Showing posts with label Julia Roberts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Julia Roberts. Show all posts

Saturday, 29 October 2022

JULIA F. ROBERTS, ONE OF THE MOST BANKABLE STARS

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Julia Roberts, the American actress who was born on a day like today in 1967.

Julia Fiona Roberts (born October 28, 1967) is an American actress

Known for her leading roles in films encompassing a variety of genres, she has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and three Golden Globe Awards.

The films in which she has starred have collectively grossed over $3.9 billion globally, making her one of Hollywood's most bankable stars.

After an early breakthrough with appearances in Mystic Pizza (1988) and Steel Magnolias (1989), Roberts established herself as a leading actress when she headlined the romantic comedy Pretty Woman (1990), which grossed $464 million worldwide.

She starred in numerous commercially successful films throughout the 1990s, including the cult romantic comedies My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Notting Hill (1999) and Runaway Bride (1999), before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the biographical drama Erin Brockovich (2000).

She achieved further film success in the following decades with Ocean's Eleven (2001), Ocean's Twelve (2004), Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Valentine's Day (2010), Eat Pray Love (2010), August: Osage County (2013), Wonder (2017), and Ticket to Paradise (2022).

Roberts also received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the HBO television film The Normal Heart (2014), had her first regular television role in the first season of the Amazon Prime Video psychological thriller series Homecoming (2018), and portrayed Martha Mitchell in the Starz political limited series Gaslit (2022).

In addition to acting, Roberts runs the production company Red Om Films, through which she has served as an executive producer for various projects she has starred in, as well as for the first four films of the American Girl franchise (2004-2008).

She has acted as the global ambassador for Lancôme since 2009. She was the world's highest-paid actress throughout the majority of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s. She was paid $300,000 for Pretty Woman (1990), and received then-unprecedented fees of $20 million and $25 million for her roles in Erin Brockovich (2000) and Mona Lisa Smile (2003), respectively. As of 2020, Roberts' net worth was estimated to be $250 million. People magazine has named her the most beautiful woman in the world a record five times.

More information: Instagram-Julia Roberts

Roberts was born on October 28, 1967, in Smyrna, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, to Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Grady Roberts. She is of English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German, and Swedish descent. Her father was a Baptist, her mother a Catholic, and she was raised Catholic. Her older brother Eric Roberts (born 1956), from whom she was estranged for several years until 2004, older sister Lisa Roberts Gillan (born 1965), and niece Emma Roberts, are also actors. She also had a younger half-sister named Nancy Motes.

Roberts wanted to be a veterinarian as a child. She played the clarinet in her school band. After graduating from Smyrna's Campbell High School, she attended Georgia State University but did not graduate. She later headed to New York City to pursue a career in acting. Once there, she signed with the Click Modeling Agency and enrolled in acting classes.

Following her first television appearance as a juvenile rape victim in the first season of the series Crime Story, with Dennis Farina, in the episode The Survivor, broadcast on February 13, 1987, Roberts made her big screen debut with an appearance in the dramedy Satisfaction (1988), alongside Liam Neeson and Justine Bateman, as a band member looking for a summer gig.

Roberts has contributed to UNICEF as well as other charitable organizations. Her six-day visit to Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1995, as she said, to educate myself, was expected to trigger an outburst of donations -$10 million in aid was sought at the time- by UNICEF officials.

In 2006, she became a spokeswoman for Earth Biofuels as well as chair of the company's newly formed advisory board promoting the use of renewable fuels.

In 2013, she was part of a Gucci campaign, Chime for Change, that aims to spread female empowerment.

In 2000, Roberts narrated a documentary about Rett syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder, designed to help raise public awareness about the disease, and in 2014, she was the voice of Mother Nature in a short film for Conservation International intended to raise awareness about climate change.

More information: Oprah


You can be true to the character all you want
but you've got to go home with yourself.

Julia Roberts

Thursday, 22 June 2017

ERIN BROCKOVICH: PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT

Erin Brockovich
Erin Brockovich (born June 22, 1960) is an American legal clerk and environmental activist, who, despite her lack of formal education in the law, was instrumental in building a case against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) of California in 1993. Her successful lawsuit was the subject of a 2000 film, Erin Brockovich, which starred Julia Roberts. Since then, Brockovich has become a media personality as well, hosting the TV series Challenge America with Erin Brockovich on ABC and Final Justice on Zone Reality. She is the president of Brockovich Research & Consulting. She also works as a consultant for Girardi & Keese, the New York law firm of Weitz & Luxenberg, which has a focus on personal injury claims for asbestos exposure, and Shine Lawyers in Australia.

She was born Erin Pattee in Lawrence, Kansas, the daughter of Betty Jo, a journalist, and Frank Pattee (1924–2011), an industrial engineer and football player. She worked as a management trainee for Kmart in 1981 but quit after a few months and entered a beauty pageant. She won Miss Pacific Coast in 1981 and left the beauty pageant after the win. She has lived in California since 1982.


More information: Erin Brockovich

The case alleged contamination of drinking water with hexavalent chromium, also written as Chromium VI, Cr-VI or Cr-6, in the southern California town of Hinkley. At the center of the case was a facility, the Hinkley compressor station, built in 1952 as a part of a natural-gas pipeline connecting to the San Francisco Bay Area. Between 1952 and 1966, PG&E used hexavalent chromium in a cooling tower system to fight corrosion. The wastewater was discharged to unlined ponds at the site, and some percolated into the groundwater, affecting an area near the plant approximately 3.2 by 1.6 km. The Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) put the PG&E site under its regulations in 1968.


Erin Brockovich
The case was settled in 1996 for US$333 million, the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history. Masry & Vititoe, the law firm for which Brockovich was a legal clerk, received $133.6 million of that settlement, and Brockovich herself was given a bonus of $2.5 million.

A study released in 2010 by the California Cancer Registry showed that cancer rates in Hinkley remained unremarkable from 1988 to 2008. An epidemiologist involved in the study said that the 196 cases of cancer reported during the most recent survey of 1996 through 2008 were fewer than what he would expect based on demographics and the regional rate of cancer. However, a June 2013 Mother Jones magazine article featured an extensive critique from the Center for Public Integrity of the author's work on the later epidemiological studies.


As of 2006, average Cr-6 levels in Hinkley were recorded as 1.19 ppb with a peak of 3.09 ppb. For comparison, the PG&E Topock Compressor Station on the California-Arizona border averaged 7.8 ppb with peaks of 31.8 ppb based on a PG&E Background Study.
 
More information: Chasing the Frog


 If you believe you're right... 
stand up and fight for your place in the sun. 
If you believe you can do it, hang in for the whole 15 rounds 
because even if you don't win, 
you will have earned the respect of everyone in the fight, 
including yourself, and in that sense you will have prevailed.
 
Erin Brockovich