Julia Roberts

Mystic Pizza in 1988 was a small film about waitresses in a Connecticut town, and it did the useful job of putting Julia Roberts in front of the people who cast films. A year later Steel Magnolias brought a Best Supporting Actress nomination and a Golden Globe. Then Pretty Woman opened in March 1990, took around $463 million worldwide against a budget of roughly $14 million, and settled the question of whether she was a star. She was twenty-two, and she had a second Oscar nomination by the following spring.

What she did with that position was less predictable than the period usually allowed. Sleeping with the Enemy in 1991 and The Pelican Brief in 1993 kept her commercially dependable without repeating the Pretty Woman formula, and there were stretches where she simply worked less than the industry would have preferred. My Best Friend's Wedding in 1997 is the film that reset the whole thing, largely because she spends most of it behaving badly and the script never quite forgives her for it. Audiences went anyway, in very large numbers.

Then 1999 produced Notting Hill and Runaway Bride inside the same year, and 2000 produced the film that ended the argument about what she was worth. Her fee for Erin Brockovich was $20 million, a figure that had until then been paid only to men. The film took more than $125 million in North America. At the ceremony held in 2001 she won Best Actress, and took the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the Screen Actors Guild award for the same performance.

The then-and-now comparison is oddly undramatic in her case, which is itself the point. Roberts never had a wilderness period to recover from and never made a comeback, because she never went away far enough to need one. She kept working at a deliberate pace, picked up a fourth nomination for August: Osage County in 2013, and the smile that sold Pretty Woman still does most of the work in a photograph. Very few careers from that decade survived without a visible dent in them.