Julia Roberts is 59, and the story her birthday brought back is less about red carpets than about the house she shares with husband Danny Moder and their three kids. E! Online laid it out in a look inside the family world the Oscar winner has spent two decades keeping mostly private.
Pretty Woman. Notting Hill. Erin Brockovich. Roberts made all of them before she made a family. Then she stepped back.
Julia Roberts Birthday Celebration
E! Online describes her roles as Moder’s wife and as a mother as her all-time favorite parts. The outlet traces that shift to 2004, when she and Moder welcomed twins. Even before the birth, her pregnancy got written into Ocean’s Twelve, where she played a character pretending to be a pregnant Julia Roberts.
Acting went on the back burner the minute she became a mom, E! Online reported. Their son followed in 2007.
Fifty-nine birthdays in, the career is the side project.
What She Said About Choosing Home
Julia Roberts explained the timing to the Wall Street Journal in 2014. She told the paper that by the time the kids arrived, she had already accomplished things and felt secure about that part of her life.
“I was so joyful moving into the family phase of my life,” she said.
She went further. For a long time, according to that interview, the children did not even know their mother had a job, because she was home so much.
Gwyneth Paltrow heard a similar version on The Goop Podcast in October 2018. Roberts told her that after nearly two decades of making movies, she felt she had earned the time to spend however she wanted, with the new people in their house.
Earned is the word that matters there. She did not frame it as a sacrifice or a retreat. She framed it as a reward she had paid for in advance, and Moder was the other half of the house she spent it in.
The Couple’s Strong Bond
Marriages between a global star and someone outside the spotlight tend to live or die on one question. Whose life is the shared life built around? Roberts answered it by making the home the center and the fame the visitor.
Her kids eventually figured out what she did for a living. Roberts told Oprah Winfrey, in a 2018 sit-down for Harper’s Bazaar, that she doubted they would ever have a true sense of how big her stardom had been. When they first caught on, she said, the question was simply whether she was famous. She answered modestly that a lot of people might have seen a movie she was in.
About an hour later, her kids came back with a follow-up. Was she more famous than Taylor Swift?
Nobody raised in a red-carpet household asks that. Kids raised by two parents who kept the red carpet outside the front door do.
Family Moments Beyond the Spotlight
Roberts got a real-world answer to the Swift question in 2015. She took the kids to the 1989 Tour, and Swift invited her onstage to dance during a song. Roberts told Extra she turned to her children to ask what they thought, and they all urged her to go.
Her youngest added a condition. Only do it if she wanted to.
Roberts called that moment so sweet. It is also the clearest picture in E! Online’s whole account of what twenty years of choosing home produced: a child who thought first about whether his mother actually wanted the spotlight.
Roberts and Moder have kept most of their marriage out of interviews. What she has shared, across the Wall Street Journal, Goop and Harper’s Bazaar, points the same direction every time. The family came first, by design, and at 59 she still talks about it as the best part she ever took.
Sources: E! Online
