Once again Roberts was awarded the Golden Globe, this time for Best Actress, while receiving another Oscar nomination. Roberts’s winsome performance as the broke, wisecracking prostitute from Milledgeville helped the film earn more than $463 million worldwide. Major Celebrityĭuring the 1990s Roberts became one of the most recognized Hollywood actresses, and her swift rise to fame began with Pretty Woman (1990), a romantic comedy directed by Garry Marshall and costarring Richard Gere. In a 1990 interview, Roberts credited the other women in the cast, veteran performers Olympia Dukakis, Sally Field, Darryl Hannah, Shirley MacLaine, and Dolly Parton, with supporting and mentoring her. Her next film, Steel Magnolias (1989), proved to be a significant critical and box-office success, especially for Roberts, who received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination. Roberts soon landed her first major role, Daisy Arujo, in the independent film Mystic Pizza (1988), written by Atlanta native Alfred Uhry. Her first role was a nonspeaking part in the film Firehouse (1987), followed by a small speaking part in the drama Blood Red (1989) alongside her brother. After her 1985 graduation from Campbell High School in Smyrna, Roberts joined her siblings in New York City, where Eric had lived since the mid-1970s. Early CareerĪlthough as a child Roberts hoped to become a veterinarian, as a teenager her interests began to shift, especially in light of her brother’s early successes as a professional actor. Both parents remarried, and in 1977 Roberts’s father died, after being diagnosed with throat cancer. Julia moved with her mother and sister to Smyrna, while her father and brother continued to live in Atlanta. Their oldest child, Yolanda, performed the lead role in the workshop’s final production, The Owl and the Pussycat, in 1970.įaced with mounting financial difficulties, the workshop closed in 1970, and the Robertses filed for divorce the following year. participated in the company’s classes and productions, and the Kings financially supported the enterprise. The four children of civil rights activists Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr. During this time they had two more children-Lelisa (called Lisa) Billingsley in 1965 and Julia (called Julie) in 1967.ĭuring its years of activity, the workshop was the only integrated theater company in Atlanta. Later that year they founded the Actors and Writers Workshop, which ran for six years. In 1964 Walter and Betty Lou began production on a local Saturday morning children’s television show called Bum Bum and His Buddies, which they financed themselves. In 1960 the family moved to Decatur, Georgia, where Walter began working with Atlanta’s Academy Theater and the Harrington Scenic and Lighting Studio. In 1957 the couple left the air force, and Walter enrolled at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. The two married in 1955, and their first child, Eric Anthony, was born in 1956. He joined the air force in 1953 and, while stationed in Biloxi, Mississippi, was cast in a military production that included Betty Lou Bredemus, who was also in the air force. While a student at Emory University in 1952, he acted in productions on campus and elsewhere in Atlanta. Her father took an early interest in the theater.
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