Julia Stiles Biography and Profile

Biography

Nama : Julia Stiles
Birth Name : Julia O'Hara Stiles
Birth Date : 03/28/1981
Birth Place : New York, USA
Height : 5' 7�"
Sex : F
Nationality : American
Occupation : Actress
Father : John O'Hara
Mother : Judith Stiles
Relation : Joseph Gordon-Levitt (actor, 1999), Joshua Jackson (actor, 2000)
Claim Fame : As Katarina 'Kat' Stratford in "10 Things I Hate About You" (1999)

Julia O'Hara Stiles (born 28 March 1981) is an American actress. Hailed as "the thinking teenager's movie goddess" by New York Times critic Ben Brantley, Stiles has been a darling of critics despite her youth. Stephen Holden of The Washington Post says she is "one of Hollywood's brighest young stars" and compares her to Jane Fonda and Glenn Close. The Jerusalem Post wrote Stiles was "a young, serious looking Diane Lane."

Stiles was born in New York City to John O'Hara, a teacher and businessman, and Judith Stiles, a potter. She was an actress from a young age, performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company. Her first film was a non-speaking role in I Love You, I Love You Not 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 and in M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake. Stiles's first starrring role was in Wicked, playing a teenage girl who murders her mother so she can have her father all to herself. Despite the acclaim the film received at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, the film was not commercially released in the U.S. and went direct-to-video.

The role that made her a star was playing Kat Stratford opposite Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew set in a Seattle high school. She won an MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance for the role. She subsequently did two more Shakespearean adaptations, playing the Desdemona role in Tim Blake Nelson's O, Othello in high school, with Mekhi Pfifer in the title role; and Ophelia in Michael Almerayda's Hamlet, with Ethan Hawke in the lead. Neither was a great success, O being subject to many delays and a change of distributors, Hamlet being an art house film done on a shoestring budget.

Her next success was Save the Last Dance, where she played an aspiring ballerina forced to leave her small town in southern Illinois when her mother is killed to live with her struggling musician father in Chicago. At her new, nearly all-black school, she falls in love with Sean Patrick Thomas, who teaches her hip-hop dance steps. That role won her two more MTV awards, for Best Kiss and Best Female Performance.

Stiles is a student at Columbia University, majoring in English. On March 17, 2001, she hosted Saturday Night Live and eight days later introduced a music nominee at the 76th Annual Academy Awards. Rolling Stone pronounced her "the coolest co-ed" and put her on the cover of its April 12, 2001 issue. She returned to Saturday Night Live on May 5, 2001 in a cameo as Jenna Bush. In the summer of 2002, she played the lead in Twelfth Night in Shakespeare in the Park.

She has played a CIA agent in The Bourne Identity and its sequel The Bourne Supremacy, a 1950s student at Wellesley College in Mona Lisa Smile, and a Wisconsin co-ed swept off her feet by a Danish prince in The Prince and Me. In the spring of 2004, she made her London stage debut in a revival of David Mamet's play Oleanna with Aaron Eckhart at the Garrick Theatre.