Julia Fiona Roberts (born October 28, 1967) is an American actress. Known for her leading roles across various genres, she has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and three Golden Globe Awards. She became known for portraying charming and relatable characters in romantic comedies and blockbusters, before expanding into dramas, thrillers, and independent films. The films in which she has starred have collectively grossed over $3.9 billion worldwide, making her one of Hollywood's most bankable stars, while the media nicknamed her "America's Sweetheart" in recognition of her widespread popularity and on- and off-screen charisma.

After early breakthroughs in Mystic Pizza (1988) and Steel Magnolias (1989), Roberts solidified her status as a leading lady with the romantic comedies Pretty Woman (1990), My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Notting Hill (1999), and Runaway Bride (1999). Roberts won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the title role in the biographical drama Erin Brockovich (2000). She then starred in films such as 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), Ticket to Paradise (2022), Leave the World Behind (2023), and After the Hunt (2025). On television, she starred as a physician during the AIDS crisis in the HBO film The Normal Heart (2014) for which she earned a Primetime Emmy Award nomination, a social worker in the first season of the streaming series Homecoming (2018), and portrayed Martha Mitchell in the Starz political limited series Gaslit (2022).

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 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^[update], Roberts's net worth was estimated to be $250 million. People magazine has named her the most beautiful woman in the world a record five times.

Julia Fiona Roberts was born on October 28, 1967, at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, 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 Catholic. Roberts was raised Catholic. Her older brother Eric Roberts (b. 1956), from whom she was estranged for several years until 2004, older sister Lisa Roberts Gillan (b. 1965), and niece Emma Roberts, are also actors. She also had a younger half-sister named Nancy Motes.

Roberts's parents, one-time actors and playwrights, met while performing in theatrical productions for the United States Armed Forces. They later co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop off Juniper Street in Midtown Atlanta. They ran a children's acting school in Decatur, Georgia, while they were expecting Julia. The children of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr. attended the school; Walter Roberts served as acting coach for their daughter, Yolanda. In gratitude for his service running the only racially integrated theater troupe in the region and due to the Roberts's financial difficulties, Coretta King paid the Roberts's hospital bill when Julia was born.

Roberts's parents married in 1955. Her mother filed for divorce in 1971; the divorce was finalized in early 1972. From 1972, Roberts lived in Smyrna, Georgia, where she attended Fitzhugh Lee Elementary School, Griffin Middle School, and Campbell High School. In 1972, her mother married Michael Motes, who was abusive and often unemployed; Roberts despised him. The couple had a daughter, Nancy, who died at 37 on February 9, 2014, of an apparent drug overdose. The marriage ended in 1983, with Betty Lou divorcing Motes on cruelty grounds; she had stated that marrying him was the biggest mistake of her life. Roberts's own father died of cancer when she was ten.

Roberts wanted to be a veterinarian as a child. She played the clarinet in her school band. After graduating from high school, she 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 in the dramedy Satisfaction (1988), alongside Liam Neeson and Justine Bateman, as a band member looking for a summer gig. (She had filmed a small role in 1987 opposite her brother Eric, in Blood Red, though she only had two words of dialogue, and it was not released until 1989.) In 1988, Roberts had a role in the fourth-season finale of Miami Vice and her first critical success with moviegoers came with the independent romantic comedy Mystic Pizza, in which she played a Portuguese-American teenage girl working as a waitress at a pizza parlor. Roger Ebert found Roberts to be a "major beauty with a fierce energy" and observed that the film "may someday become known for the movie stars it showcased back before they became stars. All of the young actors in this movie have genuine gifts".