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An Academy Award-winning American film actress, former fashion model and a mother of three children, yup we are talking about Julia Fiona Roberts a.k.a Julia Roberts. She was Julie Roberts (born October 28, 1967), mocked for her string-bean physique, thick glasses, and toothy grin. Her parents divorced when she was in kindergarten, and her father died when she was 10. In adolescence she switched to contact lenses and bloomed to beautiful, and to match her new look she asked friends to call her “Julia” instead of “Julie”. After high school, she moved to New York and spent a few years modeling, selling shoes, and working at an ice cream stand. At 19, she landed her first film role, a tiny part in a raunchy R-rated comedy of sexual harassment, Firehouse. Well, it took a long year to make her just like nowadays.

She played the doomed bride Shelby in Steel Magnolias (1989), opposite Oscar winners Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, and Olympia Dukakis. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and suddenly became Hollywood’s new “It” girl. In Pretty Woman (1990), she played a Disneyfied prostitute, falling for client Richard Gere. The film was a shallow, predictable, and utterly unbelievable fairy tale that managed to earn $178 million in America, establishing Roberts as a major star. Typical of her films are Notting Hill with Hugh Grant and Erin Brockovich with Albert Finney. She was reportedly paid $20 million for Brockovich, making Roberts the highest-paid female film starlet of all time.

Roberts has become the highest-paid actress in the world, topping the Hollywood Reporter’s annual power list of top-earning female stars for four consecutive years (2002-2005). Her fee for 1990’s Pretty Woman was $300,000; in 2003, she was paid an unprecedented $25 million for her role in Mona Lisa Smile. As of 2007, Roberts’ net worth was estimated to be US$140 million (whew…!).

She shot to fame during the early 1990s after starring in the romantic comedy, Pretty Woman, opposite Richard Gere, which grossed US$463 million worldwide. She won the Best Actress Academy Award in 2001 for her critically praised turn as the title character in Erin Brockovich and earned Oscar nominations as Best Supporting Actress for Steel Magnolias (1989) and Best Actress for Pretty Woman (1990). Her films, which also include The Pelican Brief, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting Hill, Runaway Bride, and Ocean’s Eleven, have collectively earned box office receipts well over US$2 billion.

Roberts has had a wild romantic life. She broke an engagement to Kiefer Sutherland, calling off the wedding mere days before the scheduled ceremony in 1991, when she heard that Sutherland had been unfaithful to her. She was whispered to have had a nervous breakdown in the aftermath, and ended up in the arms of actor Jason Patric. She was married to the singer Lyle Lovett for two years, and spent three years dating actor Benjamin Bratt. She is now married to a camera operator, Danny Moder, who is the father of her children. Roberts’s personal life has often been in the spotlight, a fact reflected in her Notting Hill, a romantic comedy about a famous actress falling for a bookstore owner played by Hugh Grant, another star with a high-profile personal life.

Roberts was the first actress to appear on the cover of Vogue and the first woman to land the cover of GQ. She has been named one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” eleven times, tied with Halle Berry. In 2001 Ladies Home Journal ranked her as the 11th most powerful woman in America, beating out then national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and first lady Laura Bush. Roberts has a production company called Red Om Films (”Moder” spelled backwards; formerly Shoelace Productions).

She is not only has a role in acting but also has given her time and resources to UNICEF as well as to other charitable organizations. In Spring 1995, Roberts, an enthusiastic supporter of UNICEF, asked if she could meet some of the relief agency’s neediest recipients. On May 10, she arrived in Port-au-Prince, as she said, “to educate myself.” The poverty she found was overwhelming. “My heart is just bursting,” she said. UNICEF officials hoped that her six-day visit would trigger an outburst of giving: $10 million in aid was sought at the time.

For years, Roberts was quiet about politics, but she began speaking out after the Bush administration came to power in 2001. She has described Bush as “embarrassing”, and said, “He’s not my president. He will never be my president”. Well, she also dedicated her life to humanity as in 2000, she narrated Silent Angels, a documentary about Rett syndrome, which was shot in Los Angeles, Baltimore and New York. The documentary was designed to help raise public awareness about the disease. In July 2006, Earth Biofuels announced Roberts as a spokeswoman for the company and as chair of the company’s newly formed Advisory Board promoting the use of renewable fuels.

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