Julia Roberts

Julia Roberts was born in Atlanta to parents who ran an integrated children's theater school out of Decatur, Georgia, at a time and place where that alone was a statement; her father coached the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., and Coretta Scott King paid the family's hospital bill when Julia was born, out of gratitude and because the family could not afford it. Her parents divorced early and her father died of cancer when she was 10, after which the family moved to Smyrna. She played clarinet in the school band, wanted to be a veterinarian, and had two older siblings, Eric Roberts and Lisa Roberts Gillan, already working as actors by the time she finished high school and moved to New York for modeling and acting classes herself.

Steel Magnolias in 1989 brought her first Oscar nomination at 21; Pretty Woman the next year, a role several actresses had already turned down, made her a star and the centerpiece of the highest-grossing romantic comedy yet made. A run of 1990s hits — My Best Friend's Wedding, Notting Hill, Runaway Bride — made her the reliable reason a studio's romantic comedy opened well. Erin Brockovich in 2000 won her the Academy Award for Best Actress and, at a reported $20 million, made her the first actress paid that much for a single film. By 2002 trade publications ranked her Hollywood's most bankable star regardless of gender, a title no actress had held before. She has kept working steadily since, in the Ocean's franchise, television, and the occasional prestige drama, without fully leaving the romantic-comedy persona that made her famous.

The tabloid story about her getting jilted at the altar by Kiefer Sutherland in 1991, three days before the wedding, is not quite what happened; Roberts has said the engagement ended earlier and by mutual decision, and that the press's runaway-bride version stuck anyway, two years before she starred in a movie called Runaway Bride. Her actual marriage that decade, to the country singer Lyle Lovett in 1993, lasted less than two years. The professional cost ran in a different direction: colleagues who worked with her, including director Mike Nichols on Charlie Wilson's War, have said plainly that her looks and her fame made critics slower to credit the actual skill in her performances than they were with less famous actresses doing comparable work.

She married the cinematographer Danny Moder in 2002 and has stayed married to him since, longer than any earlier, more publicized relationship, and settled into a slower, more selective phase of her career after Eat Pray Love in 2010, fewer romantic leads, more character work and television. People magazine has named her the world's most beautiful woman five times, a record, a distinction that sits oddly beside a career some directors insist was never really about the looks. She still works, by choice rather than necessity, picking projects from what her agents bring her, and the nickname coined in the 1990s, America's sweetheart, has stuck to her longer than to any actress since.

Julia Roberts's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Steel Magnolias film
  First Academy Award nomination 1989
• Pretty Woman film
  Made her a star and became the highest-grossing romantic comedy of its era 1990
• Erin Brockovich film
  Academy Award for Best Actress; first $20 million paycheck for an actress 2000
• Ocean's Eleven film
  One of several ensemble hits through the 2000s 2001

• October 28, 1967 aged 0 Born in Atlanta, Georgia
• 1977 aged ~10 Her father dies of cancer when she is 10
• 1988 aged ~21 Mystic Pizza brings her first notice
• 1989 aged ~22 Steel Magnolias earns her first Academy Award nomination
• 1990 aged ~23 Pretty Woman is released and makes her a star
• March 25, 2001 aged 33 Wins the Academy Award for Best Actress for Erin Brockovich
• July 4, 2002 aged 34 Marries cinematographer Danny Moder
• 2010 aged ~43 Eat Pray Love marks a shift toward more selective, character-driven roles

• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. her father coached his daughter
• Oprah Winfrey b. 1954
  Media executive and talk show host who built a multimedia empire and became one of the most influential women in the world. media-era contemporary
• Meryl Streep b. 1949
  Most nominated actor in Oscar history, renowned for her chameleon-like ability to inhabit diverse roles. box-office and awards-era peer
• Denzel Washington b. 1954
  Academy Award-winning actor and director regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation. Oscar-era contemporary