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Ever since she lit up the screen as
the streetwalking Cinderella who wins the heart of millionaire Richard
Gere in Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts has been hailed as one of the
brightest stars in cinema today. Even when she's not making movies - some
might say especially when she's not making movies - Roberts makes
headlines, as tabloid paparazzi feverishly document the nitty-gritty
details of her personal life. When she had a beer with the regulars at
Manhattan's Hogs & Heifers club and - in keeping with one of that
hotspot's more notorious customs - discreetly donated her bra to the bar's
permanent collection of patron undergarments, dutiful gossip columnists
rushed to inform an anxiously awaiting public that the actress wears a
size 34B. While her popularity at the box office has tailed off since her
star-confirming role in Pretty Woman, Roberts' numerous romantic
entanglements with fellow celebrities have kept her squarely beneath the
lens of the celebrity microscope - with everyone from Sean Penn to Matthew
Perry in her past, the rumor mill starts to grind away if she so much as
shares a handshake with a male of note. No longer the fresh-faced, bubbly
ingenue who became a two-time Oscar nominee before the age of 24, Roberts
nonetheless remains a huge draw at the box office and still commands one
of the highest salaries in Hollywood.
That girl-next-door persona that made Roberts famous has roots in reality:
she was born in the small-townish Atlanta suburb of Smyrna, Georgia, the
daughter of a vacuum salesman and a church secretary. Her parents divorced
when she was 4, and her father, with whom Roberts shared a deep
attachment, died of cancer when she was just 9 (Roberts has claimed that
his passage "has altered every philosophy of life [she's] ever had").
Though both mom and dad were experienced thespians - the Robertses had
even conducted a workshop for actors and playwrights for several years
prior to their daughter's birth - Julia grew up hoping to become a
veterinarian. That dream lasted until she graduated from high school,
whereupon, at the tender age of 17, she joined her actress sister Lisa in
New York to pursue a career in acting. Roberts signed on with the Click
modeling agency to pay the bills, and enrolled in several acting classes,
none of which she found enlightening enough to complete. Nepotism got
Roberts her first big break in 1986, when older brother Eric convinced
director Eric Masterson to cast his little sister as, well, his little
sister in the sun-ripened winery drama Blood Red. The film got shelved
shortly after it was finished (it was finally released in theaters in
1990), and Roberts didn't end up making her professional debut until 1988,
when she appeared on an episode of television's Crime Story.
That same year, Roberts took a bow in two feature films, the forgettable
Satisfaction and the whimsical Mystic Pizza, the latter of which presented
the breakout opportunity of her career. Playing the role of a Portuguese
waitress in a small-town pizzeria, Roberts walked away with the movie and
won raves from critics across the nation. The starmaking buzz increased in
volume following an Oscar-nominated turn as a doomed bride in 1989's Steel
Magnolias, and hit a fever pitch the next year when Pretty Woman arrived
in theaters and transformed a promising young actress into a bona fide
superstar. Believe it or not, Pretty Woman was originally envisioned as a
bleak character drama (think Leaving Las Vegas), and it was while the
project was in its infancy that Roberts won the part of hooker Vivian
Ward, a role she admits she "chased down like a dog." Shortly thereafter,
the script was purchased by Disney, and those interfering busybodies
decided to turn it into a sunny romantic comedy - go figure. A reluctant
Roberts surrendered to this new vision at the urging of director Garry
Marshall, and good thing she did - the film soared to record-setting
heights at the box office and garnered a Best Actress Oscar nomination for
its star.
Shy and plagued by insecurities about her appearance, Roberts soon found
that she was living out both her public and private lives in the
proverbial fishbowl. Two big hits followed Pretty Woman: the death-fetish
flick Flatliners and the battered-wife thriller Sleeping With the Enemy.
But her next showcase, the summer-bummer weepie Dying Young, was D.O.A. at
the box office, and rumors began to filter down from the set of Steven
Spielberg's Hook that Hollywood's most bankable female star was turning
into every director's nightmare. This period coincided with major
upheavals in Roberts' personal life: a planned wedding to her Flatliners
co-star Kiefer Sutherland fell through just days before the couple was
scheduled to take their June 14, 1991 vows. The groom-to-be's
indiscretions with stripper Amanda Rice reportedly were the last straw in
what had been a turbulent relationship from the outset, and Roberts fled
to Ireland with Sutherland's buddy, actor Jason Patric. The attendant
emotional strain of her aborted nuptials proved too much for the fragile,
down-home Georgia gal, and she reacted by secluding herself from both the
media and the public at large in the hope of renewing her creative
energies. Over the next two years, Roberts would grace the screen just
once, making the briefest of cameos in Robert Altman's The Player (1992).
A more mature, thicker-skinned Roberts resurfaced in 1993, celebrating her
return to the spotlight with both a top-grossing hit movie, The Pelican
Brief, and another celebrity romance with singer-songwriter and unlikely
suitor Lyle Lovett - this time, the relationship culminated in marriage.
The couple parted ways a mere 21 months later - many suspect that Lyle
grew tired of being endlessly referred to as the Ugly Duckling, but who
knows. Roberts handled the ceaseless ribbing of the media pundits with a
much better display of grace than she had shown previously, and she and
Lovett have remained close friends. She sandwiched four box office
disappointments around 1995's modestly successful Something To Talk About
, but critics were delighted with her breezy, uninhibited performance
alongside Woody Allen in 1996's Everyone Says I Love You.
Roberts reclaimed a large measure of her former box-office glory in 1997:
the summer release My Best Friend's Wedding opened to the highest-ever
single weekend ticket sales for a romantic comedy and earned critical
respect in the form of a Golden Globe nomination; and she shared top
billing with Mel Gibson in the late-summer paranoia thriller Conspiracy
Theory. 1998, a comparatively slow-paced year, witnessed Roberts
co-starring opposite Susan Sarandon and Ed Harris in the family drama
Stepmom, but she was off to a good start in 1999 with a brace of
successful romantic comedies: Notting Hill, in which she gave a fetching
performance as a mega-star who falls for an unassuming bookstore owner
(Hugh Grant); and Runaway Bride, an altar charmer that paired her with
Gere. Numerous critics judged her performance as a working single mom in
Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich (2000) to be her finest performance to
date, and it surprised few when she was awarded the Best Actress Golden
Globe Award in January 2001.
Roberts' production company, Shoelace, is thriving, and she's been courted
to star in everything from a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief
to the based-on-a-true-story Australian outback odyssey From Alice to
Ocean. She scored $12 million to star in the remake of George Cukor's The
Women, in which she is set to co-star with fellow über-cutie Meg Ryan, but
the project has been slow to develop. The added muscle of Roberts and Ryan
as co-producers will speed things along. |
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"I enjoy hats. And when one
has filthy hair, that is a good accessory."
"I'm too tall to be a girl, I never had enough dresses to be a lady,
I wouldn't call myself a woman. I'd say I'm somewhere between a
chick and a broad."
"My real hair color is kind of a dark blonde. Now I just have mood
hair."
(From 1998 interview) "I've sort of grown into my cuteness."
"We all need to take a deep breath and think about being a Bush
daughter and having that cross to bear. I'd go out and have a couple
of drinks, too" - about President George W. Bush's daughters being
caught with alcohol as minors.
"It doesn't bring out the Einstein moment that you hoped it
would."-- Julia Roberts, on forgetting to include the real-life Erin
Brockovich-Ellis in her Academy Award acceptance speech.
You know I'm like a total geek, right? First of all, I sit on the
set and knit. It's a very social hobby, as opposed to reading at
work - I can chat with people and still be fully engaged.
"He's embarrassing, he's not my president. He will never be my
president" - talking about President George W. Bush.
"I'm just an ordinary person who has an extraordinary job."
"I get dressed up like a doll, a nice man puts lipstick on my lips
and I say words - it's deeply satisfying" - on the essence of her
job
On why she will never do a nude scene: "I just don't feel that my
algebra teacher should ever know what my butt looks like."
"You can be true to the character all you want, but you've go to go
home with yourself."
"The first time I felt I was famous was when I went to the movies
with my mom. I had gone to the loo, and someone in the bathroom said
in a very loud voice, 'Girl in stall No. 1, were you in Mystic Pizza
(1988)? I paused and I said, yeah that was me." - (People Magazine
8/22/99)
I think it's dangerous to talk in the big generalities of sexism and
ageism and face lift-isms. You really have to speak only from your
own experience. And my experience so far has been ridiculously nice.
Yeah, do the boys get paid more? Yes. But do we all get paid too
much? Yes. I'm confused at what I'm supposed to complain about.
"I wouldn't do nudity in films. To act with my clothes on is a
performance. To act with my clothes off is a documentary."
"It's heaven truly... we were rehearsing one day, and we had just
moved into the theater and it was dark out here, and I was on stage,
and all of the sudden, I hear, 'Mama!' And Hazel had come in and in
the dark just to hear this little voice, and it's incredibly
amazing. |
