Julia Roberts

Julia Fiona Roberts, born October 28, 1967, at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, is an American actress whose career spans film, television, and Broadway. Among her accolades are an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and three Golden Globe Awards. She grew up in Smyrna, Georgia, attending Fitzhugh Lee Elementary School, Griffin Middle School, and Campbell High School before relocating to New York City to pursue acting, where she signed with the Click Modeling Agency and enrolled in acting classes.

Roberts was born to Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Grady Roberts, both one-time actors and playwrights who met while performing in theatrical productions for the United States Armed Forces and later co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop in Midtown Atlanta. They also operated a children's acting school in Decatur, Georgia, which the children of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr. attended; Walter Roberts served as acting coach for their daughter Yolanda. In recognition of his work running the only racially integrated theater troupe in the region, and owing to the family's financial difficulties, Coretta King paid the hospital bill at Julia's birth. Roberts is of English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German, and Swedish descent and was raised Catholic. Her father died of cancer when she was ten. Her siblings Eric Roberts and Lisa Roberts Gillan, as well as her niece Emma Roberts, are also actors.

Roberts made her television debut on February 13, 1987, in an episode of Crime Story, and her big-screen debut followed in the dramedy Satisfaction (1988). Her first significant critical recognition came with the independent romantic comedy Mystic Pizza (1988), in which she played a Portuguese-American teenage girl working at a pizza parlor. She then starred in Steel Magnolias (1989) as a young bride with diabetes alongside Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, and Daryl Hannah, earning her first Academy Award nomination and first Golden Globe Award win. Director Herbert Ross was notably demanding of Roberts during production, and Sally Field acknowledged that he pursued her with particular intensity given that it was largely her first major film.

Her role opposite Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (1990) brought Roberts worldwide recognition. She was paid $300,000 for the part, which earned her a second Oscar nomination and second Golden Globe win. The film grossed $463.4 million worldwide and recorded the highest ticket sales in the United States for a romantic comedy. Roberts followed that with Joel Schumacher's supernatural thriller Flatliners (1990) and the thriller Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), Steven Spielberg's Hook (1991), and Dying Young (1991). After a period away from screens that included only a cameo in Robert Altman's The Player (1992), she returned with The Pelican Brief (1993) opposite Denzel Washington. She went on to star in the romantic comedies My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Notting Hill (1999), and Runaway Bride (1999), cementing her standing as one of Hollywood's leading actresses throughout the decade. She was the world's highest-paid actress for the majority of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s.

Roberts won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her title role in the biographical drama Erin Brockovich (2000). Subsequent film credits include Ocean's Eleven (2001), Ocean's Twelve (2004), Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Valentine's Day (2010), Eat Pray Love (2010), August: Osage County (2013), Wonder (2017), Ticket to Paradise (2022), Leave the World Behind (2023), and After the Hunt (2025). On television, she portrayed a physician during the AIDS crisis in the HBO film The Normal Heart (2014), for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination, a social worker in the first season of the streaming series Homecoming (2018), and Martha Mitchell in the Starz limited series Gaslit (2022).

In 2006, Roberts made her Broadway debut in Three Days of Rain, adding a stage credit to her extensive screen career. She runs the production company Red Om Films, through which she has served as executive producer on various projects, including the first four films of the American Girl franchise released between 2004 and 2008. Since 2009, she has served as global ambassador for Lancôme. People magazine has named her the most beautiful woman in the world five times, more than any other individual.