Actress Julia Roberts shares personal story of Martin Luther King Jr

Julia Roberts says the late Martin Luther King Jr and his wife Coretta Scott King paid the hospital bill for her birth.

The actress, 55, revealed that the couple made the gesture as her parents couldn’t afford the fee, and said her mum and dad befriended the Kings while living in Atlanta running a theatre school.

She told Gayle King, in a clip showing her in conversation with the journalist last month that has now been shared online by a fan: “One day, Coretta 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.

“My mom was like, ‘Sure, come on over,’ and so they all just became friends, and they helped us out of a jam.”

It has been reported that a Ku Klux Klan member blew up a car outside one of Roberts’parents, Betty and Walter Roberts’ plays in 1965 in response to King Jr’s daughter Yolanda being cast in a role in which she kissed a white actor.

Gayle King hailed Julia’s parents’ decision as “extraordinary” because people didn’t see “little black children interacting with little white kids in acting school” at the time.

Roberts celebrated her 55th birthday last Friday by sharing a selfie of herself sipping a mug of coffee surrounded by pink and gold balloons. She captioned the photo: ‘Feeling the love and magic on my 55th Birthday! My cup runneth over.’

She paid tribute to her husband Danny Moder and their life with their children, 17-year-old twins Hazel and Phinnaeus and son Henry, 15, saying: “The life that I have built with my husband, [and] the life that we’ve built with our children, that’s the best stuff. To come home at the end of the day, triumphantly, to them.”

Roberts is now starring alongside George Clooney as a divorced couple in Ticket to Paradise. A 2022 romantic comedy film, Roberts and Clooney team up to sabotage the impending wedding of their daughter Lilly. The film is directed by Ol Parker and written by Parker and Daniel Pipski. Kaitlyn Dever, Billie Lourd, Maxime Bouttier, and Lucas Bravo also star. The Academy Award-winning duo has previously co-starred in successful films like Money Monster, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and the first two Ocean films.

Ticket to Paradise had its world premiere in Barcelona on September 8 and was released in North America on October 21, by Universal Pictures. It has grossed $119 million worldwide and received mixed reviews from critics.