The Woman Behind The Smile - Being Julia

From her breakthrough with Pretty Woman to her Oscar-winning role as Erin Brockovich, JULIA ROBERTS has always captivated audiences with her talent, warmth and natural beauty. The actor speaks to BAZAAR about why motherhood is more important to her than making movies — and how her life is all the richer for it.

- Sanjiv Bhattacharya

The dolphins are leaping off the Malibu coast this morning, but no one’s paying attention to them. Not now that Julia Roberts has emerged from her beach hut in an operatic red ballgown by Ralph & Russo, flanked fore and aft by wardrobe minions shading her with umbrellas and holding her regal train free of the sand. “Just a little something for the beach!” she quips, while some 20 people hover about her, on this gusty day, an attentive retinue to Lancôme’s ambassador. They swoop in to adjust her hair, dab her cheeks and arrange her outfit. She looks as if she’s wandered down from a Great Gatsby party in a nearby mansion; but now Alexi Lubomirski, the photographer, wants her to sit in the sand, which isn’t easy in a gown like this.

“Is there anything stiff under your dress?” he asks, prompting some sniggering in the crew.

“Yes!” she says. 

“Could you sort of crouch into it?” 

Now the sniggering is out of control, and Roberts, alert to it all, laughs her laugh, the one we know so well. She settles into the sand, scarlet silk billowing around her. “Well,” she says, her famous smile gleaming, “this story is just writing itself …”