Julia Stiles played three Shakespeare heroines before finishing college
Around the turn of the millennium, a teenage Julia Stiles became the go-to actress for updated Shakespeare: Kat in 10 Things I Hate About You, Ophelia in a modern Hamlet, and the Desdemona role in O. She was also a Columbia student, and nearly passed on the first Bourne film because of exams.
Stiles was born in New York City on 28 March 1981, the eldest of three children of a Greenwich Village artist and a businessman. At 11 she was performing with the experimental La MaMa company, and a family friend at Manhattan's Ridge Theater cast her in a nonspeaking role after seeing her in a fourth-grade play. She worked in John Moran's pieces there from 1993 to 1998 and debuted on television in 1993 on the mystery show Ghostwriter.
Her first film was I Love You, I Love You Not in 1996, with Claire Danes and Jude Law, followed by a small part as Harrison Ford's daughter in The Devil's Own. Her first lead, in Wicked, won best actress at Karlovy Vary, and a critic called her the darling of Sundance in 1998. At 17 she was cast as Kat opposite Heath Ledger in the high-school retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, which earned her an MTV breakthrough award.
Save the Last Dance in 2001, about a would-be ballerina who learns hip-hop in Chicago, put her on the cover of Rolling Stone; she said she did almost all her own dancing. She played the Treadstone operative Nicky Parsons across the Bourne series, a franchise she credits with reinventing action roles for women. She deferred a semester for each of the first two films and graduated from Columbia in English literature in 2005.
Onstage she played Viola in Twelfth Night for Shakespeare in the Park and made her West End debut in 2004 in David Mamet's Oleanna. Her role as Lumen Pierce in Dexter drew Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. She began directing with a short that premiered at Tribeca in 2007, and her first feature as director, Wish You Were Here, came out in January 2025.
Source: Julia Stiles
