American actress whose deft performances in varied roles helped make her one of the highest-paid and most-influential actresses in the 1990s and early 2000s, Julia Robert revealed that the hospital bill for her birth was paid for by Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King.
It all started recently when a Twitter user shared a compilation video of Roberts, writing “Martin Luther King Jr. paying for her birth is still a little known fact that sends me.”
A few days later, in honor of Roberts’ 55th birthday on October 28, consultant Zara Rahim tweeted a clip of Roberts sharing the story about her birth with journalist Gayle King (no relation to Dr. King), according to CNN.
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Roberts explained that Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, took care of the hospital expenses since her parents couldn’t pay the bill.
“My parents had a theater school in Atlanta called the Actors and Writers’ Workshop,” Roberts said. “And one day Coretta Scott King called my mother and asked if her kids could be part of the school because they were having a hard time finding a place that would accept her kids.”
Roberts’s mother said sure and thus began the friendship between the civil rights leaders and Walter and Betty Lou Roberts.
That led to the Kings paying for the birth of the woman who would go on to become an international star.
“They helped us out of a jam,” Julia Roberts said.
In a September interview with Gayle King, the Ticket to Paradise actress was asked who it was that helped her family pay for her birth. “Okay, her research is very good,” Roberts laughed. “The King family paid for my hospital bill. [Martin Luther King] and Corretta,” per Complex.
The connection between the Roberts and the King families came through a theater school that Julia’s father, Walter, ran in Atlanta. “One day Coretta Scott King called my mother and asked if her kids could be part of the school, because they were having a hard time finding a place that would accept her kids,” Roberts, who was born in October 1967, said. “My mom was like, ‘Sure, come on over,’ and so they just all became friends, and they helped us out of a jam.”
“In the ’60s, you didn’t have little Black children interacting with little white kids in acting school,” Gayle King added. “And Julia’s parents were welcoming, and I think that’s extraordinary, and it lays the groundwork for who Julia is.”
“A man, a tangential member of the Ku Klux Klan, had seen me kiss Yolanda the day before in the same parking lot,” he wrote. “The Klansman had come around the day before the explosion in order to make trouble. The workshop was offering a free show in the Carver Homes housing project, an exclusively African-American wonderland filled with hammered lives and children with nothing to do. The guy only heckled us the first day, said words that everyone had heard a million times before, finished his case of PBR, and was about to leave when I kissed Yolanda.”
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Sources: CNN, Complex
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