Julia Roberts Biography

• Birth name : Julia Roberts

• Birth Date

  10/28/1967

• Birthplace

  Smyrna, Georgia

• Credits

  22 Movies, 8 TV appearances, 22 awards
  View All

• Family

  Brother: Eric Roberts

  born April 18, 1956; older; stayed with father in Atlanta after parents' divorce; estranged from sisters

  Daughter: Hazel Patricia Moder
  

  born November 28, 2004; twin of Phinnaeus Walter; father, Daniel Moder

  Father: Walter Roberts
  born in February 1930; wed Betty Motes in 1955 after touring military bases in a production of "George Washington Slept Here", directed by Ron Howard's father, Rance; co-founded Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop with wife in 1963; divorced from Roberts' mother in 1971; died of cancer in March 1977

  Half-Sister: Nancy Motes
  born c. 1976

  Mother: Betty Motes
  divorced from Roberts' father in 1971

  Sister: Lisa Roberts
  born c. 1965; moved with her sister and

  mother to Smyrna, Georgia after her parents' divorce

  Son: Henry Daniel Moder
  born June 18, 2007; father, Daniel Moder

  Son: Phinnaeus Walter Moder
  

  born November 28, 2004; twin of Hazel Patricia; father, Daniel Moder

• Notes

  "... there's no mistaking the tough core of

  intelligence and wit in her work, not just a willingness to take chances but a growing delight in doing so. Here's to future gambles in the still-surprising career of Julia Roberts. Risk looks good on her."---Peter Travers writing in US, August 1997.
  "Both 'Runaway Bride' and 'Notting Hill' are tailored to the public perception of Roberts herself, the actress who surges from one high profile romance to another. It is therefore easy to accept the fiction

  of the standard Roberts character as an adorable, slightly daffy commitment-phobe whose biggest problem is making up her mind. When we think of classic indecision, we think Hamlet. When we think of indecision Julia-style, we think of a frightened kitten being lured down from the tree by a kindly fireman."---From "The Trouble With Julia" by Jami Bernard, Daily News, August 8, 1999.
  

  "I don't think I'll ever really understand the fascination with [my private life]. And I comprehend less the idea that when there is nothing to report, something has

  to be manufactured."---Roberts to USA Today, June 20. 1997.
  "I work when I want to work, and I work with people that I want to work with. I travel hither and yon to fabulous places. I'm surrounded by wonderful, interesting people. I live a privileged life, HUGELY privileged. It's an EXCELLENT life. I'm rich. I'm happy. I have a great job. It would be absurd to pretend that it's anything different. I'm like a pig in shit."---Roberts quoted in Vanity Fair, June 1999.
  

  "I'll tell you something, not long after 'Pretty Woman' came out, suddenly everyone who ever passed through Smyrna's city limits went to high school with me and was my best friend. I was suddenly reading accounts of my would-be life, based on people I had barely known in school. I find it more amusing than anything else ... every day of my life is just the greatest revenge, isn't it?"---Julia Roberts to the London Times, January 3, 1999.
  

  "I've never discussed this before, but as a child I used to bite my toenails off ins

  tead of clipping them. I was very limber."---Roberts to Movieline November 2002.
  "If only, somehow, Julia Roberts could be as complicated on-screen as the feelings she prompts in one who looks carefully at her career. If that were possible, she might become a real actress, instead of remaining just a great beauty who gives off an uncanny sense of being flawed or damaged, and needing to be rescued. The flirt's secret message to her viewers is, after all, exactly that: RESCUE ME. But the serious actress must learn that that task is hers alone."---From "In Defense of Julia Roberts" by David Thomson, Movieline, April 1997.
  

  "If people are going to support me, or pretend to support me, my belief is that they must support my desire to be a good actor, and in order to be a good actor it is my

  

  obligation to my desire to try different things. If I did the same thing all the time, how quickly would people get bored? They would be like, 'She's smiling again; oh G

  od, that smile.'"---Roberts quoted in the London Times, April 29, 1999.
  "It's nuts that the average person probably knows more about me than they do about their friends and families."---Roberts quoted in Chicago Sun-Times, May 23, 1999.
  

  "Julia's smile is like a thousand-watt bulb. Everybody falls for it, but there's nothing like it when she smiles and laughs. You can't help but be drawn into it."---Dermot Mulroney, Roberts' co-star in "My Best Friend's Wedding" quoted to People, July 7, 1997.
  "My agent hates it when I say this, but if someone was making a real good movie and they had a nickel they could spare to get me to do the job, I'

  d do it. But when someone's making a no-budget independent film, going off to Nebraska to shoot a 105-page movie in 18 days, I don't think I'm the first name that springs to their mind. And that's unfortunate, because I would think it would be a gas."---From US, August 1999.
  "The first time I felt famous was when I went to the movies with my mom. I h

  ad 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?' I paused and said, 'Yeah, that was me.'"---Roberts to People August 22, 1999.
  "The thing that I'm able to do now is put words to the feelings as opposed to once upon a time when, if someone approached me in a certain way, I might look at them and inside I'm thinking, please go away. Please stop looking at me. Please, please, please. I don't know how to deal with you. I don't know what to do."

  "But it was a challenge that obviously I had to have in my life, and I think I wa

  s able to draw a lot of things from it. And I regret not a moment of it. Not even at its worst moment of really being apoplectic with ignorance, because my life is now so, I just live my life now. And each little steppingstone leads to the next thing, and it sounds corny, but to remove one element of it is to collapse the whole house of cards."---Roberts quoted in US, August 1999.
  "What changes with fame, I think, are perceptions of an individual, more than the individual."---Julia Roberts to Stephen Schaefer in Boston Herald, May 28, 199

  9.
  In 1993, Roberts became the highest-paid actress to date, reportedly receiving $8.5 million per film. For "Mary Reilly" in 1996, she reportedly earned $10 million while a year later, she was paid $12 million for "Conspiracy Theory". In 1999, Roberts cracked the $20 million mark, making her once again the highest-paid female actor in Hollywood.
  On her rocky relationship with the press: "Everybody has a job to do, I appreciate that. But at the same time, my job is to act, not to clear things up, not to fill in the dotted lines of the ifs, ands, buts, whys and hows of my life. I have too often succumbed to the pressure of feeling that's my responsibility. I have been fleeced enough times, lied about

  enough times, raked over the coals, misrepresented, misunderstood and misconceived enough."---Julia Roberts quoted in Rolling Stone, July 14, 1999.
  On her role in "Notting Hill": "It's not Julia Roberts. It's Anna Scott. For someone to think that I'm so fascinated with myself that I deserve to be the main character in a movie, they're out of their mind. A, my life is not to be documented in that way and B, I'm not that narcissistic. SO for people to think I'm playing myself is selling me way short.

  

  I worked way too hard on that movie. I work hard to look that natural. I can't prevent people from saying that. I'm not trying to change people's minds about me; never tried to, not interested in it. If they think Anna Scott is me playing myself, that's fine. But I didn't write the script. I didn't know the man who wrote it."---From Chicago Sun-Times, July 14, 1999.
  On starring in a movie about a woman with commitment problems given her own checkered romantic past, Roberts told US (August 1999): "Look, 'Runaway Bride' is a great title, incredibly evocative, but it doesn't attach to my life at all."
  

• Milestones

  (1992) Appeared as herself (in a movie-within-the-movie) in Robert Altman's "The Player"
  (1998) Appeared as herself in an episode of the CBS sitcom "Murphy Brown"
  (1988) Appeared in first TV-movie, "Baja Oklahoma" (HBO)
  (1990) Breakthrough screen performance, the title role in "Pretty Woman"; garnered Best Actress Academy Award nomination; first screen pairing with Richard Gere under the direction of Garry Marshall
  (2001) Co-starred with Brad Pitt in "The Mexican"
  (1988) First released film, "Satisfaction"
  Formed Shoelace Productions
  (1992) Formed a two year semi-exclusive production deal between her own YMA Productions and Joe Roth's Caravan Pictures
  

  

  (1995) Guest-starred in an episode of the hit NBC sitcom "Friends"
  (1997) Had box-office hit with the comedy "My Best Friend's Wedding"
  (1994) Had rare box office disappointment teamed with Nick Nolte in "I Love Trouble"
  (2000) Had title role of "Erin Brokovich", a based on fact tale of a legal secretary who championed a case of water poisoning into a class action lawsuit; received a Best Actress Academy Award
  (1986) Made film acting debut in "Blood Red", co-starring brother Eric (released regionally in USA March 1989)
  (2006) Made her stage debut in the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg's play, "Three Days of Rain"
  (1999) Made rare TV dramatic guest appearance on an episode of "Law & Order"; garnered an Emmy nomination
  Moved to NYC immediately after high school graduation; lived with sister Lisa; worked briefly as a Click model
  (1989) Received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination as Shelby, the doomed diabetic bride in "Steel Magnolias"
  (1998) Narrated and appeared in the PBS' special "In the Wild: Orangutans With Julia Roberts"
  (1991) Played Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg's "Hook"
  (2003) Played a free-spirited teacher at a women-only college in "Mona Lisa Smile"
  (2001) Played a personal assistant to a movie star in "America's Sweethearts"
  (1988) Played first leading film role in "Mystic Pizza"
  (1996) Portrayed Kitty Kiernan, erstwhile lover to "Michael Collins" in Neil Jordan's biopic of the Irish patriot
  (1998) Producing debut, "Stepmom"; played the title role of Ed Harris' young girlfriend competing with his ex-wife (Susan Sarandon)
  Raised in Smyrna, Georgia
  (1999) Reteamed with Garry Marshall and Richard Gere for "Runaway Bride"
  (2004) Returned with the original cast for "Ocean's Twelve" directed by Steven Soderbergh
  (2002) Reunited with Clooney for "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" which he also directed
  (1991) Starred as an abused wife on the run from her husband in the surprise hit "Sleeping With the Enemy"
  (1993) Starred opposite Denzel Washington in "The Pelican Brief"
  (1999) Starred opposite Hugh Grant in the romantic comedy "Notting Hill"
  (1996) Starred opposite Woody Allen in the musical comedy "Everyone Says I Love You"; warbled "All My Life" on the soundtrack
  (2002) Starred with Blair Underwood in the Steven Soderbergh directed "Full Frontal"
  (2004) Starred with Jude Law in Mike Nichols' "Closer" an adaption of the broadway play
  (1987) TV debut in "The Survivor" episode of NBC's "Crime Story"
  (1996) Took on a dramatic role as the British maid to Dr. Jekyll in "Mary Reilly"
  (2006) Voiced the title character in live-action/computer-animated feature film "Charlotte's Web," based on the book by E.B. White
  (2001) Was featured in Steven Soderbergh's remake of "Ocean's Eleven"; Pitt also in the cast
  (---) Will serve as executive producer for the made-for-TV movie, "Samantha: An American Girl Holiday" (WB); Set in 1904, the period film is based on the popular American Girl dolls and books (lensed 2004)