📍Smyrna, Georgia, USA
1967 – 1985“Julia Roberts grew up in Smyrna, a suburb of Atlanta in Cobb County, the youngest of three children of Walter Roberts and Betty Lou Bredemus. Both her parents had been actors and playwrights, and before she was born they ran the Actors and Writers Workshop in Atlanta, a small theatre school in Midtown. Among their students were the children of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and the family story is that, when Julia was born, Mrs King paid the hospital bill to thank them. Her parents' marriage later ended, and Julia was raised mostly by her mother in Smyrna, where she lived an ordinary suburban childhood: she played clarinet in the school band, loved animals and for a long time wanted to be a veterinarian. Her father died when she was ten, a loss she has spoken about only gently. Her older brother, Eric, was already making his name as an actor, and as a teenager she began to see acting as a family calling that might also be hers. After graduating from Campbell High School in Smyrna in 1985, she moved to New York to join her sister Lisa, signed with a modelling agency and took acting classes. Mystic Pizza, Steel Magnolias and Pretty Woman soon followed, and that wide, warm smile became one of the most famous in the world. Smyrna is proud of her, and she has spoken affectionately of her Georgia childhood, of a home where storytelling and performing were simply part of the family, and of the courage it took for a young woman from the Atlanta suburbs to try her luck in New York.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today