February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“I see the adult phase of my career having gone on for quite some time,” Roberts offers.
“I probably wouldn’t pinpoint a transition. I’d just say that I think it existed before being in a movie with a group of young girls, which seems to illustrate my age more clearly to everybody.”
The movie Roberts is referring to is Mike Newell’s latest, “Mona Lisa Smile,” in which the actress plays a free-spirited art history professor encouraging her students at Wellesley College to follow their dreams, not simply conform to 1950s mores and expectations. The star-studded cast includes Julia Stiles (“O,” “Save the Last Dance,”) Kirsten Dunst (“Spider-Man,” “Interview with the Vampire”) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (“Secretary”).
Asked what audiences find so appealing about inspirational teacher movies, Roberts muses, “Well, it’s an environment that we’re all perfectly familiar with…”
“That might be something,” she continues. “And I think, also, it has a good structure for presenting conflict and presenting personalities in a really clear way.”
For Roberts, filming on the school’s actual Massachusetts campus and watching hundreds of young women run around in 1950s clothes, hair and makeup made slipping into her own character an almost effortless experience.
“All that stuff does make it easier,” she explains. “I (watched) some really nice documentaries on the ’50s, which I thought were very informative. The ’50s seems like this unlauded decade. The ’60s kind of overpowered it in its coolness, and I think the ’50s actually is a really interesting period of time that our culture became ruled by television and advertising.”
Looking back at that seemingly more innocent time five decades ago, Roberts admits there are some values she would not mind seeing rediscovered.
“I think that [the era is] not so much that it was bad. It was just limited,” she observes. “Not wrong, just smaller somehow. But I think that, certainly, the ideas of certain traditions and a certain sense of continuity is glorious when you apply it to life. And I think certainly the ’50s and this particular school represented certain types of loyalty to tradition that should be greatly appreciated.”
So, how is one of the most famous and highest-paid women in the world enjoying that most sacred of traditions — married life — with cameraman Danny Moder?
“There’s a real ease to it,” she confides. “But I think, in part, because I’ve been able to have a lot of great career opportunities and build on them over a long period of time, and so the kind of attention or maintenance or focus that I give to my career as it were can be very sporadic, and very of my choosing. So, I’m really fortunate in that way so I can really devote myself to my family in a way that becomes very effortless and isn’t a conflict and that doesn’t make me feel torn.”
Emphatically denying she is suffering from morning sickness due to pregnancy, (“No, I have the flu and I’ve been throwing up for seven days.
So, if I seem slightly less than enthusiastic, I’m trying to keep it together,” she told reporters in Los Angeles recently,) Roberts admits she doesn’t know if her marriage is helped by the fact her husband is not himself a celebrity.
“I don’t know that that’s of consequence,” she says. “It’s better that he’s the person that he is.”
Set subhed:
A theme she could relate to
Getting back to the film, the Oscar-winning “Erin Brockovich” star says she could relate to how her character’s students were at crossroads in their lives. While those young women were faced with the decision of whether to embark on a career or get married, Roberts recalls having to make her own judgment call of how to follow up her breakthrough performance in the 1990 romantic comedy “Pretty Woman.”
“Just a lot of the scripts that I read, I felt were really uninteresting and sort of tedious and not well-written, fully realized women parts, or at that time girl/women parts,” she explains.
“And so I started just passing on everything and what started off as just me thinking, ‘Well, I’d just wait for something good,’ turned into an over two-year wait and I didn’t want to give into the panic of they’re going to stop asking me to do movies? because I’m just the picky girl in the corner who keeps saying no? to everything. And I really at a certain point thought, ‘Well, if I don’t make a stand now for what I am looking for, when will I ever be able to?’ I think that really made me feel just a strength within myself to stand up for not wanting to work just because I was being asked to work.”
Set subhed:
Julia on Julia
One of Roberts? favorite parts of filming “Mona Lisa Smile” was working with the 22-year-old Stiles.
“I think she’s remarkable,” Roberts notes.
“I think she’s such a poised, bright, interesting girl. She’s one of my favorite actors to watch in movies and of these young girls, when we were first developing the ideas for cast, she was the very first person that I absolutely wanted to have in this movie play any part that she possibly wanted to play.
“And she’s just really professional and I find her slightly intimidating, but I also find her to be this wonderfully, timelessly breath-taking girl. I mean, I think she could just play any part. I’ve seen her look so incredibly modern and sometimes she is this kind of sweet, geeky college girl.
Roberts concluded: “Sometimes she seems like this Botticelli and then other times she’s this very professional intellectual woman.”
“Mona Lisa Smile” opens Dec. 19.