Actress Julia Roberts

It was impossible for me to continue this blog any further without featuring one of the most celebrated American actresses of the past thirty years. :-)  

Although Julia Roberts - sister of Eric, aunt of Emma - first made favorable impressions with the critics in the 1988 movie Mystic Pizza, playing a Portuguese-American pizzeria waitress in the Connecticut town of Mystic,  it was her performance in the title role of 1990's Pretty Woman, as a prostitute named Vivian who becomes a rich man's date at social events, that made her a star.  Richard Gere, her co-star, joked that he need only have sent his empty suit to the set and let Ms. Roberts carry the film herself - she was that good. 

In between those two movies, she played Shelby, the brave, dying woman in Steel Magnolias.

Ms. Roberts made more incredible movies, such as My Best Friend's Wedding, a 1997 comedy about seeing her secret crush about to wed someone else (the bride played by Cameron Diaz, an earlier honoree on this blog), 1999's Notting Hill, about a famous actress in love with an ordinary English bloke (played by the not-so-ordinary Hugh Grant), and 2000's Erin Brockovich, the Steven Soderbergh true-story film about the plucky California working-class heroine who fought the public utility Pacific Gas and Electric in a groundwater pollution case . . . and won.   (The real-life Erin Brockovich has a cameo appearance as a waitress named . . . Julia. :-D)

She also played another real-life character - conservative Texas socialite Joanne Herring, who was instrumental in getting U.S. support for the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in 2007's Charlie Wilson's War (Tom Hanks played the title-character congressman), a role as far from Erin Brockovich as you can get.

Julia Roberts, who just turned 49 in October 2016, is not done yet, but she already has a record of achievement that any actress would want to retire with. :-)