Stiles was born in New York City[1] to 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).[3] Stiles is of English, Irish, and Italian descent.[4] She started acting at age 11, performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company.[5]
Career
Film and television
Stiles made her acting debut in 1993 on the mystery show Ghostwriter as Erica Dansby.[6]
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. 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 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. 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's 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.[9] She told Rolling Stone that she performed all her own dancing in the film, except for some closeups of the feet.[9]
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 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."[10] 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",[11] but the film met with generally unfavorable reviews. Stiles played a Wisconsin college student who is swept off her feet by a Danish prince, played by Luke Mably, in The Prince and Me (2004), directed by Martha Coolidge. Stiles told an interviewer that she was very similar to her character Paige Morgan. Critic Scott Foundas said she was "irrepressibly engaging" and the film was a "strange career choice for Stiles".[12] This echoed criticism in reviews of A Guy Thing (2003), a romantic comedy with Jason Lee and Selma Blair. Critic Dennis Harvey wrote that Stiles was "wasted"[13] and Holden called her "a serious actress from whom comedy does not seem to flow naturally".[14] In 2006, Stiles starred opposite her Hamlet co-star Liev Schreiber in The Omen, a remake of the 1976 horror film.[15] She returned to the Bourne series with a much larger role in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), her highest-grossing film to date.
In 2015, Stiles signed on to reprise her role as Nicky Parsons in Jason Bourne, the fifth installment of the Bourne franchise.[19] She also featured as Courtney, the wayward mother of Sophie Nélisse, in The Great Gilly Hopkins (2016).[20] In 2019, Stiles appeared in the movie Hustlers as the journalist, Elizabeth. The film was a box office success.[21]
Stiles was to play Jeannie in a production of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig directed by the playwright beginning in spring 2011,[28] but the show was postponed indefinitely.[29]
In 2012, the web series Blue premiered. It stars Stiles as a single mother with a 13-year-old son. She works at an office and also as a call girl to make ends meet on an otherwise meager income fighting to protect her son from the collision between her complicated past and tenuous present.[40] For her work on Blue, Stiles won two IAWTV Awards, in 2013 and 2014.[41] The actress during the recordings shared set with artists like Michelle Forbes, JC Gonzalez, and Uriah Shelton.
Stiles played Maisy-May in the Canadian Amazon Prime series The Lake. Maisy-May is the "picture-perfect" stepdaughter/stepsister who was given the family cottage by her stepfather, to the dismay of her stepbrother Justin.[42][43] Season 1 premiered in summer 2022.[43]
Stiles is a former vegan, occasionally eating red meat.[51] She says she gave up veganism after she developed anemia and found it difficult to get proper nutrition while traveling.[51]
^O'Sullivan, Charlotte (September 13, 2002). "Julia Stiles: 'That'll sound slutty'". The Independent. Archived from the original on January 22, 2009. Retrieved December 19, 2017. Her mother (half English, half Italian) makes ceramic pots, her dad (Irish) sells them – and Stiles admits that the basic ethos is, 'it's bad to be lazy! If I decided not to go to college [my parents] would not be that happy.'
