Coretta Scott King paid the hospital bill when Julia Roberts was born
Julia Roberts's parents ran the only racially integrated theatre troupe in their part of Georgia, and taught acting to the King children. When money ran short, Coretta Scott King covered the Atlanta hospital bill for Julia's birth. That baby became the highest-paid actress in the world for most of the 1990s.
Roberts was born at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta on October 28, 1967, to Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Grady Roberts. Both had acted and written plays; they met while performing in shows for American troops, later co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop in Midtown, and ran a children's acting school in Decatur. Among its pupils were the children of Martin Luther King Jr., and Walter coached their daughter Yolanda. Acting ran in the family: her older brother Eric, sister Lisa and niece Emma all took it up.
Childhood was hard. Her parents divorced in 1972, the year her mother married Michael Motes, a frequently jobless and abusive man Julia loathed; that marriage lasted until 1983. Her father died of cancer when she was ten. She grew up in Smyrna, Georgia, played clarinet in the school band, and dreamed of becoming a vet. After high school she moved to New York, signed with the Click modelling agency and began acting lessons.
Mystic Pizza (1988) and Steel Magnolias (1989) opened doors, and Pretty Woman (1990) made her a leading lady. Romantic comedies such as Notting Hill kept her there, and in 2000 she won the Best Actress Oscar for playing the title role in Erin Brockovich. Later she joined the Ocean's heist ensemble and tackled heavier work, including a doctor in the early AIDS crisis in HBO's The Normal Heart, which brought an Emmy nomination, and Martha Mitchell in the political series Gaslit.
Her reach went beyond the screen. Through her company, Red Om Films, she executive-produced several of her own projects and the first four American Girl films. She has fronted Lancôme globally since 2009, and People magazine has five times named her the world's most beautiful woman, more than anyone else. From the 1990s into the mid-2000s, no actress was paid more.
Source: Julia Roberts
