After Dinner Speakers: Julia Roberts, John Inverdale, John Adair

Actress. Born Julie Fiona Roberts, on October 28, 1967, in Smyrna, Georgia, to Betty and Walter Roberts. Her parents divorced when she was four and her father died when she was nine. Just after high school, Roberts joined her sister in New York City and began modeling. Her brother, Eric, was already established as an actor, and Julia filmed a small role in Blood Red (1988), in which he starred. Her first major film role came in 1988’s Satisfaction, starring Justine Bateman of Family Ties fame and Liam Neeson. That same year, she costarred as one of three restless small-town girls in Mystic Pizza. Her performance as a doomed young bride in 1989’s ensemble drama Steel Magnolias, costarring Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Daryl Hannah, Shirley MacLaine, and Dylan McDermott earned Roberts notice as a promising dramatic actress, including a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Just one year later, Roberts made the leap to superstardom with her breakthrough turn as a Hollywood Boulevard prostitute who falls in love with her business mogul client, played by Richard Gere, in the smash hit Pretty Woman (1990). She again garnered Golden Globe and Academy Award nods for the role, this time in the Best Actress category. The tremendous box office success of Pretty Woman made Roberts one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actresses. She released a number of less successful movies on its heels, including the standard-issue thrillers Flatliners (1990), costarring future fiancé Kiefer Sutherland, and Sleeping with the Enemy (1991); the star-studded Steven Spielberg bomb Hook (1991), with Dustin Hoffman; and the weepy Dying Young (1991). Throughout the first half of the 1990s, Roberts made headlines more for her tumultuous love life—she left Sutherland virtually at the altar to take up with actor Jason Patric, then married country singer Lyle Lovett in 1993 after a whirlwind romance that began on the set of Robert Altman’s The Player (1992)—than her box office success. While the hit legal drama The Pelican Brief (1993), costarring Denzel Washington, and Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (Ready to Wear, 1994) were minor hits, Roberts’ forays into dramatic period pieces (notably 1996’s Mary Reilly and Michael Collins) were critical and commercial disappointments, and the romantic comedies I Love Trouble (1994) and Something to Talk About (1995) failed to attract audiences. With a starring role in the smash-hit comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding in 1997, Roberts reasserted her considerable box office authority. Costarring Cameron Diaz, Rupert Everett, and Dermot Mulroney, the film was Roberts’ first movie to gross over $100 million since Pretty Woman. After finding only modest commercial success with Conspiracy Theory (1997), costarring Mel Gibson, and Stepmom, costarring Susan Sarandon and Ed Harris, Roberts again struck box office gold in 1999 by returning to her romantic comedy roots. Her next two films—Notting Hill, costarring Hugh Grant, and Runaway Bride, which reteamed Roberts with her Pretty Woman costar Gere and director Garry Marshall—earned a combined domestic gross of over $300 million, despite receiving mixed reviews from critics. Roberts got the role of her career in 2000 when she portrayed the crusading legal secretary who spearheaded one of the largest class-action lawsuits in U.S. history in the drama Erin Brockovich. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the film was an enormous critical and commercial success, earning five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Albert Finney), and Best Actress. Roberts’ emotional Oscar win capped an incredible string of international awards she received for the role, including Best Actress honors from the New York, Los Angeles, and London critics’ associations, a Golden Globe Award, and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award (the British equivalent of the Oscar). Her $20 million salary for the film also made Roberts the highest-paid actress of all time. In 2001, Roberts starred in the romantic crime caper The Mexican opposite Brad Pitt, the comedy America’s Sweethearts, costarring John Cusack, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Billy Crystal, and the star-studded remake Ocean’s Eleven, directed by Soderbergh and featuring Pitt, George Clooney, and Matt Damon. After her marriage to Lyle Lovett ended in 1995 after less than two years—most of which the couple spent apart due to work commitments—Roberts dated actors Daniel Day-Lewis and Matthew Perry as well as health club owner Pat Manocchia. In late 1997, she began a more than three-year relationship with the actor Benjamin Bratt, then the star of Law & Order. Roberts and Bratt split in the spring of 2001. On July 4, 2002, Roberts married cameraman Daniel Moder at her New Mexico ranch.