Julia Stiles

Julia O'Hara Stiles, born March 28, 1981, in New York City, is an American actress and director. The daughter of Judith Newcomb Stiles, a Greenwich Village artist, and John O'Hara, a businessman, Stiles is the oldest of three children and is of English, Irish, and German descent. A native New Yorker, she began performing at age 11 with La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York.

Stiles began auditioning for television in 1993, making her acting debut that year on the mystery series Ghostwriter as Erica Dansby. Her first film appearance came in 1996 in I Love You, I Love You Not, alongside Claire Danes and Jude Law, followed by small roles in The Devil's Own (1997) and Wide Awake (1998). Her first lead film role was in Wicked (1998), in which she played a teenage girl suspected of murdering her mother; the performance earned her the Karlovy Vary Film Festival Award for Best Actress. She also co-starred in the made-for-TV miniseries The '60s (1999) as a teenage daughter in a middle-class American family from Chicago.

Stiles rose to wider recognition through a series of prominent film roles beginning in 1999. Cast at 17 as Kat Stratford opposite Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, she won an MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance. The Chicago Film Critics Association named her the most promising new actress of 1999. She subsequently appeared in two additional Shakespearean adaptations: as Ophelia in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), with Ethan Hawke in the lead role, and as Desdemona opposite Mekhi Phifer in Tim Blake Nelson's O (2001), a version of Othello set at a boarding school. Also in 2000, she appeared in David Mamet's State and Main and in Down to You, the latter earning her and co-star Freddie Prinze Jr. a Teen Choice Award nomination for on-screen chemistry.

Save the Last Dance (2001) marked another commercial success for Stiles, in which she played an aspiring ballerina who relocates to Chicago after her mother's death and falls in love with a character played by Sean Patrick Thomas. The role brought her two additional MTV Movie Awards, for Best Kiss and Best Female Performance, as well as a Teen Choice Award. That same year she appeared opposite Stockard Channing in The Business of Strangers. Her accolades across this period include a Teen Choice Award and two MTV Movie Awards, along with nominations for a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.

Stiles expanded her range further with Mona Lisa Smile (2003), in which she played a Wellesley College student in 1953 whose art professor, played by Julia Roberts, encourages her toward a legal career. She starred in The Prince & Me (2004), directed by Martha Coolidge, as a Wisconsin college student who falls for a Danish prince played by Luke Mably. In 2006, she appeared opposite Liev Schreiber in The Omen, a remake of the 1976 horror film.

A significant thread of Stiles's film career has been her portrayal of Nicky Parsons, a Treadstone operative, in the Bourne franchise. Her role, introduced in The Bourne Identity (2002), expanded in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), grew substantially in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and continued through Jason Bourne (2016). Stiles has described the franchise as important to her career, noting that it reinvented the action genre, particularly for female characters. Additional film credits include A Guy Thing (2002), Carolina (2003), Edmond and A Little Trip to Heaven (both 2005), The Cry of the Owl (2009), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), Out of the Dark (2014), Blackway (2015), 11:55 (2016), Hustlers (2019), in which she played journalist Elizabeth, and Orphan: First Kill (2022).

On television, Stiles played Lumen Pierce during the fifth season of Dexter (2010), a role that earned her nominations for the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress. From 2012 to 2014 she starred as the titular character in the web series Blue, earning two IAWTV Awards for Best Actress. She then starred as Georgina Ryland on the Sky Atlantic series Riviera from 2017 to 2020, and appeared in the Amazon series The Lake from 2022 to 2023.

On Broadway, Stiles appeared from 2008 to 2009 in a production of Oleanna. She also participated in The 24 Hour Plays in 2004, an event in which she appeared alongside other performers in short works developed and staged within a single day.