Best Known As: Nicky Parsons in The Bourne Identity movies
Julia Stiles became a movie star thanks to standout performances in the teen romances 10 Things I Hate About You (1999, with Heath Ledger) and Save the Last Dance (2001). She has since earned a degree from Columbia University (2005) and worked in both small films and big-budget Hollywood productions, including the Matt Damon thriller series begun by The Bourne Identity (2002) and followed by The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Her other films include A Guy Thing (2003, starring Jason Lee), Mona Lisa Smile (2003, with Julia Roberts) and the 2006 remake of The Omen (with Liev Schreiber). Stiles joined the cast of the cable series Dexter in 2010.
Stiles is unrelated to basketball star Jackie Stiles.
With a number of high-profile projects, a variety of magazine covers, and a spot on Teen People's 21 Hottest Stars Under 21 list in 1999 under her belt, actress Julia Stiles has come a remarkably long way in a very short time.
Born March 28, 1981, in New York City, Stiles was interested in performing from a very young age. When she was eleven years old, she wrote a letter to a Manhattan theater director asking to be cast in a production and was soon acting on-stage in avant-garde plays at both the La Mama and Kitchen Theaters. In 1996, Stiles made her film debut with a small part in I Love You, I Love You Not and the following year had her television debut in the Oprah Winfrey Presents: Before Women Had Wings, in which she played an abused child. The same year, she made a brief appearance as Harrison Ford's daughter in The Devil's Own and followed with roles in two 1998 films, Wide Awake and the Sundance entry Wicked.
The year 1999 proved to be Stiles' breakthrough year, as she played a prominent part in the television miniseries The '60s and the lead role in 10 Things I Hate About You, the latest film to mine gold and produce endorsements out of William Shakespeare. The film was a hit, and Stiles was soon being heralded as one of the hottest, young actors of her generation. With her name attached to a number of future projects, it seemed that Stiles would indeed have success in living up to this label.
Sure enough, Stiles was almost immediately cast in two modernized-for-MTV-generation Shakespeare flicks, namely director Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) with Ethan Hawke and O, a teen-oriented adaptation of Othello starring Josh Hartnett and Mekhi Phifer. As classic literature once again fell in place behind predictable romantic comedies, Stiles could be found playing the romantic lead in Down to You with teen movie veteran Freddie Prinze Jr., and alongside Sean Patrick Thomas in Save the Last Dance, which featured Stiles in the role of a grieving ballet dancer who attends an inner-city school and eventually finds love within a primarily black high school. Though the film was not a critical success, Save the Last Dance (2001) and 10 Things I Hate About You nonetheless helped construct Stiles a respectable fan base, and the young actress -- now with a Saturday Night Live credit under her belt -- would continue to build her resumé throughout the early 2000s.
In the film adaptation of novelist Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, Stiles had the chance to participate in a film starring Hollywood golden boy Matt Damon and returned to the role in 2004's The Bourne Supremacy. Stiles was praised for holding her own against Stockard Channing in The Business of Strangers (2001), which was shown at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and fared decently in A Guy Thing, a romantic comedy-of-errors co-starring Jason Lee and Stiles' fellow Down to You alumna Selma Blair. In 2003, Stiles would play opposite the Oscar-winning Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile, which finds Stiles playing a conservative '50s college student whose beliefs undergo some serious scrutiny after coming in contact with an uncharacteristically progressive teacher (Roberts).
The year 2004 promised more teen-styled roles; Stiles played the eccentric title character in Carolina under the direction of Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris and worked with director Martha Coolidge and 28 Days Later's Luke Mably in The Prince & Me. A key role in opposite William H. Macy in director Stuard Gordon's critically lauded but little seen David Mamet adaptation Edmond served well to remind audiences of Stiles acting abilities, and the following year the wholesome-looking beauty would serve as mother to the ultimate evil in the high profile horror remake The Omen. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi
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.[3] Stiles has English, Irish, and Italian ancestry.[4] She started acting at age eleven, performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company.[5]
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, 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"[7] and Martin Hoyle, who commented that Stiles played Kat "with bloody-minded independent charm from the beginning with hints of wistfulness beneath the determination."[8]
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 in a private 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' 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.[9]
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,"[11] 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."[12] 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,"[13] and Stephen Holden called her "a serious actress from whom comedy does not seem to flow naturally".[14]
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 teenager's movie goddess" who put him in mind of a "young Jane Fonda."[19]
She reprised the role of Carol in a 2009 production,[21] directed by Doug Hughes and co-starring Bill Pullman at the Mark Taper Forum. On June 30, 2009, it was announced that this production would be transferring to Broadway's John Golden Theatre, with previews beginning Sept. 29 before an October 11 opening night.[22]
Stiles will play Jeannie in a production of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig directed by the playwright beginning in April 2011.[23]
Stiles is a graduate of Columbia University and holds a degree in English literature. She received a John Jay Award in 2010, the annual honorary award given to five alumni by the Columbia College Alumni Association for professional achievements.[32]
She is an ex-vegan, occasionally eating red meat.[36] 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]
Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Most Promising Actress MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance – Female
Nominated — Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Breakout Performance – Female
Nominated — Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Sexiest Love Scene (Shared with Heath Ledger)
Nominated — YoungStar Award for Best Performance by a Young Actress in a Comedy Film
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