Julia Roberts
Julia Roberts is a renowned American actress celebrated for her charm and versatility in a wide range of roles. Growing up in a theatrical family, she began her acting career in minor films before gaining significant recognition for her performance in "Mystic Pizza" (1988) and earning an Oscar nomination for "Steel Magnolias" (1989). Roberts achieved major stardom with her iconic role in "Pretty Woman" (1990), which solidified her status as a leading actress in romantic comedies. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, she starred in acclaimed films like "My Best Friend's Wedding," "Notting Hill," and "Erin Brockovich," the latter winning her an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Beyond her film career, Roberts has made notable television appearances and engaged in philanthropic efforts, including work with UNICEF. In recent years, she has continued to capture audiences with roles in projects such as "Wonder" (2017), "Ben Is Back" (2018), and the Netflix film "Leave the World Behind" (2023), which became a major hit on the platform. As one of Hollywood's highest-grossing actresses, Roberts has also been an advocate for issues like equal pay and children's welfare, enhancing her influence both on and off the screen. Her enduring appeal stems from her ability to portray strong, relatable female characters across various genres.
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Julia Roberts
- Born: October 28, 1967
- Place of Birth: Smyrna, Georgia
One of Hollywood's best-known actors, Oscar-winner Roberts has won moviegoers’ hearts with her charm and varied roles.
Raised in a theater environment in which their parents hosted workshops for children, Julia Roberts and her brother, Eric (also an actor), showed an early interest in performance. She survived a difficult childhood to perform in four minor films and win a significant supporting role as a feisty waitress in Mystic Pizza (1988). The part sparked her casting, with Sally Field, as a fatally diabetic young mother-to-be in Steel Magnolias (1989), which culminated in an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award.
Roberts’s career was launched after she starred in director Garry Marshall’s romantic comedy Pretty Woman (1990), costarring Richard Gere, in which she played a good-hearted prostitute redeemed by a millionaire client. The role established her comedic star-quality appeal and won her an Academy Award nomination and Golden Globe Award for best actress. A romantic-comedy favorite with both sexes, Roberts also proved popular with the critics, who applauded her acting in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and Notting Hill (1999), both of which garnered her Golden Globe nominations for best actress. Her reunion with Gere in Runaway Bride (1999) capitalized on Pretty Woman’s success. Furthermore, Roberts’s appeal and salary strengthened and steadily rose when she undertook serious roles in somewhat less successful films, including Flatliners (1990), The Pelican Brief (1993; based on John Grisham’s novel), Michael Collins (1996), Everyone Says I Love You (1996; with director Woody Allen), and Conspiracy Theory (1997). Additionally, Roberts made television appearances on Friends and Murphy Brown and made goodwill tours for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). By the end of the 1990s, Roberts, one of the highest-grossing actors of the decade and one of America’s favorite movie stars, had completed more than twenty-five films.
Roberts reached her greatest success in 2000 with her Academy Award-winning performance in the title role of director Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich, based on the true story of a single mother who against all odds wins a hard battle against a California power giant that has contaminated the water supply. Without legal training, she worms into a job with a law firm and proceeds to unearth evidence that the corporate violator has denied liability while many people’s health has been ruined. Similar to the real-life person, Roberts’s character portrayed a pertinacious individual who connects effectively with the victims, enabling her firm to win a huge settlement. Critics and audiences praised Roberts’s performance, which earned her $20 million, an Oscar for best actress, a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA), and other awards.
In the early 2000s, Roberts played a supporting role in the box-office smash hit Ocean's Eleven (2001) and its sequel, Ocean's Twelve (2004), which was nearly as successful. The year 2004 saw her star in Mona Lisa Smile. Roberts then went on to make her Broadway debut in Three Days of Rain in the spring of 2006; however, the production was poorly received. The same year, she also provided voice-overs for the animation The Ant Bully (2006) and a live-action remake of Charlotte's Web (2006). She returned to the big screen alongside Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson's War (2007), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress. In 2009, Roberts also starred in that year's acclaimed spy thriller Duplicity, which garnered her another Golden Globe nod for best actress. The following year, fans flocked to see her in Valentine's Day and the spiritual quest Eat Pray Love.
In the family melodrama August: Osage County (2013), Roberts plays the long-suffering eldest daughter opposite Meryl Streep as the family matriarch. Although critics gave the film itself mixed reviews, Roberts was praised for her part and won the Golden Globe Award for best supporting actress as well as Oscar and BAFTA nominations. Roberts's next project was the 2015 thriller Secret in Their Eyes, based on an Argentine film. It features her as a grief-stricken investigator whose daughter has been assaulted and murdered and fared poorly among critics. She followed with appearances in the ensemble cast of the comedy drama Mother's Day (2016), alongside Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson; in the crime drama Money Monster (2016), costarring with George Clooney and Jack O'Connell; and in the animated Smurfs: The Lost Village (2017), in which she voiced SmurfWillow.
In 2017, Roberts costarred in the family drama Wonder, alongside Jacob Tremblay and Owen Wilson. Based on the New York Times best-selling novel of the same name by R. J. Palacio, Wonder earned positive critical reviews and was nominated for an Oscar award for makeup. The following year, she starred in the drama Ben Is Back (2018), about a drug-addicted teenager who unexpectedly returns home for the holidays, before starring in the first season of the Amazon original thriller anthology series Homecoming. For her performance as Heidi Bergman, a therapist who works to cure PTSD in military veterans by erasing memories, Roberts earned a Golden Globe nomination. From 2018 to 2022, Roberts starred in two films, Ben is Back (2018) and Ticket to Paradise (2022), as well as several TV shows. Homecoming (2018) outlined experiences at the fictional Geist Group wellness center, and the series Gaslit (2022) told the story of the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.
In 2023, Roberts starred alongside Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon in the apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind, a film adaptation of author Rumyaan Alam's 2020 book by the same title. In Leave the World Behind, Roberts's and her costars' characters must navigate the world amid the widespread collapse of modern technology. The film was released in select theaters in November before it premiered on the streaming service Netflix on December 8, 2023. By December 10, Leave the World Behind became the most viewed film of the week on Netflix with 41.7 million views and shot to the top spot on the list of the ten most popular English language films on Netflix. The buzz of Leave the World Behind boosted streams of Roberts's 1990 film Pretty Woman, which became the third most streamed film on Netflix at 8.4 million views during the week of Christmas. In January 2024, the film entered Netflix's top ten list of the platform's all-time most popular films at 136.3 million views. The film remained within Netflix's top ten most popular English language films well into 2024, with over 140 million views received by March 2024. Roberts announced in April 2024 that she would play a college professor in the upcoming thriller films After the Hunt.
Along with her screen career, Roberts’s lively love life endeared her to the tabloids. Boyfriends included Liam Neeson, Kiefer Sutherland, Daniel Day-Lewis, singer Lyle Lovett (a short-lived marriage ensued), Benjamin Bratt, and cinematographer Daniel Moder (whom she married in 2002). Roberts and Moder went on to have three children together, and the family has traveled to accommodate some of her filming.
Impact
Performances from Pretty Woman to Erin Brockovich made Julia Roberts the most popular actress of the 1990s. She continued to inspire audiences in the 2000s and 2010s. Her best roles represented a warm yet independent woman not intimidated by male or corporate power. Roberts has used her celebrity status to speak out about equal pay, children's welfare, nature conservation, and sexual harassment.
Bibliography
Cooper, Tracie. "Julia Roberts." AllMovie, 2022, www.allmovie.com/artist/julia-roberts-p60634. Accessed 22 May 2024.
"Julia Roberts Talks Family and Lessons from Smurfs." CBS News This Morning, 6 Apr. 2017, www.cbsnews.com/news/julia-roberts-smurfs-the-lost-village-children. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Liptak, Kevin. "Julia Roberts, George Clooney, and Barack Obama to Headline Biden Fundraiser." CNN, 12 May 2024, www.cnn.com/2024/05/12/politics/julia-roberts-george-clooney-biden-fundraiser/index.html. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Novak, Analisa, et al. "Julia Roberts Talks about How Leave the World Behind Blends Elements of Family with a Disaster Movie." CBS News, 12 Dec. 2023, www.cbsnews.com/news/julia-roberts-leave-the-world-behind-disaster-movie-and-family/. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Rozen, Leah. "Mother and Mega-Star, Happily Balanced." The New York Times, 29 Apr. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/movies/02roberts.html. Accessed 22 May 2024.
Sanello, Frank. Julia Roberts. Mainstream, 2000.
Spada, James. Julia: Her Life. St. Martin’s Press, 2004.