Julia Roberts
A warm, famously selective star whose screen presence blends classic Hollywood glamour with an approachable, down-to-earth quality. Her $20 million fee for Erin Brockovich made her the first actress paid at that level and set a new benchmark for women's pay in film.
Personality
Roberts works from instinct rather than method. She has said she has no formal acting technique and finds actors' talk about acting dull, and critics have long noted how closely her screen warmth tracks her own public persona. She is selective about work: by 2017 she said she no longer chased roles but waited to see what came along, and that her agents never try to talk her into a part. She has also kept a firm line between her private life and her career, keeping her husband, cameraman Daniel Moder, and their three children largely out of view.
Under pressure
Early fame brought harsh scrutiny. Director Herbert Ross was notoriously tough on her during Steel Magnolias, and after a run of poorly reviewed 1991 films and a two-year break from the screen, People magazine ran a 1993 cover asking what had happened to her. She answered with The Pelican Brief and, later in the decade, a string of romantic-comedy hits. Her 2006 Broadway debut in Three Days of Rain sold well but drew blunt reviews. Rather than retreat to safe ground, she kept widening her range, moving toward character-driven dramas and ensemble work as she grew older.
The arc
Born in Atlanta to parents who ran an actors' and writers' workshop, Roberts moved to New York after high school and broke through with Mystic Pizza (1988) and Steel Magnolias (1989). Pretty Woman (1990) made her a global star, and she dominated the late 1990s with My Best Friend's Wedding, Notting Hill and Runaway Bride before winning the Best Actress Oscar for Erin Brockovich. Later work leaned toward drama, including August: Osage County, The Normal Heart, Homecoming and Gaslit. France named her a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2025, and After the Hunt brought a Golden Globe nomination in 2026.
Legacy
Roberts was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, and her agent at the time credited her with helping convince studios that women could lead films as successfully as men. In 2002 she became the first woman ranked Hollywood's most bankable star in The Hollywood Reporter's industry poll. Pretty Woman and Notting Hill remain touchstones of the modern romantic comedy, while Erin Brockovich showed a dramatic range that some critics had doubted, and her pay negotiations are often cited in discussions of gender pay equity in film.
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