(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 22 February 2026 1:00, UK
Much as many people believe that it takes talent and no small amount of luck to get to the top of a profession, but the old saying of there being no substitute for hard work generally rings true.
The more effort someone puts into doing something, the higher their chances of success, and for one,
Julia Roberts knows this, which is why she was so blown away to work with arguably the greatest actor in history.
Roberts, though, is someone who had a relatively quick ascendency to fame once she decided she wanted to be an actor like her brother Eric, who had been Golden Globe and Oscar nominated while his sister was still at school. She moved to New York in 1987, signed a modelling contract and then quickly picked up a couple of TV roles before landing her first movie alongside Liam Neeson, called Satisfaction.
The same year, she had a moderate hit with the comedy Mystic Pizza and then broke through in 1989, at just 22, in Steel Magnolias, the comedy drama that featured heavy-hitters like Sally Field, Dolly Parton and Shirley MacLaine, with Roberts more than holding her own and getting both Golden Globe and Oscar nominated for her performance.
Another actor who had Oscar success in her first couple of films and made her debut, ironically, in a film called Julia, was Meryl Streep, and she would prove not only to be a role model for Roberts in terms of their trade, but also with life in general; with the younger one taking advice on how to bring up children in the pressure-heavy world of Hollywood.
Roberts’ ascent was underlined when Pretty Woman became a global smash in 1990, and by the end of the decade, she was one of the most highly-paid and in-demand actors in the industry. Streep, meanwhile, had experienced the opposite, where after an astonishing 15 years, in which she earned eight Oscar nominations, she had a quiet 1990s with only Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County as a hit, although this being Streep, she still picked up four Oscar nods in that decade.
Roberts meanwhile won her own ‘Best Actress’ Oscar in 2001 for Erin Brockovich, and while Streep kept her usual standards up with four nominations in the 2000s and a win as Margaret Thatcher in the Iron Lady in 2011, it wasn’t until two years later that the two big names came together on the same film, and predictably, once they did, it meant recognition for the pair of them. The film was 2013’s August: Osage County, a comedy with an ensemble cast including British talent like Ewan McGregor and Benedict Cumberbatch and produced by George Clooney that told the story of a family of women brought back to the house they grew up in, leading to conflict all around. Performing only moderately at the box office, both Streep and Roberts still picked up Oscar nominations for their roles as a mother and daughter.
Roberts would go on to be close friends with Streep and has praised her, saying, “[She] showed that it is about working hard. Because I’ve never seen anyone work harder than she works. She doesn’t just snap her fingers and be a genius. She really is just the hardest-working girl in the room. I was so grateful to see that up close. To work with Meryl Streep is a dream come true for anyone. To know her is an honour. She is such a beautiful person, and it was intimidating, certainly, to be in these scenes with her.”
Streep is now the most Oscar-nominated actor in cinema history, with the last of them coming for 2017’s newspaper drama The Post. She may well have more stage-climbing to do, however, seeing as the long-awaited The Devil Wears Prada 2 hits cinemas in May. Roberts, on the other hand, has wrapped on a thriller called Panic Carefully with Elizabeth Olsen and is signed up to appear in Oceans 14 with Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.