Julia Roberts was the smile that lit up the nineties, and the warmth behind it turned her into America’s sweetheart.Julia Fiona Roberts was born on October 28, 1967, in Smyrna, Georgia, and grew up in a family close to the stage. Her parents ran a children’s acting workshop, and after high school she moved to New York, where early television and film work led to her breakthrough.That breakthrough came quickly. In Mystic Pizza (1988) she played Daisy, a young woman full of appetite for life, and in Steel Magnolias (1989) she played Shelby, a role that brought her a first Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe win. Then came Pretty Woman (1990), in which her Vivian Ward, opposite Richard Gere, turned a modern fairy tale into a worldwide hit and made Roberts a star of a kind Hollywood had not seen in years.The nineties kept her at the centre of popular film. She moved from romantic comedy to thriller and drama with ease, in Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), The Pelican Brief (1993), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and Notting Hill (1999), where her famous actress falling for an ordinary bookseller felt both glamorous and believable. Audiences trusted her laugh, and they trusted the feeling underneath it.In Erin Brockovich (2000) she gave the defining performance of that run, playing the real-
