Julia Roberts interview: More than just the Pretty Woman

JULIA Roberts is perhaps the last old-fashioned female star whom audiences want to see simply for herself – for her rangy gait, oversized features, and her enormous friendly T-Rex smile. The ability to convey joy onscreen, to offer a simulacrum of happiness is a rare one, so when Roberts stepped back from films five years ago and focused on marriage, babies and housework in New Mexico, we missed her. There were even rumours that she'd gone into retirement entirely. If that's the case, th

It's a wet weekday afternoon, and the actress is draped in a slightly smudged Pucci wraparound, paired with skinny black trousers and a skinnier top. Her brown hair has been highlighted honey blonde, her lips are glossy pink and right now she's dismissing the very idea that she's hit the comeback trail. "I don't see this as a comeback," she says. "I'm still here – not new, but cleaned and pressed. And I don't think I've taken that much time away. I was never really one to work too much. I never did years and years of movie after movie, although when you've got three toddlers in the house, you're performing all day long. In a way I act around the clock with puppet shows, stories."

At 41, Roberts is as lean and leggy as she was 21 years ago, when she slid frets in the trashy Satisfaction, as the bass player in an all-girl band for which she really learnt to play guitar under the tutelage of Booker T and the MGs' Steve Cropper. The following year her ailing Southern belle in Steel Magnolias won her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but it was Pretty Woman that anointed her as an Audrey Hepburn for the naughty Nineties with a gallus charm that made the film's become-a-hooker-and-land-a-rich-husband message almost palatable.

"Ten hours in a bathtub dries out the skin," is what she recalls of her first big love scene with Richard Gere. "At one point, when I was lathering up Richard's chest, he goes, 'My skin is cracking open – you've got to stop putting soap on me.'"

Thus began Julia Roberts' dippy, misshapen career whose arc illustrates the benevolent tyranny of filmgoers when they fall in love. For a while she tried to shake off the collective crush by playing a string of sourpuss roles in a string of flops (a brogue-challenged Victorian menial in Mary Reilly chief among them). She turned down Sleepless In Seattle and refused Shakespeare In Love. Roberts worried that people would tire of her continually playing the lovelorn ingénue, and allowed the likes of Sandra Bullock to try out as America's Sweetheart, until she beamed her way back with My Best Friend's Wedding in 1997.

Proving that her box-office power was directly proportional to the amount of screen time given to her mile-wide smile, she became the first actress to join male A-listers in the £20m salary bracket, and against all odds, she has continued to be a rare female film draw despite tepid thrillers, tabloid rumours and surprising nuptials, first to Lyle Lovett and then to the father of her three children Danny Moder – and at one point, almost Kiefer Sutherland, who she abandoned at the altar when she discovered his dalliance with a stripper. Her difficulty conceiving her two older children, Phinnaeus and Hazel, was tracked in print, online and on TV right until she gave birth, yet Roberts considers herself fortunate compared to younger actresses.

"The media is such a different animal now. It's ugly in a way that I guess I don't understand. The focus is so surgical on these girls, so microscopic into everything they wear and every detail of their lives in a way that's kind of negative."

The insatiable appetite for new raw talent means that actors have only one or two chances to prove themselves, instead of Roberts' slow blossoming through Mystic Pizza to Satisfaction to Pretty Woman. "Everybody's sort of shoved down your throat," she says. "You're not allowed to really sit back and appreciate people very well."

Public affection for Pretty Woman drew Roberts and Gere back together 10 years after their hit revived his career and launched hers – but their skittish comedy The Runaway Bride generated few laughs and fewer sparks. Now Duplicity sees Roberts reteam with another screen lover, Clive Owen. As she points out, the temperature can only go up a few degrees from Closer five years ago, when Owen's character called her a "f***ed-up slag". Roberts guffaws. "If we can do a movie like Closer and do those scenes together and still be friends I think we deserve to be able to revisit that professional relationship with a bit more fun dialogue."

She was persuaded to take the role as a double-dealing spy in Duplicity because of her friendship with Owen. When he sent her the script, she was pregnant at the time. He said he'd wait, and that the film could be shot in New York, where she has a home, to minimise disruption to her family life.

"I love Clive. Our list of priorities in our personal lives are not different, we are both happily married with families and lead a pretty normal, unaffected existence within this odd universe of show business that we've both chosen to go into. He's got the greatest wife and these two beautiful daughters. He's a really complete human being and I think that gives him an ease and makes you just want to be around him."

Despite her rom-com reputation, Roberts is an even better actress than her Oscar for Erin Brockovich would suggest. On screen she may be a life-affirming force of joy but in person, she's closer to Pretty Exasperated Woman. She's polite, or shrewd, enough to wrap her asperity up in smiles, but her meaning is plain. Asked about the business of combining motherhood with films, she says she was lucky that her older children were at school and the film took breaks to allow her to breastfeed Henry, who was then only a few months. But she also notes: "I find I get asked a lot more questions about being a mother than Clive does about being a father."

Surprisingly perhaps, she also refuses to join in the chorus of disapproval among actresses and rail against the unfairness of filmmaking on women approaching middle age. "I think the days of 'Oh, we hit 40 and we're f***ed' are really over because the best actresses around who are working with consistency are Susan Sarandon, Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep, Annette Bening, and Holly Hunter… all of whom are not 30," she asserts. "Where are the movies that are motivated by the 20-year-olds? There aren't any. There certainly aren't as many as there were when I was in my 20s.''

Certainly her own dance card continues to fill up quickly. Later this year she starts work on Eat, Pray, Love based on Elizabeth Gilbert's patchouli-scented bestseller about a writer who flees a broken marriage and rediscovers herself in Italy, India and Indonesia. Before that there is the summer release of Fireflies In The Garden, a low-budget indie feature which allowed her to work with her cameraman husband for the first time since Mona Lisa Smile. Filming was "just blissful – but I get nervous acting in front of him. I'd rather be cooking a good dinner and ask him, 'What do you think of that?' It's less nerve-wracking." v

Duplicity is on general release from Friday.