Julia Stiles

Julia Stiles
Stiles in April 2007 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City
Born	Julia O'Hara Stiles (1981-03-28) March 28, 1981 New York City, New York, US
Alma mater	Columbia University
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1993–present

Julia O'Hara Stiles (born March 28, 1981) is an American actress. She first gained prominence for her lead roles in teen films such as 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Down to You (2000) and Save the Last Dance (2001). Her career progressed to starring in films such as The Business of Strangers (2001), Mona Lisa Smile (2003) and The Omen (2006). She also played the supporting character Nicky Parsons in the Bourne film series (2002-2007).

She guest starred as Lumen Pierce in the fifth season of the Showtime series Dexter, a role that earned her Emmy Award nomination and Golden Globe Award nomination.^[1][2] Most recently, Stiles had a supporting role in Silver Linings Playbook (2012), and also appears in Blue, a YouTube series from WIGS.^[3]

Early life

Stiles was born in New York City, the eldest of three children. Her mother, Judith Newcomb Stiles, is a potter, and her father, John O'Hara, is a businessman.^[4] Stiles is of English, Irish, and German descent.^[5] She started acting at the age of eleven, performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company.^[6]

Career

Movie career

Stiles's first film role was in I Love You, I Love You Not (1996), with Claire Danes and Jude Law. She also had small roles as Harrison Ford's character's daughter in Alan J. Pakula's The Devil's Own (1997) and in M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake (1998). Her first lead was in Wicked (1998), playing a teenage girl who might have murdered her mother so she could have her father all to herself. Critic Joe Balthai wrote she was "the darling of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival"^[7]

In 1999, she portrayed Kat Stratford, opposite Heath Ledger, in Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew set in a high school in Tacoma, Washington. She won an MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance for the role. The Chicago Film Critics voted her the most promising new actress of the year. Her next starring role was in Down to You (2000), which was panned by critics, but earned her and her co-star Freddie Prinze, Jr. a Teen Choice Award nomination for their on-screen chemistry. She subsequently appeared in two more Shakespearean adaptations. The first was as Ophelia in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), with Ethan Hawke in the lead. The second was in the Desdemona role, opposite Mekhi Phifer, in Tim Blake Nelson's O (2001), a version of Othello set at a boarding school. Neither film was a great success; O was subject to many delays and a change of distributors, and Hamlet was an art house film shot on a minimal budget.

Stiles's next commercial success was in Save the Last Dance (2001) as an aspiring ballerina forced to leave her small town in downstate Illinois to live with her struggling musician father in Chicago after her mother dies in a car accident. At her new, nearly all-black school, she falls in love with the character played by Sean Patrick Thomas, who teaches her hip-hop dance steps that get her into The Juilliard School. The role won her two more MTV awards for Best Kiss and Best Female Performance, and a Teen Choice Award for best fight scene for her battle with Bianca Lawson. Rolling Stone pronounced her "the coolest co-ed," putting her on the cover of its April 12, 2001 issue. She told Rolling Stone that she performed all her own dancing in the film, though the way the film was shot and edited might have made it appear otherwise.^[8]

In David Mamet's State and Main (2000), about a film shooting on location in a small town in Vermont, she played a teenage girl who seduces a film actor (Alec Baldwin) with a weakness for teen girls. Stiles also appeared opposite Stockard Channing in the dark art house film The Business of Strangers (2001) as a conniving, amoral secretary who exacts revenge on her boss. Channing was impressed by her co-star: "In addition to her talent, she has a quality that is almost feral, something that can make people uneasy. She has an effect on people."^[9] Stiles also had a small but crucial role as Treadstone operative Nicolette "Nicky" Parsons in The Bourne Identity (2002), a role that was enlarged in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), then greatly expanded in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007).

Between the Bourne films, she appeared in Mona Lisa Smile (2003) as Joan, a student at Wellesley College in 1953, whose art professor (Julia Roberts) encourages her to pursue a career in law rather than become a wife and mother. Critic Stephen Holden referred to her as one of cinema's "brightest young stars,"^[10] but the film met with generally unfavorable reviews. Stiles played a Wisconsin college student who is swept off her feet by a Danish prince in The Prince and Me (2004), directed by Martha Coolidge. Stiles told an interviewer that she was very similar to the character, Paige Morgan. Critic Scott Foundas said while she was, as always, "irrepressibly engaging," the film was a "strange career choice for Stiles."^[11] This echoed criticism in reviews of A Guy Thing (2003), a romantic comedy with Jason Lee and Selma Blair. Critic Dennis Harvey wrote that Stiles was "wasted,"^[12] and Stephen Holden called her "a serious actress from whom comedy does not seem to flow naturally".^[13] In 2005, Stiles was cast opposite her Hamlet co-star Liev Schreiber in The Omen, a remake of the 1976 horror film. The film was released on June 6, 2006.^[14] She returned to the Bourne series with a much larger role in The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007, which is her highest grossing film to date.

Stiles began filming Between Us in May 2011 with co-stars Taye Diggs, David Harbour and Melissa George. Between Us is the screen adaptation of the off-Broadway play by the same name written by playwright Joe Hortua.^[15] The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, where its producers hoped to find a domestic distributor.^[16] The film has since screened at 15 film festivals, winning the grand jury prize at the 2012 Bahamas International Film Festival.^[17]

In 2012, Stiles starred alongside David Cross and America Ferrera in the dark comedy It's a Disaster. The film premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and was picked up by Oscilloscope Laboratories for commercial distribution. The film was scheduled to screen in select theaters starting on April 12, 2013.

Stiles had a small but pivotal role as a reporter in the 2013 British-American film Closed Circuit.

Also in April 2013, it was announced that Stiles will be starring in an indie supernatural thriller Out of the Dark alongside Scott Speedman and Stephen Rea. Filming began in Bogota, Colombia.^[18]

Stage career

Stiles's first theatrical roles were in works by author/composer John Moran with the group Ridge Theater, in Manhattan's Lower East Side from 1993–1998. She later performed on stage in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, in the summer of 2002 and appeared as Viola, the lead role in Shakespeare in the Park's production of Twelfth Night with Jimmy Smits.^[19]

In the spring of 2004, she made her London stage debut opposite Aaron Eckhart in a revival of David Mamet's play Oleanna at the Garrick Theatre.^[20] She reprised the role of Carol in a 2009 production of Oleanna, directed by Doug Hughes and co-starring Bill Pullman at the Mark Taper Forum.^[21] The production moved to Broadway's John Golden Theatre for October 11 opening night.^[22]

Stiles was to play Jeannie in a production of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig directed by the playwright beginning in April 2011,^[23] but it has been postponed indefinitely.^[24]

Other work

Stiles appeared in the video for Cyndi Lauper's single, "Sally's Pigeons" in 1993. On March 17, 2001, Stiles hosted Saturday Night Live and, eight days later, she was a presenter at the 73rd Academy Awards.^[25] She returned to Saturday Night Live on May 5 appearing as then-President George W. Bush's daughter Jenna Bush in a skit that poked fun at the two first daughters being arrested for underage drinking.^[4] MTV profiled her in its Diary series in 2003,^[26] and she was Punk'd by Ashton Kutcher at a Washington DC museum in the spring of 2004.^[27]

Stiles made her writing and directorial debut with Elle magazine's short Raving starring Zooey Deschanel.^[28] It premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.^[29]

In May 2010 Stiles was cast in a major role in the Showtime series Dexter^[30] and signed for 10 episodes.^[31] For this role Stiles received a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film.^[32] as well as a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.

In June 2012, the web series Blue (produced by WIGS) premiered. It stars Stiles as a single mother with a 13-year-old son. She works at an office and also as a call girl in order to make ends meet on an otherwise meager income and must fight to protect her son from the collision between her complicated past and tenuous present.

Personal life

Stiles graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English literature. In 2010, she received a John Jay Award, an annual honorary award given to five alumni by the Columbia College Alumni Association for professional achievements.^[33]

Stiles has also worked for Habitat for Humanity, building housing in Costa Rica,^[34] and has worked with Amnesty International to raise awareness of the harsh conditions of immigration detention of unaccompanied juveniles. In January 2004, Marie Claire featured Stiles's trip to see conditions at the Berks County Youth Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania.^[35][36]

She is an ex-vegan, occasionally eating red meat.^[37] She says she gave up veganism after she developed anemia and found it difficult to get proper nutrition while traveling. Stiles has described herself as a feminist and wrote on the subject in The Guardian.^[20]

She loves baseball and is an avid fan of the New York Mets. She threw the ceremonial first pitch before their May 29, 2006 game.^[38] She is also a soccer fan and supports the New York Red Bulls.^[39]

Filmography

Film

Television

References

External links

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More spoken articles

• Julia Stiles at the Internet Movie Database
• Julia Stiles at the TCM Movie Database
• Julia Stiles at the Internet Broadway Database
• Julia Stiles at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Raving Trailer directed by Julia Stiles
• Icons of Fright interview (June 1, 2006)
• Guardian Unlimited interview (April 3, 2004)
• Tiscali.uk interview (2004)
• Stiles on Tavis Smiley (June 5, 2006)