Julianne Moore doesn't think marriage should feel like "work".

She said: "I hate to call it work because it should be pleasurable, right? I think it takes effort, but I don't think it should be 'work' because that sounds miserable."

Julianne, 55, first got married in 1986 to actor John Gould Rubin and then again to her current husband, Bart Freundlich, in 2003.

The actress has nothing but praise for her current husband, describing him as "extraordinary" and revealing he always makes her feel good about herself.

She told the Mail on Sunday newspaper: "He always makes me laugh.

"I was about to go into a meeting yesterday and he sent me a text. I was laughing so hard I started to cry; I had to pull myself together before I went in."

Meanwhile, Julianne recently revealed that her children, 18-year-old Caleb and 14-year-old Liv, had no idea she was so famous.

She said: "A couple of years ago I got an award, and they did one of those film clubs.

"My kids came and they had seen one or two of my movies, but they hadn't seen them all, and they were shocked! Shocked! First of all, they were shocked that I had done so many movies, and then, that I seemed to be doing these outrageous things."

The flame-haired actress also said her passion for acting gets stronger the older she gets.

She explained: "I like [acting] more the older I get, and that has surprised me, because I've always been waiting for the other shoe to drop, the day I'll be like, 'I don't want to do that anymore!'

"But instead, it's more compelling to me. I like the act of figuring it out, I like learning things ... Like right now, I'm playing a character who is deaf, so I'm learning about deaf culture and learning some very rudimentary sign language, and that's exciting to me."