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| Birth Name(s) : Julia O'Hara Stiles |
Date of Birth: March 28, 1981 |
| Status:
N/A
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| Profession:
Actor |
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Full Julia Stiles Biography
| Julia Stiles began her career on stage in New York and had many small parts in films such as "The Devil's Own" (1997) before landing her breakthrough role in the TV mini-series "The 60s" (1999). She has also appeared in films such as "10 Things I Hate About You" (1999), "Hamlet" (2000) and "Save the Last Dance" (2001). |
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Additional Julia Stiles Biography
After beginning her career in small parts in a New York City theatre troupe, she has moved on to leading roles in plays by writers as diverse as William Shakespeare and David Mamet. Her film career has included both commercial and critical successes, ranging from teen romantic comedies such as 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) to dark art house pictures such as The Business of Strangers (2001). Stiles also actively supports a variety of progressive causes.
After two appearances as the computer punk Erica Dansby on the PBS series Ghostwriter in 1993 and 1994, she appeared as a guest star on the medical drama Chicago Hope. She has been seen in two made-for-TV movies: in Before Women Had Wings (1997) on CBS, she played opposite Ellen Burstyn and Oprah Winfrey in an adaptation of the novel by Connie May Fowler; and she played a teenage girl who finds herself pregnant and runs away from her unforgiving father (Bill Smitrovich) in NBC's miniseries The '60's (1999), a film Caryn James of The New York Times dismissed as "conspicuously idiotic." Stiles was the public face of the film, with NBC using her face, painted with a peace sign and the American flag, both in its advertising and on the cover of the soundtrack album.
The role that gained Stiles renown was Kat Stratford, opposite Heath Ledger, in Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew set in a high school near Tacoma. She won an MTV Movie Award for "Breakthrough Female Performance" for the role, and the Chicago Film Critics voted her the most promising new actress of the year. Foreign critics applauded her work as well, including Adina Hoffman, who praised her as "a young, serious looking Diane Lane" and Martin Hoyle, who commented that Stiles played Kat "with bloody-minded independent charm from the beginning with hints of wistfulness beneath the determination."
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 young girls. Stiles also played opposite Stockard Channing in the dark art house film The Business of Strangers (2001) as a conniving, amoral secretary who exacts revenge on her cold 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." Stiles also had small, but crucial roles as Treadstone operative Nicolette Parsons in The Bourne Identity (2002) and its sequel The Bourne Supremacy (2004).
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 becoming a wife and mother. Critic Stephen Holden referred to her as one of cinema's "brightest young stars," but the film met with generally unfavorable reviews.
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.
Stiles' 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. Reviewing the production, Ben Brantley of The New York Times saluted Stiles as "the thinking teenagers' movie goddess" who put him in mind of a "young Jane Fonda".
Stiles attended Friends Seminary, a Quaker prep school in Manhattan, and graduated from the Professional Children's School in New York in 1999. She then was an English major at Columbia University, though she several times interrupted her studies to pursue her career. During her first year (2000-2001), Stiles caused a minor uproar on campus when she mocked cafeteria workers in Columbia's dining halls while appearing on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Stiles later apologized for her comments in the campus newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator. She graduated in May 2005, five years after entering.
Stiles is a Democrat and supported John Kerry's candidacy for President of the United States. Her official site, which her mother helps to maintain, provides a link to Moveon.org.
Stiles has also worked for Habitat for Humanity, building housing in Costa Rica, and has worked with Amnesty International to try to raise awareness of the harsh conditions of immigration detention of unaccompanied juveniles; Marie Claire magazine, in January 2004, featured Stiles' trip to see conditions at the Berks County Youth Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania. Additionally, Stiles serves on the Board of Directors of Amend.org, a New York-based nonprofit that implements childhood injury prevention programs in Africa.
Stiles is also an avid baseball fan. Her favorite team is the New York Mets. She threw the ceremonial first pitch before their May 29, 2006 game.
On August 17th 2007, she joined Prince on stage at the O2 in London. Prince handed her a mic and got her to sing Wild Cherry's Play That Funky Music in front of a 20,000 strong crowd. |
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