The Crown Julia

WHEN Julia Roberts smiles, a thousand teeth begin to flash. It is the first thing one notices about her, but certainly not the last. Roberts' most defining quality is a desperate sense of mission in life. She desperately wants to be happy and she desperately wants to succeed as an actress.

In the past two years, Roberts has been to the brink and back. At the height of her fame, hailed as the screen's most magical face since Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, she dropped out of Hollywood's culture of deceit and ran off to Ireland with fellow actor Jason Patric. It was a time of terrific personal strain for Roberts, who had called off her impending marriage to Kiefer Sutherland three days before the nuptials were to take place on the 20th Century Fox lot.

'I still can't imagine I went through that,' she says. 'The worst thing about that time was the feeling that everyone was watching me. It was the ultimate humiliation. I felt a total lack of privacy at the one moment in my life when I needed to be alone.

'The real stress didn't come from what was actually going on in my personal life but from how everybody was speculating that I was strung out on drugs or having a nervous breakdown. It was nothing like that. I just wanted to get away from the madness for alittle while.' Fame can extract a terrible price from those who seek it. Julia Roberts is a charming, insouciant, rebellious and driven young woman. From a very early age, she dreamed of stardom, of living on the stage. 'I used to fall asleep at night listening to Shakespearean sonnets that my parents were reciting. Acting is a permanent form of pleasure. But it also means living. I try to live as intensely as I can. That's part of what makes you a good performer.' Beauty and the beast. That was the response of a horde of shocked observers when Roberts married Lyle Lovett, perhaps one of the strangest looking individuals on this planet. Lovett is also, however, arguably the most intelligent, cool and captivating country-and-western performer around. But did Roberts have to marry him? 'Lyle is the sweetest man in the universe,' she says. 'He has this incredible calm and sense of self. A lot of people might think he's not very emotional. It's totally the opposite. He thinks more deeply than anyone but has his own way of adapting to the world. I wish I had that kind of laid-back cool - maybe I wouldn't have so much trouble dealing with what other people think about me.' That is a revealing remark. Roberts does mind what other people say and think about her and was visibly hurt when directors like Herbert Ross and Steven Spielberg were trashing her in private and in the media. On-set reports from Hook had Spielberg losing his temper - an almost unknown thing - with Roberts' constant fussing and fretting over her work. 'All I can say is that I remember the great times Steven and I had on the set. If he remembers our experience differently, that's his right. I may have been tense, and there was a lot going on in my personal life at the time, but I didn't think it was detracting from my acting.' After 18 months spent with girlfriends and staying conspicuously clear of old Hollywood haunts (she and Sutherland used to be a fixture on the Los Angeles club scene), Roberts has emerged with a fresh outlook on life. This shows in her polished performancein The Pelican Brief, a stylish new thriller directed by Alan Pakula (All the President's Men, Sophie's Choice) and based on John Grisham's (The Firm) best-seller.

'I liked the idea of doing something different from most of my previous work,' she says. 'I definitely didn't want to do a really sentimental or sad film, and thought it would be interesting for people to see me in a film where the story rather than any ofthe individual performances keeps your attention.

'I didn't want the whole film to revolve around my character, because I know there are still a lot of people out there wanting me to fail. That's the sadistic side of this business that I have trouble figuring out. It's not in my nature to imagine the worst things that people can do or say about you, but now I'm more aware of how to defend myself.' A trace of bitterness creeps on to Roberts' face when she recalls the nastier rumours that have been circulating during her absence. 'Isn't it terrible that once you've achieved a level of success everyone is looking for you to crash? I've talked to a lot of other actors over the past few years, and they've all given me encouragement because they've suffered the same thing.

'I know I'm sensitive to what others think about me, because I put a lot of pressure on myself to be a good actor. What really gets to me is that just about all the [nasty things] people have been saying about me has nothing to do with my work!' Her voice suddenly rises several decibels. 'That's the killer aspect of Hollywood. If they can't get you for what you do on camera, they'll try to destroy you with vicious gossip.' In The Pelican Brief, Roberts plays Darby Shaw, a bright and ambitious law student whose lover (a professor played by Sam Shepard) is murdered under mysterious circumstances. She suspects a conspiracy and launches her own investigation with the help of newspaper reporter Gray Grantham, played by Denzel Washington. 'I love thrillers,' Roberts says, 'and I was excited about Pelican Brief because I loved the atmosphere of the book. It was the perfect film for me to get back to work with. It's a fresh start.' A new beginning is exactly what Roberts needs. Two years ago she began to hate her celebrity and the artificial importance of being the hottest property in the film industry. Coming from the Deep South, she has a lot of pride in basic virtues like work, family and respect for privacy. When she made the break with Hollywood, her last film, Dying Young, had received generally negative reviews - although not for her performance - she needed to get away from Sutherland and she certainly had no privacy since herlove life had become an international cause celebre.