Julia Stiles

Julia O'Hara Stiles (born March 28, 1981 ) is an American actress.

Born and raised in New York City, Stiles began acting at the age of 11 as part of New York's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.

Stiles's first appearance in a video series was in 1993 in Ghostwriter as Erica Dansby.

Her film debut was a small role in I Love You, I Love You Not (1996), followed by a lead role in Wicked (1998) for which she received the Karlovy Vary Film Festival Award for Best Actress.

Stiles's 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 Baltake wrote she was "the darling of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival."

She rose to prominence with leading roles in teen films such as 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Down to You (2000), and Save the Last Dance (2001).

Her accolades include a Teen Choice Award and two MTV Movie Awards, as well as nominations for a Golden Globe Award, and Primetime Emmy Award.

She next starred in the TV miniseries The '60s in 1999.

Later that year, 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 Seattle, 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 other notable film credits include Hamlet, State and Main (both 2000), O (2001), A Guy Thing (2002), Carolina (2003), The Prince & Me (2004), Edmond, A Little Trip to Heaven (both 2005), The Cry of the Owl (2009), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), Out of the Dark (2014), Blackway (2015), 11:55 (2016), Hustlers (2019) and Orphan: First Kill (2022).

Her next starring role was in Down to You (2000), which was panned by critics, but earned both 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.

In David Mamet's State and Main (2000), about a film shooting on location in a small town in Vermont, she played a teenage girl who seduces a film actor (Alec Baldwin) with a weakness for teen girls.

Stiles added to her list of credits with films such as The Business of Strangers (2001), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), and The Omen (2006), and became known to audiences worldwide with her portrayal of Nicky Parsons in the Bourne franchise (2002–2016).

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 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 help 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 named her "the coolest co-ed" and put her on the cover of its April 12, 2001, issue.

She told Rolling Stone that she performed all her own dancing in the film, except for some closeups of the feet.

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 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 called her one of cinema's "brightest young stars", but the film met with generally unfavorable reviews.

Outside of film, Stiles played Lumen Pierce on the fifth season of Dexter (2010), earning nominations for the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress.

From 2012 to 2014 she appeared as the titular character in the web series Blue, for which she earned two IAWTV Awards for Best Actress.

From 2017 to 2020 she starred as Georgina Ryland on the Sky Atlantic series Riviera.

She currently stars in the Amazon series The Lake (2022–present).

Stiles was born in New York City to parents Judith Newcomb Stiles, a Greenwich Village artist, and John O'Hara, a businessman.

She is the oldest of three children; her siblings are John Junior and Jane (also an actress).

Stiles is of English, Irish, and Italian descent.

She started acting at age 11, performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company.