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Julia Stiles Filmography
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Julia Stiles: Film career
Stiles' first film was a non-speaking part in I Love You, I Love You Not (1996) with
Claire Danes and
Jude Law. She also had small roles as
Harrison Ford's daughter in Alan J. Pakula's The Devil's Own (1997) and in M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake. Her first lead was in
Wicked (1998), playing a teenage girl who murders her mother so she can have her father all to herself. Joe Balthai wrote she was "the darling of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival" and Internet movie writer Harry Knowles said she was the "discovery of the fest", but the film was not commercially released in the U.S. and went direct-to-video.
The role that made her a star was Kat Stratford opposite
Heath Ledger in Gil Junger's
10 Things I Hate About You (1999), an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew set in a Seattle high school. She won an MTV Movie Award for "Breakthrough Female Performance" for the role and the Chicago Film Critics voted her the most promising new actress of the year. Foreign critics applauded her work as well. Adina Hoffman praised her as "a young, serious looking
Diane Lane" and Martin Hoyle said Stiles played Kat "with bloody-minded independent charm from the beginning with hints of wistfulness beneath the determination."
She subsequently appeared in two more Shakespearean adaptations, playing the Desdemona role opposite Mekhi Phifer in the title role in
Tim Blake Nelson's
O (2001), Othello in high school; and Ophelia in Michael Almerayda's
Hamlet (2000), with
Ethan Hawke in the lead. Neither was a great success;
O had been subjected to many delays and a change of distributors and Hamlet was an art house film shot on a minimal budget.
Her 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 is killed. At her new, nearly all-black school, she falls in love with Sean Patrick Thomas, who teaches her hip-hop dance steps that get her into dance 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 pronounced her "the coolest co-ed", putting her on the cover of its April 12, 2001 issue. She told
Rolling Stone that despite rumors, she did all her own dancing in the film, though the way the film was shot and edited made it appear otherwise.
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, played by
Alec Baldwin, with a weakness for young girls. Stiles also played opposite
Stockard Channing in the dark art house film The Business of Strangers (2001) as a conniving underling who exacts revenge on her cold 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," said Channing. Stiles also had small roles as a CIA agent in The Bourne Identity (2002) and its sequel The Bourne Supremacy (2004). Aimee Agresti quoted producer Lynda Obst as saying Stiles was turning into the next
Meryl Streep.
Her next leading role was in Mona Lisa Smile (2003) as Joan, a student at Wellesley College in 1953, whose art professor, played by
Julia Roberts, encourages her to pursue a career in law rather than becoming a wife and mother. Stephen Holden referred to her as one of the cinema's "brightest young stars" but the film met with generally unfavorable reviews.
Stiles played a Wisconsin co-ed with dreams of becoming a doctor who is swept off her feet by a Danish prince in The Prince and Me (2004), directed by Martha Coolidge. Stiles told Leslie Goober that she was very similar to the character, Paige Morgan, but critic Scott Foundas said while she was, as always, "irrepressibly engaging" the film was a "strange career choice for Stiles", echoing criticism in reviews of A Guy Thing (2003), a romantic comedy with
Jason Lee and
Selma Blair. Dennis Harvey wrote that Stiles was "wasted" and Stephen Holden called her "a serious actress from whom comedy does not seem to flow naturally."
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