JULIA ROBERTS

Life is too short to waste in the bitterness of reality, so dream on

Julia Fiona Roberts (born October 28, 1967) is an American film actress and former fashion model. She became well known during the early 1990s after starring in the romantic comedy Pretty Woman opposite Richard Gere, which grossed $463 million worldwide. She won the Best Actress Academy Award in 2000 for her critically acclaimed 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 romantic comedies such as My Best Friend's Wedding, Mystic Pizza, Notting Hill, Runaway Bride, and crime films such as The Pelican Brief and Ocean's Eleven, have collectively earned box office receipts of over $2 billion, making her the most successful actress in terms of box office receipts.

Roberts had become one of the highest-paid actresses in the world, topping the Hollywood Reporter's annual "power list" of top-earning female stars from 2002 to 2005, until 2006, when Nicole Kidman won the top spot. 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's net worth was estimated to be $140 million.

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.[4] Roberts has a production company called Red Om Films, formerly Shoelace Productions ("Moder" spelled backwards, after her husband's last name).

Early life-Roberts was born in Atlanta, Georgia at Crawford Long Hospital. Her father, Walter Brady Roberts, was a vacuum cleaner salesman, and her Minneapolis, Minnesota-born mother, Betty Lou Motes (née Bredemus), was a one-time church secretary and real estate agent. Her parents, one-time actors and playwrights, met while performing theatrical productions for the armed forces and later co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop in Atlanta, Georgia off Juniper Street in Midtown; the two divorced in 1971.[5] Her mother later married Michael Motes and had another daughter, named Nancy Motes who was born in 1976. Roberts's father died of cancer when she was ten. Her older brother and sister, Eric Roberts (from whom she was once estranged but reconciled since 2004) and Lisa Roberts Gillan, are also actors.

Roberts moved to Smyrna, Georgia (a suburb of Atlanta) in 1972, where she attended Fitzhugh Lee Elementary School, Griffin Middle School and Campbell High School. [6] She played clarinet in the band. Roberts wanted to be a veterinarian as a child, but soon after graduating from Smyrna's Campbell High School,[7] she headed to New York to join her sister Lisa Roberts Gillan and pursue a career in acting. Once there, she signed with the Click modeling agency and enrolled in acting classes. She reverted to her original name "Julia Roberts" when she discovered that a "Julie Roberts" was already registered with the Screen Actors Guild. Her niece, Emma Roberts, whom Julia used to take to movie sets when she was a young girl, has joined her father and aunts in the acting business.

Relationships-Roberts's personal life has often been in the spotlight. She has had widely reported romantic relationships with numerous famous men, including Liam Neeson, Dylan McDermott, Kiefer Sutherland, Lyle Lovett, Matthew Perry, and Benjamin Bratt. She was briefly engaged to McDermott, her Steel Magnolias co-star. She met Sutherland in 1990, when he was her co-star in Flatliners; he left his wife and children to move in with Roberts. In August 1990, Roberts and Sutherland announced their engagement, with an elaborate studio-planned wedding scheduled for June 14, 1991. Roberts broke the engagement three days before the wedding when she discovered Sutherland had been meeting with a stripper named Amanda Rice. Roberts subsequently went to Ireland with Jason Patric, a friend of Sutherland's. On June 27, 1993, she married country singer Lyle Lovett; the couple had met only three weeks earlier. The wedding took place on 72-hours' notice and was held in Marion, Indiana, near where Lovett was appearing on tour with his band. Less than two years later, in March 1995, the couple separated, and subsequently divorced.

In 1998, Roberts began dating Law & Order star Benjamin Bratt, who was her escort for the March 25, 2001 Academy Awards ceremony at which she won her Oscar. Three months later, in June 2001, Roberts and Bratt announced that they were no longer a couple. "It's come to a kind and tenderhearted end," she said of their relationship.[13]Roberts met her current husband, cameraman Daniel Moder, on the set of her movie The Mexican in 2000 and they began an affair. Though at the time, Moder was married to Vera Steinberg Moder, he filed for divorce a little over a year later, and after it was finalized, he and Roberts wed on Fourth of July 2002, at her ranch in Taos, New Mexico.[14]On November 28, 2004, they became the parents of fraternal twins, daughter Hazel Patricia and son Phinnaeus "Finn" Walter. Their third child, son Henry Daniel Moder, was born on June 18, 2007 in Los Angeles.

Roberts 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.

In 2000, Roberts narrated Silent Angels, a documentary about Rett syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder, 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...