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Julia O'Hara Stiles (born March 28,
1981) is an American stage and screen actress. After
beginning her theatre 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.
Early life: Stiles was born in New York City to
John O'Hara, a teacher and businessman who owns and
operates a pottery business, and Judith Stiles, a
potter. Her father is of Irish descent and her mother is
of half Italian and half English ancestry.
Stiles has two younger siblings, Jane and Johnny and a
half sister Bridget O'Hara Koch, the first daugter of
John O'Hara. She was raised in SoHo by liberal, lapsed
Catholic parents. She started acting at age eleven,
performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company and
securing work by submitting photographs of herself in
costume to the company and asking that she be kept in
mind for juvenile roles.
Television career: Stiles began her acting career
in television roles. 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.
Film career: Stiles' first film was a
non-speaking part in I Love You, I Love You Not (1996),
with Claire Danes and Jude Law. She also had small roles
as Harrison Ford'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 murders her mother so she can
have her father all to herself.
Critic Joe Balthai wrote she was "the darling of
the 1998 Sundance Film Festival" and Internet movie
writer Harry Knowles said she was the "discovery of
the fest," but the film was not commercially
released in the U.S. and went direct-to-video in 2001,
after Stiles had become better known.
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 Seattle. 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."
Her next starring role was in Down to You (2000), which
was heavily panned by critics, but earned Stiles 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 the Ophelia in Michael Almerayda'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 in a
private boarding school. Neither film was a great
success; O had been subjected to many delays and a
change of distributors and Hamlet was an art house film
shot on a minimal budget.
Stiles' 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
is killed. 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.
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), and a much larger role inThe Bourne
Ultimatum (2007). Producer Lynda Obst was quoted as
saying that Stiles was "turning into the next Meryl
Streep".
Her next film role was 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.
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
interview that she was very similar to the character,
Paige Morgan, but critic Scott Foundas said while she
was, as always, "irrepressibly engaging" the
film was a "strange career choice for Stiles".
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,"
and Stephen Holden called her "a serious actress
from whom comedy does not seem to flow naturally".
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.
Stage career: 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".
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.
Other work: On March 17, 2001, Stiles hosted
Saturday Night Live and eight days later introduced a
music nominee at the 73rd Academy Awards. She returned
to Saturday Night Live on May 5 in a cameo as President
George W. Bush's daughter Jenna Bush in a skit that
poked fun at the two first daughters being arrested for
underage drinking. MTV profiled her in its Diary series
in 2003, and she was "Punk'd" by Ashton
Kutcher at a Washington DC museum in the spring of 2004.
In 2007 Stiles made her writing and directoral debut
with Elle magazine's Raving starring Zooey Deschanel.
The film will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Personal life: 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 had 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 ex-vegan. When interviewed by Conan
O'Brien, she said the word "orgasm" came to
mind when she had her first cheeseburger after giving up
veganism - although she has said in an interview for
tiscali that this was a joke.
She gave up being vegan because it
wasn't healthy whilst travelling. The actress has
described herself as a feminist and wrote on the subject
in The Guardian. Stiles told Gotham Magazine in 2005
that "I'd never be in Playboy or anything close to
that, not that anyone would ask" and in fact hates
being photographed.
Stiles has dated actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt (in 1999)
and Joshua Jackson (in 2000). 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, Julia joined Prince on stage at the
O2 in London. Prince then 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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