Details From Julia Roberts’ Private Life Are Catching Fans Off Guard
While Julia Roberts has been widely seen as one of Hollywood's favorite leading ladies for the last three decades, her reputation as “America’s sweetheart” hasn’t always matched her life outside the spotlight. From her checkered romantic history to her fractured familial relationships, and from accusations of infidelity to claims of diva behavior, Roberts has a habit of catching her fans off guard. Heck, even the icon herself says she's confused by her good-girl reputation. And taking a closer look at her personal life, it's no wonder!
America’s sweetheart?
Let’s begin with how Roberts herself has always seemed perplexed by how the media portrays her. During a 2003 interview for O magazine, Oprah asked, “America’s sweetheart. Does that label mean anything to you?” and the actress replied, “No, because it's all a projection, and projection is very changeable.”
She added, “Projection comes not so much from what I'm doing, but from the point of view of the person perceiving me. So, it's like a joining of two things, one of which I have no control over or understanding of.”
She’s never understood the phrase
Roberts then revealed that she always thought “America’s sweetheart” meant something very different than “America’s favorite female star.” She laughed, “I somehow thought it meant I was tiny. Doesn't the word sweetheart sound so sweet and tiny?”
Then, when it came to the label being applied to another upcoming star — such as Reese Witherspoon — the star mused, “Somebody else is always going to be the next sweetheart. It’s all contrivance — label them as fast as you can so you can keep them all straight.”
“Tinkerhell”
Regardless, over the years Roberts’ “America’s sweetheart” image has had to weather a few storms. For example, in 1991 she starred as Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg’s “Peter Pan as a grown up” tale Hook. She reportedly behaved so badly on set that the crew dubbed her “Tinkerhell.”
At the time, a Premiere magazine article claimed the star — who was in her early 20s at this point — was a “curious presence” in the movie, and was “sometimes somber, sometimes at the near edge of hysteria.”
She didn’t think she was temperamental
In ’91, Roberts claimed to Entertainment Weekly that she’d never heard anyone call her “Tinkerhell.” She did admit to being frustrated while making the special-effects-heavy movie, though, as this resulted in a lot of downtime.
She explained, “I’m a normal person. I mean, if I sit in my trailer for six hours doing nothing, I’m going to say, ‘What the [heck] is going on?’ I have normal frustrations like everybody else, but I don’t consider myself temperamental.”