hey, sister, could I get some eyelashes?’ ”)

Then she describes how, at age 39, pregnant with twins, she got the chance to play Claire, Bowen’s humor vanishes. “All I can say is, thank God for television! Our writers are flexible enough to write to my strengths and open-minded enough to imagine Claire in a car pool and naked in a hot spring. I needed good material. I’m not like Amy Poehler, who can make anything funny,” she says. When I suggest that her role as the mother-kid sister–aunt perfectionist control freak is iconic, she doesn’t agree. She just says, “Wow. Thank you.”

You’d expect someone who got suddenly famous at 40 to have some “Whoa, what a crazy ride, man” attitude. But Bowen’s too down-to-earth for that kind of thing. Instead, she talks about how now, different things are expected of her. “It was a big evolution in style for me to grow up and say ‘I need to take fashion seriously for my job.’ I have a stylist now, and she’s trying to get me to wear more revealing stuff. She’s Kristen Stewart’s stylist,” Bowen says, fluttering her eyelashes at the name drop. “I go there and see all this amazing funky stuff, and I know it’s for her. If I get K-Stew’s castoffs, that’s all right with me.”

A twentysomething girl passes by our table. She’s wearing Isabel Marant leather-and-suede wedge sneakers, and Julie I-know-nothing-about-fashion-but-I-rocked-neon-at-the-2012-Emmys Bowen gives the girl such a big, obvious sitcomy stare that she stops cold. Bowen waves her over, smiling, as if to say, “I come in peace, girl wearing $656 sneakers.” She grills the girl, charmingly, asking her where she got the shoes, what she thinks of the knockoffs, what she does for work. The girl is already adorable, and ever more so under the bright beam of Bowen’s curious attention. When she gets back to her table, she waves shyly.

Even if Bowen’s been stepping up her game style-wise, she doesn’t feel the need for Claire to do the same. “Claire’s a teensy bit bland and very un-trendy. But nothing is worse than watching a rerun of some show and getting distracted by the styles.” Plus, style might be important in Bowen’s world, but not so much in Claire’s. “People like Claire,” Bowen points out, “because at the end of the day, she’s a good mom.” I wonder if perhaps people like Claire because they like Julie Bowen. Julie Bowen does not harbor a similar curiosity. “I am quite sure there are plenty of people who could play Claire,” she insists. “I was just in the right place at the right time.”

**fly me to the moon** · 03-07-2013, 12:29 PM

Thanks for posting that article...

Sweet Embrace · 03-07-2013, 04:25 PM

Aw I really enjoyed that interview! She always so cheerful in interviews.

carito · 03-09-2013, 04:49 PM

Why on earth can't she deal with the fact that she's beautiful!!!

I'll post the video and Photos soon, I'm on my phone now so it's a little complicated


Fan Forum > Archived Television Shows > Modern Family > Claire/Julie#6 Raising kids is like sending a rocket -> the moon, waiting for the faint signal that they're coming back