Julia Roberts is a national treasure — look no further than My Best Friend’s Wedding. But if you need further proof, the Oscar-winner’s birth was paid for by none other than civil rights icons Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King.
That obscure but truly mind-blowing fact was revealed back in September when Roberts sat down with fellow national treasure Gayle King for A+E Networks and History Channel’s HISTORYTalks in Washington, D.C. A month later, it’s gotten some traction with Roberts’ 55th birthday falling on Oct. 28 and a tweet from Zara Rahim, a former strategic advisor for Barack Obama.
King gently coaxed the fact out of the Pretty Woman star, who noted that the reporter’s “research is very good.”
“The King family paid for my hospital bill,” Roberts said. “Martin Luther King and Coretta.” Roberts parents, Walter and Betty Lou, were friends with the Kings because they ran a theater school in Atlanta, the Actors and Writers’ Workshop, which at the time was one of the few if not the only school willing to accept the King children.
Theo Wargo/Getty Images Julia Roberts thinks we didn’t fully appreciate the rom-coms of yesteryear
So when little Julia was born and the Roberts couldn’t afford the hospital bill, the King family stepped in.
“They all became friends and they helped us out of a jam,” Roberts said.
Roberts became friends with Yolanda King, the eldest of MLK’s children, who died in 2007 from complications related to a chronic heart condition. Yolanda King had starred in a play produced by the Actors and Writers Workshop in which she kissed a white actor, prompting a member of the KKK to blow up a car outside the theater.
“In the ’60s, you didn’t have little Black children interacting with little white kids in acting school,” Gayle King noted. “And Julia’s parents were welcoming, and I think that’s extraordinary, and it lays the groundwork for who Julia is.”
And who Julia Roberts is … is feisty. Roberts infamously got in trouble in 1990 for calling a South Carolina town “horribly racist” and “a living hell” after a Black friend was refused service at a restaurant.
“I can see her doing that,” Yolanda King later said of Roberts in a CNN interview. “I can see it pouring forth from her, and rightfully so.”
Roberts was in Abbeville filming Sleeping with the Enemy, and residents were none too happy with her comments, taking out an ad in Variety entitled, “Pretty Woman? Pretty Low.”
“I was born in the South, so in no way am I trying to create a stereotype,” Roberts said in a statement at the time. “I was shocked that this type of treatment still exists in America in the ’90s — in the South or anywhere else.”
Related content:
