Julia Stiles

Early life

Stiles was born in New York City, to parents Judith Newcomb Stiles, a potter, and John O'Hara, a businessman. She is the eldest of three children; she has a brother, Johnny, and a sister, Jane. Stiles is of English, Irish, and Italian descent. She started acting at the age of 11, performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company.

Film career

Stiles' first film role was in I Love You, I Love You Not (1996), with Claire Danes and Jude Law. She also had small roles as Harrison Ford's character'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 might have murdered her mother so she could have her father all to herself. Critic Joe Balthai wrote she was "the darling of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival."

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. The Chicago Film Critics voted her the most promising new actress of the year. Her next starring role was in Down to You (2000), which was panned by critics, but earned her co-star Freddie Prinze, Jr. and her 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 at a 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's 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.

In David Mamet's State and Main (2000), about a film shooting on location in a small town in Vermont, she played a teenaged girl who seduces a film actor (Alec Baldwin) with a weakness for teen girls. Stiles also appeared opposite Stockard Channing in the dark art house film The Business of Strangers (2001) as a conniving, amoral secretary who exacts revenge on her 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 a small but crucial role as Treadstone operative Nicolette "Nicky" Parsons in The Bourne Identity (2002), a role that was enlarged in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), then greatly expanded in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007).

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", but the film met with generally unfavorable reviews. Stiles played a Wisconsin college student who is swept off her feet by a Danish prince, played by Luke Mably in The Prince and Me (2004), directed by Martha Coolidge. Stiles told an interviewer that she was very similar to her character Paige Morgan. 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. She returned to the Bourne series with a much larger role in The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007, which is her highest-grossing film to date.

Stiles began filming Between Us in May 2011 with co-stars Taye Diggs, David Harbour, and Melissa George. Between Us is the screen adaptation of the off-Broadway play by the same name written by playwright Joe Hortua. In 2012, Stiles starred alongside David Cross and America Ferrera in the dark comedy It's a Disaster. The film premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and was picked up by Oscilloscope Laboratories and received a commercial release in April 2013. Stiles had a small but pivotal role as a reporter in the 2013 British-American film Closed Circuit. In April 2013, it was announced that Stiles will be starring in an indie supernatural thriller Out of the Dark alongside Scott Speedman and Stephen Rea. Filming began in Bogotá, Colombia.

In 2015, Stiles signed on to reprise her role as Nicky Parsons in Jason Bourne, the fifth installment of the Bourne franchise. She also featured as Courtney, the wayward mother of Sophie Nélisse, in The Great Gilly Hopkins, which premiered in U.S. cinemas on October 7, 2016.

Stage career

Stiles's 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. From July to August 2002, she performed on stage in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, and appeared as Viola, the lead role in Shakespeare in the Park's production of Twelfth Night with Jimmy Smits.

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. She reprised the role of Carol in a 2009 production of Oleanna, directed by Doug Hughes and co-starring Bill Pullman at the Mark Taper Forum. The production moved to Broadway's John Golden Theatre for October 11 opening night.

Stiles was to play Jeannie in a production of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig directed by the playwright beginning in April 2011, but the show was postponed indefinitely.

Other work

Stiles appeared in the video for Cyndi Lauper's single, "Sally's Pigeons", in 1993. On March 17, 2001, Stiles hosted Saturday Night Live and, eight days later, she was a presenter at the 73rd Academy Awards. She returned to Saturday Night Live on May 5, appearing as then-President George W. Bush's daughter Jenna Bush in a skit that poked fun at the two first daughters for being arrested for underaged 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.

Stiles made her writing and directorial debut with Elle magazine's short Raving starring Zooey Deschanel. It premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

In May 2010, Stiles was cast in a major role in the Showtime series Dexter and signed for 10 episodes. For this role, Stiles received a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film, as well as a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.

In June 2012, the web series Blue, produced by WIGS, premiered. It stars Stiles as a single mother with a 13-year-old son. She works at an office and also as a call girl to make ends meet on an otherwise meager income, and must fight to protect her son from the collision between her complicated past and tenuous present. For her work on Blue, Stiles won two IAWTV Awards, in 2013 and 2014.

Personal life

Stiles graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English literature. In 2010, she received a John Jay Award, an annual honorary award given to five alumni by the Columbia College Alumni Association for professional achievements.

Stiles has also worked for Habitat for Humanity, building housing in Costa Rica, and has worked with Amnesty International to raise awareness of the harsh conditions of immigration detention of unaccompanied juveniles. In January 2004, Marie Claire featured Stiles's trip to see conditions at the Berks County Youth Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania.

She is a former vegan, occasionally eating red meat. 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 in the United Kingdom.

She loves baseball and is an avid fan of the New York Mets. She threw the ceremonial first pitch before their May 29, 2006, game. She is also a fan of soccer and the New York Red Bulls.

On January 3, 2016, she announced her engagement to camera assistant Preston J. Cook, with whom she worked on Blackway. In June 2017, Stiles confirmed she and Cook are expecting their first child later this year.