Julia Roberts’s reasons to be cheerful.
The essence of her appeal is that she is more lovable than desirable, and, even when love is off the menu, she cannot not be liked.Illustration by Al Hirschfeld / Courtesy of The Margo Feiden Galleries, LTD

What will happen on March 25th? A few months ago, moviegoers and studio executives alike were so dismayed by the quality of this year’s films that it became possible, indeed fashionable, to fear for the very existence of the Academy Awards. As things turned out, we are facing, if not a feast, at least a decent meal. “Gladiator” will presumably slay all tigers, crouching or otherwise, although I for one would welcome a best-director nod for Ang Lee, largely because of a desire to see him run up the walls of the Shrine Auditorium, spin over Russell Crowe, and bounce lightly off Catherine Zeta-Jones. Amid a night of uncertainty, one sure thing shines out: the Oscar for best performance by an actress in a leading role will go to Julia Roberts. No offense to Juliette Binoche and the other players, but the contest really is no contest. Not just in the hive of Hollywood but in the minds of a hundred million drones around the world, Julia is Queen Bee.

This royal status was confirmed by the receipts for “The Mexican,” her latest picture. There was a distinct lack of rave in the reviews, but that didn’t faze the fan base. You could argue that as many people lined up to see Brad Pitt, Roberts’s co-star, as they did for the lady herself, yet even the most expert Bradologists would not claim that he enjoys her crossover appeal. In short: men like watching Julia Roberts and women like watching Julia Roberts—or, at least, women don’t mind watching Julia Roberts, and, even if they did mind, they could always pass the time by watching the men watch Julia Roberts. This is an entertaining, if not an edifying, sight: if you had knelt behind the screen at the première of “Pretty Woman” and peeked around the edge, you would have seen the menfolk sitting there, slack as puppies, waiting for Roberts to unleash her grin and wondering if they could climb into her mouth.

What matters about “The Mexican” is not that it collared $20.3 million in its first three days but that, in doing so, it completed a hat trick for the Roberts phenomenon: all three of her most recent movies have slid immediately into the top slot. “Runaway Bride” (1999) ran up $34.5 million over the same period, and “Erin Brockovich” (2000) took $28.1 million. Often a lonely figure, Roberts now has the box office to herself; no other female star comes close. Her male counterparts take home two or three times as much per picture, but that’s Hollywood—liberal as you like, but with the crusty old inequalities, racial and sexual, still clinging on below the waterline. The two Toms, Hanks and Cruise, are Roberts’s main contenders, but only Hanks seems able to match the progress of the new model Julia, all peaks and no trough. No “Eyes Wide Shut” for her, although it’s a tempting thought, especially with those dinky black masks. Just to freak the guys out further still, one of her next projects will be “Ocean’s 11.” Directed by Steven Soderbergh, with whom she made “Erin Brockovich,” and co-starring George Clooney, it’s a remake of a Rat Pack roundelay from 1960, with Angie Dickinson and Frank Sinatra. Roberts is playing someone called Mrs. Ocean: ideal casting for a woman who has overwhelmed two-thirds of the planet.

Turn back ten years, and the story was much the same. Julia Roberts, born in 1967, was finally living up to her genetic billing. She was a younger sister of Eric, the man who founded an entire movie career on the strength of his cheek muscles, and the daughter of two theatre-thirsty parents who had run the Actors and Writers Workshop in Atlanta. Now it was her turn. According to her biographer Frank Sanello, she had already been voted one of twelve finalists in her high-school beauty pageant, which makes you wonder what the other eleven girls looked like, and had been described by her English teacher, following a class reading of “Julius Caesar,” as “a very emotional Brutus.” Moving up a gear, she followed her brother to New York and then landed roles in “Mystic Pizza,” “Steel Magnolias,” and, after much lobbying, “Pretty Woman,” which went on to earn a very emotional four hundred and fifty million dollars. All three films pulled the single whammy that Hollywood, in its sneaky heart, treasures above all else—not the critical and commercial hit but the commercial hit that outwits the critics and proves them superfluous, hooking up a direct feed into public taste. When the reviewers fawned over “Erin Brockovich” and—with more than a murmur of surprised condescension—over the rip and rancor of its leading lady, Roberts may have cast her mind back to the slush of yesteryear, which the same crowd could hardly wait to shake from its boots. Like many popular figures before her, she hitched a ride with Middle America and then waited a while—in her case, a decade—for her more fastidious viewers, the types who would rather die than cry, to catch up.

All of which is no reason to revise one’s critical opinion. No amount of retrospection will transform “Mystic Pizza” into “Three Sisters,” although the plots are not that different, and none of us can say what would have happened if Chekhov had recovered from tuberculosis and gone into the pepperoni business. Yet the film works on its own terms, and, considering that it cost only six million dollars, which is what a Jerry Bruckheimer production spends on deep-pan specials to go, “Mystic Pizza” seems to have aged into the favorite movie of an awful lot of people. These are, admittedly, the same people whose notion of a good movie is one that enables them to lie on the couch and snuffle into their Cookie Dough Chip, but they still constitute an important fraction of the viewing audience, and Julia Roberts is mistress of their domain. One of her friends and confidantes has been Sally Field, another reflex tearjerker, who paired with Roberts on “Steel Magnolias,” in the company of Olympia Dukakis, Daryl Hannah, Dolly Parton, and Shirley MacLaine. The characters had names like Clairee, Truvy, and M’Lynn, the very sound of which, I recall, was enough to make me bring up m’lunch.

“Steel Magnolias” introduced a couple of themes that would echo through the Roberts career. One concerned the women around her; she was canny enough and, one suspects, effusive enough not to elbow other actresses out of her way, refusing to use her beauty, or the likelihood that she would be the Next Big Thing, to turn the picture into a showpiece. This generosity has seldom wavered; even in “Runaway Bride,” she is happy to let two funny women, Joan Cusack and an uncredited Laurie Metcalf, do their own running away with various scenes—a favor that is bound to play well with a female audience. Julia may get twenty million up front per picture, but look, she has difficulties with boys, and, on a good day, she is surely one of the girls.

The other strain was death. In a sense, “Pretty Woman” was an interruption; what flowed, with toxic logic, from “Steel Magnolias” was a stream of movies that began with “Flatliners” (1990) and “Dying Young” (1991), in which Roberts either succumbed to the Grim Reaper or made serious efforts to date him, and rolled straight through to “Mary Reilly” (1996), in which she wore the pallor of the permanent victim, and on to the gruesome “Stepmom,” of 1998. So ingrained is our expectation of Julia the nearly departed that I was convinced, thinking back to “Stepmom,” that it had been Roberts who contracted terminal cancer. Checking my notes, I learned that the sufferer was in fact Susan Sarandon, and that Julia’s knit hats had thus been intended as a fashion statement rather than a polite signal of hair loss. Maybe that is why “Erin Brockovich” was such a blessing, such a clearing of the sky. Erin was not just full of life but specifically anti-death; people were falling all around her, as if on a battlefield, but she grabbed the flag and soldiered on. Did all this point to a new resolution and independence in Roberts’s domestic setup, or should we thank Steven Soderbergh, who presumably instructed the caterers to slip something into her lunchbox? In many of her twentieth-century movies, Roberts had been led by her long-tressed, pre-Raphaelite looks (or misled by maudlin style merchants, such as Joel Schumacher) to come on like a nineteenth-century maiden in distress; now, in her first project of the new century, she has brought herself up to date.

“Pretty Woman” was not and will never be an interesting movie, but that doesn’t matter; the saga of its success is lurid with all kinds of interest, whether your field is politics or shoulder pads. Garry Marshall’s film had been kicking around for a while, initially as the tale of a drug-addicted hooker who sleeps with a rich guy and ends up back on the street. Then Disney bought it and painted it in Cinderella stripes; the blow job that Vivian, Roberts’s character, administers to a dog-tired Richard Gere feels like the last gasp of Reaganomics. With this movie, the eighties delivered a bitter, all but unanswerable slap to the mantras of the sixties: money, contrary to what Paul McCartney had informed us, could buy you love.

The intercourse in “Pretty Woman” represented the first and, if my research is correct, the last occasion on which Julia Roberts consented to action in the sack. Though there are plenty of bedroom scenes in her career, she either lies there and nuzzles, as she did in “Mystic Pizza,” or she lies there waiting to expire; she half disrobed in “Flatliners,” but only so that the other medical students could clamp electrodes to her skin. The leading scholar of such niceties is Craig Hosoda, the author of “The Bare Facts Video Guide.” Hosoda doesn’t do art; he fast-forwards his VCR to glimpses of nudity and labels them in crisp shorthand. His findings on Roberts are brief but forensically precise, consisting of one scene from “Pretty Woman”:

Very, very brief tip of left breast, then right breast, then left breast seen through head board, in bed with Richard Gere. It’s her—look especially at the vertical vein that pops out in the middle of her forehead whenever her blood pressure goes up.

This may be the most telling analysis of Julia Roberts that we possess. Hosoda, the guy who causes perspiring teen-agers across America to hit the pause button, suddenly stops his exhaustive notation of “breasts” and “buns”—there are no other components—to talk about a vein. Roberts herself is on record as saying, “I’m really against nudity in movies. When you act with your clothes on, it’s a performance. When you act with your clothes off, it’s a documentary. I don’t do documentaries.” This is neatly put; it shows, incidentally, how remote she is from any European visions of cinema—not just from the relaxed, Old World attitude toward sex but from the European assumption (found lingering in the work of Americans like Robert Altman) that the scent of documentary can and should be allowed to flavor a fictional method.

It may sound mad, or cold, or downright blasphemous to claim that Julia Roberts is not sexy. Any well-briefed attorney could proffer evidence to the contrary. What of those push-up bras in “Erin Brockovich,” say, that had steam venting from critics’ ears? Well, for one thing, they were a prop; they were as awkward and distorting as the neck brace that Erin wears in the early scenes, after her car accident. She wasn’t arousing in the movie; she was mock-arousing, poking her killer cleavage at the clerks from whom she required information, and therefore, by extension, at the lunks in the audience who could be expected to fall for the same trick.

So, if the underwear won’t support the argument, how about the smile? If Julia Roberts doesn’t rely on word of mouth, who does? As her movies remind us, the pathological gaze of the closeup, something that directors of photography share only with dental hygienists, allows the oral habits of life to be writ engulfingly large. Characters use their mouths to transmit reams of promise about their loves and leanings: they kiss, drink, smoke, and smile, and it is always something of a comedown—too low a reminder of bodily necessity—to see them eat. (That’s why there are comparatively few chewing scenes in cinema, and hardly any that are non-comic; the most celebrated, such as the oyster-sucking in “Tom Jones,” are blatant stand-ins for lust.) Not that full-lipped stars are guaranteed to be loudmouths: Ava Gardner was no chatterbox, and Jeanne Moreau’s superb sulk, with its downturned corners, was like a worldly, sex-heavy acknowledgment that all men are doomed to disappoint. If Roberts summons the ghost of anyone, it is an actress like Ann Sheridan: funny, busy, noisy, all-American, no-shit—hoping that her sensibility, however hyper, will lose out to her good sense.

The most common comparison, however, is with Audrey Hepburn; both women reign more serenely than the films that they crown, and the laughing Vivian of “Pretty Woman,” like the Holly Golightly of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” switches to full beam with so little provocation that it feels ungallant to point out that in both cases—one is a pro, the other an eager amateur—their virtue is meant to be easy. They don’t want to work on their backs; they want to be swept off their feet. But Audrey was tiny, Belgian-born, and never less than cosmopolitan, whereas the rangy Roberts is, in her own words, “just a girl from Smyrna, Georgia, who wanted to be in the movies and get some attention.” She palpitates with worry and need; the famous upper lip, so hilariously unstiff that I am amazed she was allowed through British customs to shoot “Notting Hill,” spends more time in tremble mode than in any other, and she tends to throw herself hungrily at kisses, as if she hadn’t had a square meal in weeks. Hannibal Lecter would describe her as tasty. The essence of Roberts’s appeal—notably old-fashioned, if you think about it—is that she is more lovable than desirable, and that, even when love is off the menu, she cannot not be liked. There is no more flattering illusion in movies, none that we prefer to hear over and over again: here is a goddess, and she wants to be your friend.

It wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t like this in 1996, certainly, when Roberts was coming off “Mary Reilly” and heading into “Michael Collins.” Those are both interesting movies, although not as interesting as her decision to act in them, and the public shied away like a startled horse. Social historians broadly agree that while the mid-nineties were good for the economy and the New York transportation system, they were bad news for Julia Roberts. Her choice of titles is telling: anyone who voluntarily goes to work on a picture called “I Love Trouble” is asking for it, and her 1995 movie “Something to Talk About” was, in a word, not. The late Alan J. Pakula cast her in “The Pelican Brief” and refused to show her full-on smile until the final shot, which is like keeping Cyd Charisse in cargo pants. Roberts had already been miscast as Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg’s “Hook,” where both her hair and her shorts, cropped to a dandy boyishness, suggested that, in line with the androgynous tradition of the stage, she would have made a delectable Peter Pan.

A trace of childishness has glittered through the life and works of Julia Roberts; you can feel other actors responding to it—should they chide, indulge, or defend this singular creature? In “Something to Talk About,” a tale of a hobbled marriage, the confusion is rife; at one point, Robert Duvall, playing Julia’s leathery father, says to her, “Now, look, child . . . you’re a grown woman with responsibilities.” Onscreen, she tends to register distress with the helpless speed of a hurt little girl; elsewhere, however sturdily she is castled in celebrity, legends of brittleness keep peeking through. It cannot be good for your conscience, let alone your equanimity, to know that half the country can recite a list of your lost loves: Liam Neeson, Dylan McDermott, Kiefer Sutherland (to whom Roberts was engaged), Jason Patric, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Matthew Perry. None of the above qualify as anonymous, and it comes as a pleasant shock to learn that, in 1996, Julia dated a personal trainer called Pat. Then there was the marriage to Lyle Lovett; many onlookers took it as a good omen, arguing with unkind logic that, if she was attracted to him, it must be love. The wedding took place in 1993, in Marion, Indiana, where the clerk of the local courthouse described them as “nice people,” and went on to say, “I was very impressed but not awestruck. I was awestruck when I met Dan Quayle.”

The marriage did not last. Lovett and Roberts split up two years later; one can only imagine the pain of separation, what with Julia trying to yank her mane of ringlets away from the scary Velcro thatch of her beloved. Nobody, not even the National Enquirer, knows what goes on in the private life of Julia Roberts, but it is difficult not to watch the vulnerable performer of that period, alternately fractious and mousy, without asking yourself what, or whom, she had to go home to. The film that snapped her out of this slump was “My Best Friend’s Wedding”—a graceless work, hardly stronger than some of her comedy flops, yet humming with enough high spirits to earn about three hundred million dollars, much of it in countries where they dub everything but the smiles. The film wakes up at the exact moment when Roberts, arriving at an airport, sees Cameron Diaz shimmying toward her—not just a blonde, and not just a blonde who has been vaccinated against all known neuroses, but a blonde with a smile as canyon-wide as her own. If this were a Chuck Jones cartoon, you would get a closeup of Julia’s eyes, flashing bright red like the cherries on a slot machine—“Rival! Rival!” Forget love; this was war.

From then on, screenwriters and directors have followed suit; it is as though a memo had been circulated among the studios to the effect that the most lucrative Julia Roberts movies had to be parables on the theme of Julia Roberts. Hence, “My Best Friend’s Wedding” is as much a catfight for the throne of Hollywood as a tussle over an inoffensive jock; “Conspiracy Theory” is a study of justified paranoia; “Notting Hill” is a headlight turned on the deerlike panic of its heroine, faced as she is with a non-famous man from a foreign land; and, as for “Runaway Bride,” consider this conversation between the settled Peggy (Joan Cusack) and the itchy Maggie (Roberts), who just cannot decide on one man:

Peggy: I think sometimes you just sort of . . . spaz out with excess flirtatious energy and it just . . . lands on anything male that moves.

Maggie: Anything male that moves? As opposed to anything male that doesn’t?

Peggy: Well, like certain kinds of coral.

Maggie: I’m definitely going to have to kill myself today.

Peggy: Why?

Maggie: Because you think I’m all like, Hey, man, check me out!

Peggy: No, I don’t. I think you’re like, I’m charming and mysterious in a way that even I don’t understand and something about me is crying out for protection from a big man like you. It’s very hard to compete with, specially for us married women who’ve lost our mystery.

Maggie: Lost? You haven’t—you are totally mysterious.

Peggy: No. I’m weird. Weird and mysterious are two very different things.

Maggie: I’m weird.

Peggy: No. You’re quirky. Quirky and weird are two very different things.

Maggie: Peggy, I think there is a distinct possibility that I am profoundly and irreversibly screwed up. Despite that, I love you.

And there the scene dies. Doesn’t anybody in Hollywood know how to write zingers anymore—how to lead an audience on and then sock us in the jaw? Comedy, when it doesn’t gross us out, has shrivelled into a prelude to sincerity: something to be hustled out of the way, almost with embarrassment, to allow warm feelings in. This is a dangerous practice, given that the best comedy, from Ben Jonson to Preston Sturges, was designed to strip our nobler nature down to its socks; but it is perfect for a star like Roberts, whose levity tends to darken, not dazzle, with the onset of perplexity.

That is the open secret of her success: she satisfies all the current requirements of an American star, being at once seductively outgoing in her wit, or in her rare flashes of wrath, and consolingly inward in her furrowed brow and her fondness for the homely. She looks luminous in jeans, T-shirts, and sweaters, and she looks tacky and trapped in posh frocks and wedding outfits—which is slightly unfortunate, given that so many of her movies seek to railroad her down the aisle. Indeed, with her endless limbs and uncool gait, the highest-paid actress in the world sometimes wanders through her movies like a stoned foal—one more instance, perhaps, of Roberts not wanting to frighten or freeze her average viewers, who must be thrilled to discover an ungainliness to match their own. Like both Hepburns, Audrey and Katharine, she cheers you up simply by walking into the frame; unlike them, she often seems to be casting around for reasons to be cheerful herself. Just now, she has plenty, with an Oscar in her sights and Benjamin Bratt, “my own golden man,” in the palm of her hand. So, will Julia continue to be a Brockovich, or will she stumble into a rerun of the nineties? Will she get married again and raise a little Bratt pack? She ascended to fame during one Republican Administration, and there is no telling how fruitfully Pretty Woman—or Lovely Older Woman—might thrive under another. It’s asking a lot, but Julia Roberts could yet be as awesome as Dan Quayle. ♦

This story is part of our Actresses collection. To read more stories, click here.