03/20/2001
By David Germain / Associated Press
LOS ANGELES – Just how giddy with success can Julia Roberts get?
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 Kevork Djansezian / AP |
| Julia Roberts and Benjamin Bratt pose for photographers as they arrive for the 7th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday, March 11, in Los Angeles. Roberts is nominated for her role in Erin Brockovich and Bratt is nominated for his role in Traffic. |
With all the ups and downs since Roberts first gained notice with Mystic Pizza in 1988, you'd think she might be blase about the honors she's receiving now. Nope.
"To get used to that would be to like, lose a pulse, lose the breath of life,'' she said backstage at the recent Screen Actors Guild awards, where she won the best-actress honor for Erin Brockovich.
"One mustn't get used to things like this. ... I was pretty overcome.''
Earning as much as $20 million a film, Roberts, 33, has become the one Hollywood actress who can regularly justify such paychecks.
Pretty Woman (1990) remains her biggest hit, with a domestic gross of $178.4 million. But the last four years have been her most consistent, with a string of $100 million hits that include My Best Friend's Wedding, Notting Hill, Runaway Bride and Erin Brockovich.
A couple of weeks after the Oscar nominations came out, she was back with The Mexican, No. 1 at the box office for two straight weekends. The mob caper originally was meant to be a small flick without stars, but with Roberts and co-star Brad Pitt aboard, it has topped $50 million in just 17 days.
As recently as 1996, though, Roberts' star had plummeted when she tried her hand at darker dramatic roles. She bombed as Dr. Jekyll's dour housekeeper in Mary Reilly, which grossed just $5.7 million. She returned in a supporting role in the Irish historical drama Michael Collins, which took in only $10.9 million.
"She was in a little rut there and she came out of it, and I dare say it's going to be a while before she gets into a rut again,'' said box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations.
The year before that box-office rut, Roberts' brief marriage to singer Lyle Lovett had broken up. Five years earlier, she and fiance Kiefer Sutherland called off their wedding at the last minute.
Today, Roberts gushes like a schoolgirl over steady Benjamin Bratt and has a seemingly flawless ability to pick projects audiences will love.
She'll be seen this summer in the romantic comedy America's Sweethearts, something of a twist on Notting Hill, in which Roberts plays personal assistant to a Hollywood superstar (Catherine Zeta-Jones). And she is shooting the casino-heist flick Ocean's Eleven, which reteams her with Pitt and with Erin Brockovich director Steven Soderbergh.
Brockovich itself was a risk for Roberts – a real-life story based on a little-known legal battle. It wound up being a crowd-pleaser largely because of Roberts' saucy performance.
"The great thing about Julia's performance is her range,'' said Michael Shamberg, a producer on the film. "She goes from being a mother to public advocate to effective speaker to being a pain in the butt.''
At a recent forum for Directors Guild of America nominees, Soderbergh joked that Roberts would not have done Erin Brockovich if he had shown her the skimpy costumes when they first talked. He said he promised her it would be done tastefully.
By the end of the shoot, "one day she walked onto the set and said, `This skirt is too long.' Then I knew we'd turned her,'' Soderbergh said.
On stage at the SAG awards, Roberts' voice wavered. She said the award validated her sense of her own talent, "because I'm not always sure.''
"I'm a fraud to stand here alone because, God, there's so many people that make me look like I know what I'm doing,'' Roberts said. "There's all these invisible people behind me that I wish you could see, because they're lovely and they're sweet and they work so hard, and they make what I do look like it's easy. And we all know that it's kind of torture.
"But, you know, they pay us so much,'' she joked.
Backstage, she was jocular, doing an auctioneer impersonation when reporters held up numbered cards to ask questions, then cracking wise about why she became an actress:
"A real lack of skill to do anything else. Honestly, that's what it comes down to. It was either acting or being a dental hygienist because I come from a family with really good teeth and I felt I should give back,'' Roberts said. After a pause, she added, "But, here I am.''
