So, Julia, what will you say if you win?

At $20m a movie, Julia Roberts has long been Hollywood's most successful actress. But could this be the year she finally wins the recognition of the Academy? Bob Longino reports

Julia Roberts, dressed for comfort in jeans and a suede and leather jacket, strides into a hotel room five weeks before Oscar night, taking her seat at the head of a banquet table lined with nearly a dozen waiting reporters. Her cheeks give off a soft reddish glow. Her demeanour is the opposite of Erin Brockovich, the headstrong, foul-mouthed upstart role that made Roberts the clear favourite to win the best actress award on March 25. She seems more like Mary Reilly, the mousy, English waif she played in 1996 who found herself face to face with Dr Jekyll's Mr Hyde.

  1. Erin Brockovich
  2. Production year: 2000
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 133 mins
  6. Directors: Steven Soderbergh
  7. Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Albert Finney, Cherry Jones, Julia Roberts, Marg Helgenberger, Peter Coyote, Veanne Cox
  8. More on this film

Somewhere in this room, high up in LA's Regent Beverly Wilshire, some unsuspecting journalist is going to ask the inevitable question. Roberts is Hollywood's premier actress and, at 33, she has weathered more than a dozen years of prying and dumb press questions.

She's here promoting The Mexican, her new $35m DreamWorks action comedy with Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini, and she explains how she tries to avoid repeating herself in back-to-back movies. Then one of those questions comes. It always does. Can she explain the differences, a Latino reporter wants to know, between The Mexican and the movie she's filming now, America's Sweethearts? "Well, you know," Roberts replies quickly, lowering her head and then looking up with focused brown eyes. "The Mexican. Mexican. America's Sweethearts. American. So right there I'm going down the right path."

Roberts has never exactly enjoyed a great relationship with the media. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer finds himself trapped in a cinema showing a fake Julia Roberts movie entitled Love is Nice, and loathing every minute of it. And there are heaps of magazines sporting glorious, glossy photos of her in glorious, glossy fashions and replete with words like "hugely famous" and wondering "ain't her life grand?" But here, long before Roberts enters, some of the reporters are labelling her "catty". Even mean. No one asks what her responses might be if she was asked more thought-provoking questions.

That messy private life has fuelled a lot of the past press attention she clearly despises. Breaking her engagement to Kiefer Sutherland. Anxiety in the park with Jason Patric. Marrying and then divorcing Lyle Lovett. Living with Liam Neeson. Dating Daniel Day-Lewis. That friendship with Matthew Perry.

A German interviewer at the Brockovich press junket asked: "Did that [performance as Brockovich, a mother of three] make you think of children, imagine yourself as a single mother?" Roberts replied: "Doing Pretty Woman didn't make me want to hit the streets! It's as if people are wanting me to procreate . . . This is something I ponder when I go home at night all weary. Why do people keep checking if I'm ovulating?"

Ask a Julia Roberts fan which of her nearly 30 film performances is her best work and, quite often, you'll hear Pretty Woman or My Best Friend's Wedding. Ask Roberts and she'll name neither. "I guess specifically I could find the good and bad in all the movies," she has said. "But I suppose Erin Brockovich, just in the most general sense, I'm the best in. It was the most challenging, the most well-rounded, had the widest scope of a person to play."

Brockovich herself says that the film's opening-scene car wreck in LA, a startling, grab-the-moviegoer's-gut crash, actually happened in Las Vegas. It set in motion an odd turn of events that ultimately led to the filming of her story and five Oscar nominations, including Roberts's high-profile race for an award after 10 years without an Academy nomination.

Following the wreck, Brockovich went to Los Angeles chiropractor Pamela DuMond. DuMond related the story to another client, Carla Santos Shamberg. She happens to be married to Michael Shamberg. He happens to be a producing partner with Danny DeVito. "I was pitching Michael something every day of my life," Shamberg says. "On that day I told him I found something." Shamberg, who eventually became Brockovich's executive producer, knew that she wanted Roberts to play Brockovich. Her husband's thoughts were, she says: "I don't get [the story] and you won't get Julia Roberts." Roberts not only "got" the story but, after reading the script, asked for the part. She also asked for $20m, a salary that only top male actors had commanded. "I was so happy to give this girl $20m," Shamberg says. "Why shouldn't she make what the boys make?"

In The Mexican, Roberts plays the high-strung, in-your-face girlfriend of Brad Pitt, sent by thugs south of the border to recover a legendary handmade pistol. Roberts's performance often crackles with the same ferocity as the movie's frequent gunfire.

With gun in hand, and a willingness to pull the trigger, Roberts is shedding her perceived Melanie Wilkes image for a fully-fledged Scarlett O'Hara. "It was really original," she says of the script. "Introduce two people in a relationship and then half a minute later separate them - put them in two different countries, in fact." Roberts's co-stars praise her and her work ethic. "She's such a laugh, a charm, a wit," Pitt says. "I liked putting us into a run-and-gun movie."

Exactly 24 hours after her west coast press interviews, Roberts is striding across the New York stage of David Letterman's chat show. It's one more interview, and Roberts knows that the Late Show host is going to try to rattle her, as she says, "in the name of fun". He starts with the Oscars. "Uh, well, yeah, yeah," Roberts says, shifting uncomfortably. "You know what it is? I'm a grown-up person now. So on that level, it has a different kind of effect on me."

Letterman keeps on. "This is what I find myself thinking - and I'm so pleased you asked about the Oscars," she says. "It doesn't rattle my nerves at all. Everybody talks about, you know, uh, 'Do you want to win?' 'What will you say if you win?' And really that bypasses to me a huge step - the excitement and 12-year-old giddiness of, 'I got nominated for an Oscar!' So that's what I'm doing for the next five weeks."

Letterman keeps on, wondering if, "as a professional", she shouldn't be ready with an Oscar speech? Finally, Roberts musters up her most revelatory statement. Words from a woman who's risen to the top of her field, matured in front of our eyes. Words that, perhaps better than most, reflect what she is like now on-screen and off. "Yes," she says. "However, I think one must be hopeful but expect to remain seated."

And - who knows - if she does win an Oscar, perhaps even Homer Simpson will become a Julia Roberts fan.

© New York Times. Erin Brockovich is re-released next Friday. The Mexican is released on April 27.

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