Julia Roberts delivered one of the most quoted lines in modern cinema history in 1999: “I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her. ” Audiences around the world treated it as a defining romantic moment. Behind the cameras, however, the dynamic between Roberts and her co-star Hugh Grant was far less warm than the chemistry they managed to create on screen. For 25 years, Roberts remained silent about reports that Grant had been difficult on set, openly joking about the size of her mouth and even ranking her below Renée Zellweger when it came to on-screen kissing.
Now, at 57 years old, Roberts has begun to address that period in her life in more direct terms, describing the experience as complex and expressing a particular irony she only understood with time. Roberts was born on October 28, 1967, in Smyrna, Georgia, the youngest of three children. Her parents, Walter and Betty, were actors and playwrights who co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop and ran a children’s acting school. When Julia was born, Coretta Scott King paid the hospital bill as a gesture of gratitude to the Roberts family for running the only racially integrated theater troupe in the region.
Her parents divorced in 1971, and her father died of throat cancer in 1977, when Julia was just nine years old. After graduating from high school in 1985, she moved to New York City, following her older brother Eric into acting. Her breakthrough came with 1989’s Steel Magnolias, which earned her a Golden Globe and her first Academy Award nomination. The following year, Pretty Woman turned her into the most famous woman in the world almost overnight.
She was paid $300,000 for the film, which grossed $463 million worldwide and became the highest-ticket-selling romantic comedy in American box office history. Fame at that speed created pressures Roberts was still learning to navigate a decade later. She called off her engagement to Kiefer Sutherland in 1991, three days before the ceremony, and briefly married country singer Lyle Lovett in 1993. The marriage lasted 21 months.
Through the 1990s, she moved between massive hits and quieter misses, trying to reconcile the public image of the smiling romantic lead with the private person underneath that image. By the time Notting Hill came along in 1999, Roberts was already working to rebuild her box office standing, following the success of My Best Friend’s Wedding. The script, written by Richard Curtis, was almost absurdly simple: the most famous woman in the world walks into a small London travel bookshop and falls for the man behind the counter. Roberts has said she did not arrive on the project with high expectations, approaching it as a good script and a good part.
The tension between her and Grant changed the texture of the production. Grant made jokes on set about the size of Roberts’s mouth and later told an interviewer that she was “literally physically a very big mouth. ” He also told Vanity Fair during the film’s press tour that it was easy to forget that the “lovely, relaxed 30-year-old woman” he was working with was also the untouchable icon who had been famously difficult to approach for a decade. Roberts never responded publicly to any of this for 25 years.
Roberts was playing a version of herself in the film: a famous actress who cannot escape her own image. Behind the scenes, she reportedly renegotiated her salary from $10 million to $15 million during production, which Grant found irritating. Despite the friction, the two maintained professional courtesy, and the chemistry written into the script somehow made it onto the screen. The film opened in May 1999 and grossed nearly $364 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing British film of the year.
The following year, Roberts starred in Erin Brockovich, playing the real-life single mother who helped bring one of the largest class action lawsuits in American history against a California power company. Roberts was paid $20 million, the first actress in Hollywood history to reach that salary for a single film, and won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Roberts married cinematographer Daniel Moder in 2002, after meeting him on the set of The Mexican. They have three children: twins Hazel and Phineas, born in 2004, and Henry, born in 2007.
She has described her family as the foundation under the fame, the private life she had long been reaching toward. She lives in New Mexico and goes barefoot whenever she can, a habit so characteristic that it has been written into film roles. Grant followed a different trajectory. He married Swedish actress Anna Eberstein in 2018 and has spoken warmly about fatherhood.
His career shifted from the warm likability of his earlier work into sharper territories, including his performance in the HBO series The Undoing, where he played a man concealing something dark behind easy charm. Now, after three decades of declining to engage with the question of what really happened between them on that set, Roberts has said the experience was complex. Making a film about a woman who cannot be seen as ordinary while being treated as anything but ordinary by her co-star carried a kind of irony she understood only later. She has said that the line “I’m also just a girl” was the truest thing in the script, because she had spent the previous decade trying to make other people believe it while not quite believing it herself.
She has said that she and Grant are fine, that they have run into each other over the years and been perfectly pleasant. The film, she said, belongs to the people who watched it, not to her or Grant or Curtis. To the woman who quoted it at her wedding, to everyone who ever needed a way to say that they were just a person standing in front of another person asking to be loved. The relationship between the two people at the center of that film—complicated, professionally strained, privately resolved into something between ordinary civility and genuine mutual respect—turned out to be its own kind of love story.
Not the one that was filmed, but the real one, which is always messier and more interesting than anything that makes it onto a screen.
