SHE loves tartan, thinks porridge "is not bad", and once got emotional as she recalled her grandfather's attempts to replicate a Scottish garden in New Jersey.

Now Julianne Moore, who has spoken fondly of her Scottish roots, is odds-on favourite to win the Best Actress Oscar tomorrow night, to add to the Golden Globe and Bafta accolades she has already been awarded.

Moore has impressed critics with her moving performance in Still Alice as a 50-year-old linguistics professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.

Two days ago, Slate online magazine summed up her Oscar chances by saying: "It appears [her] moment has finally arrived: She ... has been virtually unstoppable thus far in awards season."

Accepting her Bafta award earlier this month, Moore's voice cracked with emotion as she thanked "the five Scottish women who poured love into me" - her great-aunts May, Mary and Cissy, her grandmother Flora and her mother, Anne. "This is for you," she added.

Her mother, Anne Love Smith, was born in Greenock in July 1940 and moved to New Jersey with her parents and brother at the age of 10.

She later became a counselling psychologist and social worker, and married Peter Moore, an army colonel, military lawyer, judge and helicopter pilot. They had three children - Julianne, Valerie and Peter.

Because of her father's job, Julianne, an 'army brat', lived in several places across Germany and the US. The family finally settled in Maryland.

Anne died in 2009, aged 68, after an embolism.

In a recent interview, Moore, 54, said of her: "When she came to the United States she opted not to get American citizenship because at the time you could only hold one passport.

"But when my father was applying for some jobs for graduate school, he wasn't allowed to be married to a foreign national, so she had to get her citizenship and they made her renounce her own." Four years ago, Moore applied for dual citizenship to honour her late mother.

Two years ago, she said she had written a children's book, My Mom is a Foreigner, about having a Scottish mother: "It's about that idea that your mother is from another place but still being just the same as any other mother."

In a 2008 interview she recalled: "My grandfather planted his lawn with thick sod that grows well in Scotland, but in New Jersey it never looked right. I didn't understand it - and then I went to Scotland and everyone had spongy grass, climbing roses and deer in their garden.

"It broke my heart, really, that he was trying to replicate it and it didn't fit."

Two weeks ago, Muriel Love, 63, the actor's long-lost cousin in the Borders, said she was trying to get the sales manager at Hawick Knitwear, where she works, to appoint Moore as an ambassador. "Why not?" she said. "Americans love Scottish cashmere."

xref Arts magazine