Julia Fiona Roberts (born October 28, 1967) is an American actress. Known for her leading roles across several genres, she has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and three Golden Globes. She became known for playing charming and relatable characters in romantic comedies and blockbusters, before expanding into dramas, thrillers, and independent films.
After early breakthroughs in Mystic Pizza (1988) and Steel Magnolias (1989), Roberts cemented herself as a Hollywood leading lady with the romantic comedies Pretty Woman (1990), My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Notting Hill (1999), and Runaway Bride (1999). She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the titular role in the biographical drama Erin Brockovich (2000). Roberts then starred in films such as 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 starred as a physician during the AIDS crisis in the HBO film The Normal Heart (2014), which earned her a Primetime Emmy Award nomination, a social worker in the first season of the streaming series Homecoming (2018), and portrayed Martha Mitchell in the Starz political limited series Gaslit (2022).
Roberts runs the production company Red Om Films, through which she has served as an executive producer for various projects she has starred in, as well as for the first four films of the American Girl franchise (2004–2008). She has served as the global ambassador for Lancôme since 2009. She was the world's highest-paid actress throughout the majority of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s. People magazine has named her the most beautiful woman in the world a record five times.
Julia Fiona Roberts was born on October 28, 1967 at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, to Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Grady Roberts. She is of English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German, and Swedish descent. Her father was a Baptist, her mother Catholic. Roberts was raised Catholic. Her older brother Eric (born 1956), from whom she was estranged for several years until 2004, older sister Lisa (born 1965), and niece Emma, are also actors. She also had a younger half-sister named Nancy Motes.
Roberts's parents, onetime actors and playwrights, met while performing in theatrical productions for the United States Armed Forces. They later co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop off Juniper Street in Midtown Atlanta. They ran a children's acting school in Decatur, Georgia, while they were expecting Julia. The children of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr. attended the school; Walter Roberts served as acting coach for their daughter, Yolanda. In gratitude for his service running the only racially integrated theater troupe in the region and due to the Roberts's financial difficulties, Coretta King paid the Robertses' hospital bill when Julia was born.
Roberts's parents married in 1955. Her mother filed for divorce in 1971; the divorce was finalized in early 1972. From 1972, Roberts lived in Smyrna, Georgia, where she attended Fitzhugh Lee Elementary School, Griffin Middle School, and Campbell High School. In 1972, her mother married Michael Motes, who was abusive and often unemployed; Roberts despised him. The couple had a daughter, Nancy, who died at 37 on February 9, 2014, of an apparent drug overdose. The marriage ended in 1983, with Betty Lou divorcing Motes on cruelty grounds; she had stated that marrying him was the biggest mistake of her life. Roberts's own father died of cancer when she was ten.
Roberts wanted to be a veterinarian as a child. She played the clarinet in her school band. After graduating from high school, she headed to New York City to pursue a career in acting. Once there, she signed with the Click Modeling Agency and enrolled in acting classes.
1987–1999: Acting debut and film stardom
Following her first television appearance as a juvenile rape victim in the first season of the series Crime Story, with Dennis Farina, in the episode "The Survivor", broadcast on February 13, 1987, Roberts made her big screen debut in the dramedy Satisfaction (1988), alongside Liam Neeson and Justine Bateman, as a band member looking for a summer gig. (She had filmed a small role in 1987 opposite her brother Eric, in Blood Red, though she only had two words of dialogue, and it was not released until 1989.) In 1988, Roberts had a role in the fourth-season finale of Miami Vice and her first critical success with moviegoers came with the independent romantic comedy Mystic Pizza, in which she played a Portuguese-American teenage girl working as a waitress at a pizza parlor. Roger Ebert found Roberts to be a "major beauty with a fierce energy" and observed that the film "may someday become known for the movie stars it showcased back before they became stars. All of the young actors in this movie have genuine gifts".
In Steel Magnolias (1989), a film adaptation of Robert Harling's 1987 play of the same name, Roberts starred as a young bride with diabetes, alongside Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine and Daryl Hannah. The filmmakers were looking at both Laura Dern and Winona Ryder when the casting director insisted they see Roberts, who was then filming Mystic Pizza. Harling stated: "She walked into the room and that smile lit everything up and I said 'that's my sister', so she joined the party and she was magnificent." Director Herbert Ross was notoriously tough on newcomer Roberts, with Sally Field admitting that he "went after Julia with a vengeance. This was pretty much her first big film." The film was a critical and commercial success when it was released, and Roberts received both her first Academy Award nomination and first Golden Globe Award win for her performance.
Catapulting on her Oscar nomination, Roberts gained further notice from worldwide audiences when she starred with Richard Gere in Pretty Woman in 1990, playing an assertive freelance sex worker with a heart of gold. Roberts won the role after Michelle Pfeiffer, Molly Ringwald, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Karen Allen, and Daryl Hannah (her co-star in Steel Magnolias) turned it down. The role also earned her a second Oscar nomination and second Golden Globe Award win. She was paid $300,000 for the part. Pretty Woman saw the highest number of ticket sales in the U.S. ever for a romantic comedy, and made $463.4 million worldwide. The red dress Roberts wore in the film has been considered one of the most famous gowns in cinema.
Her next film release following Pretty Woman was Joel Schumacher's supernatural thriller Flatliners (also 1990), in which Roberts starred as one of five students conducting clandestine experiments that produce near-death experiences. The production was met with a polarized critical reception, but made a profit at the box office and has since been considered a cult film. In 1991, Roberts played a battered wife attempting to begin a new life in Iowa in the thriller Sleeping with the Enemy, a winged, six-inch-tall tomboyish Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg's fantasy film Hook, and an outgoing yet cautious nurse in her second collaboration with director Joel Schumacher, the romance drama Dying Young. Although negative reviews greeted her 1991 outings, Sleeping with the Enemy grossed $175 million, Hook $300.9 million and Dying Young $82.3 million globally.
Roberts took a two-year hiatus from the screen, during which her only appearance in a film was a cameo in Robert Altman's The Player (1992). In early 1993, she was the subject of a People magazine cover story asking, "What Happened to Julia Roberts?". Roberts starred with Denzel Washington in the thriller The Pelican Brief (1993), based on John Grisham's 1992 novel of the same name. In it, she played a young law student who uncovers a conspiracy, putting herself and others in danger. The film was a commercial success, grossing $195.2 million worldwide. None of her next film releases—I Love Trouble (1994), Prêt-à-Porter (1994) and Something to Talk About (1995)—were particularly well received by critics nor big box office draws. In 1996, she guest-starred in the second season of Friends (episode 13, "The One After the Superbowl"), and appeared with Liam Neeson in the historical drama Michael Collins, portraying Kitty Kiernan, the fiancée of the assassinated Irish revolutionary leader. Stephen Frears' Mary Reilly, her other 1996 film, was a critical and commercial failure.