That broad smile, that gloriously curly hair, that eternal air of optimism – Julia Roberts has always been an exuberant screen presence, and whether she’s playing a conniving food critic, an outspoken activist, or a loose-lipped, ’70s-era political insider, she’s also, always, instantly recognisable. To many, she’ll forever be the rom-com queen of the ’90s – rolling out a bevy of frothy, feelgood instant classics – but, in recent years, she’s also proved herself to be a formidable character actor, navigating tense thrillers as effortlessly as she does heartwarming family dramas.
On her 59th birthday, we look back at her best performances from the last three decades.
It’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Roberts playing the glorious, gregarious redhead Vivian Ward who enchants Richard Gere’s stuffy corporate raider in Garry Marshall’s steamy romance. She emerged from it a household name, Hollywood heavyweight and verified fashion icon, with an Oscar nomination to boot.
There are so many reasons to watch PJ Hogan’s delightful romp: moment when the wedding party sings “I Say a Little Prayer”; Rupert Everett’s scene-stealing supporting performance; Cameron Diaz’s turn from perky to ferocious; but also Roberts’s delicious embodiment of a cynical journalist who pursues her best friend (Dermot Mulroney), despite the fact that he’s engaged to another woman.
Hugh Grant’s Will Thacker is reduced to a bumbling bundle of nerves when faced with the serene goddess that is Roberts’s Anna Scott in Roger Michell’s modern fairytale about a bookshop owner who falls for a reclusive movie star. By turns warm and laidback, and then suddenly cold and prickly, she’s mercurial – but always magnetic.
In the part that finally secured her a Best Actress Oscar, Roberts sizzles as the titular force of nature, an unemployed single mother who talks Albert Finney’s Ed Masry into giving her a job in his law office and falls down a rabbit hole when investigating a gas and electricity company that is poisoning the groundwater of a small desert town. Under Steven Soderbergh’s direction, she’s fierce and outspoken, razor-sharp and wonderfully empathetic (not to mention unashamedly sexy), giving what is still, unquestionably, her best performance to date.
Icy and inscrutable, the actor is a world away from her largely wholesome rom-com roots in Mike Nichols’s tense tale of adultery and ennui alongside Clive Owen, Jude Law and Natalie Portman. Playing a foul-mouthed photographer who takes no prisoners, she proves she can do anything.
With a giant bouffant, thick Southern accent and a wardrobe of slick ’80s cocktail dresses, the actor is the shrewd and strategic foil to Tom Hanks’s freewheeling congressman in this political drama, Roberts’s second collaboration with Mike Nichols. The scene where she declumps her mascara with a safety pin while discussing foreign policy sums her up – she’s exacting, relentless and utterly terrifying.
Showing herself to be more than a match for Meryl Streep – especially in the sequence in which she literally pounces on her – Roberts is explosive in John Wells’s venomous family saga about the search for a missing patriarch, earning yet another Oscar nomination.
As the endlessly supportive mother of a 10-year-old with a rare facial disfigurement who is nervous to start school in Stephen Chbosky’s tender coming-of-age story, Roberts is truly wondrous: gentle, steadfast and understanding, while also being quietly fearful of how the world will treat him.
Roberts made the leap to TV significantly later than most of her peers with this deeply unsettling psychological thriller from Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, but it was certainly worth the wait. In the role of a diner waitress looking back at her time working as an administrator at a mysterious government facility, ostensibly designed to help veterans transition back to civilian life, she’s subtle, slippery and as compelling as ever.
Her prestige drama era continued with Robbie Pickering’s rip-roaring account of the Watergate scandal, in which she sinks her teeth into the part of Martha Mitchell, the ostentatiously dressed, famously outspoken wife of the US attorney general under Nixon who refuses to fall into line – and faces perilous consequences as a result. It’s a barnstorming performance that confirms that Roberts is only getting better with age.