Julianne Moore named best actress

CNN  — 

Julianne Moore won the Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a leading role for her performance in “Still Alice.”

With her win, the actress adds to her trophies for her work as a woman struggling with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Moore, who’s nominated for a best actress Oscar and similar honors at the BAFTA and Independent Spirit Awards, has already taken home Golden Globe, Critics Choice, Gotham and Hollywood Film Awards this season.

She’s also won her second SAG award, taking home her first trophy from the acting union in 2012 for her work as Sarah Palin in Game Change.

Moore began her remarks by talking about her soap opera past, saying “When I was on As the World Turns…” The audience cheered and she said, “Yeah!” before explaining how she was excited when the show wrote both good and evil twin roles for her but then discovered it was “super boring to act by myself.” (Birdman’s Zach Galifianakis later referenced her remark when he and his co-stars in the Fox Searchlight film accepted the SAG award for best cast, stepping to the microphone and repeating, “When I was on As the World Turns…”)

“What I really loved, what I really craved was being with another actor, and feeling that intimacy and that excitement and that thrill of getting to know somebody in that way. And that’s what keeps me coming back to acting, again and again and again.” With that, she thanked her “partners” in the Still Alice cast, her co-stars Hunter Parrish, Kate Bosworth, Alec Baldwin and Kristen Stewart.

She also thanked her “professional partners: The people who have supported every weird choice I’ve ever made.” That group included her CAA agents Josh Lieberman and Kevin Huvane and his brother, her publicist Stephen Huvane (“I just heard now the ‘h’ is silent”) and “my longtime manager and friend of 25 years, Evelyn O’Neill, [at Management 360].”

She concluded by saying, “When I was 17 and decided I wanted to be an actor, it didn’t seem possible because I’d never met a real actor, so I want to say to all the kids in the drama club, ‘You guys are the real actors.’”

See more SAG Awards 2015: Red-Carpet Arrivals

Moore beat fellow nominees Jennifer Aniston (Cake), Reese Witherspoon (Wild), Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) and Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything).

Cate Blanchett won best actress at the SAG Awards last year, on her way to winning an Oscar for her role in Blue Jasmine.