Julia Roberts

For the past seven years, superstars and Oscar winners have left behind their Perrier water, makeup artists, designer clothes, cell phones, luxury Winnebagos and overattentive publicists to get up close and personal with some of the most amazing animals in the wild.

Encased in a coffin, waiting to be brought back to life: That's how Snow White spends a good portion of the folk story that bears her name. There's no such downtime for the princess in the snappy retelling "Mirror Mirror," a fractured fairy tale that occupies the divide between Disney and Grimm. A booster shot of testosterone lends kinetic kick to director Tarsem Singh's visually inventive interpretation, without shortchanging the requisite froufrou or sugarcoating the story's dark Oedipal heart.

I take exception to the Julia Roberts bashing in last week's Saturday Letters. As an actor, I have an acute appreciation of what it must take to succeed in this business, to remain on top for as many years as she has, and to be on a par with the top male actors. Why do people delight in bashing those few who triumph? She deserves not our admonition but our admiration. MARCIA ANN BURRS Thousand Oaks

Snow White was driving hastily through West Hollywood, swerving her SUV out of a lane of cars jammed in traffic. Opportunities to make U-turns on Santa Monica Boulevard don't come frequently, so Lily Collins - who plays the classic fairy-tale princess in Friday's"Mirror Mirror" - pulled a quick illegal maneuver to minimize her time in the car. "It would have taken forever otherwise," the actress said in the parking lot of the French...

Call it a preemptive paparazzi strike. Julia Roberts and her husband, cameraman Danny Moder, have released the first photos of their nearly 3-month-old twins to People magazine, which hit newsstands Friday. "We are releasing these photographs not only to share our happiness, but to ensure the privacy, safety and respect our babies deserve," the couple said in a statement. The photographs show Roberts with her sleepy-eyed twins: Phinnaeus Walter (Finn) and Hazel Patricia.

Julia Roberts is bound for Broadway to star in a revival of Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain," staged by Joe Mantello next spring. Though she has no professional stage credits -- Roberts isn't even a member of the stage actors' union, Actors' Equity -- she had participated in a reading of the play in a Los Angeles conference room in June, according to co-producer Marc Platt. "It was evident that it was a wonderful marriage of actress and role," he said.

Actress Julia Roberts and singer Lyle Lovett were married Sunday during a hastily arranged ceremony, her publicist said. Lovett's band performed "Angel Eyes" in honor of Roberts during the small church wedding in Marion, Ind., spokeswoman Nancy Seltzer said. Roberts, 25, met Lovett, 35, when they filmed 1992's "The Player," Seltzer said. It was the first marriage for both. The wedding was planned in two days, Seltzer said.

Nothing about this Julia Roberts recalls the radiantly pretty woman whose wide smile and wild tresses made her the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. In fact, today that unruly mess of hair, which seduced a nation of men and women alike, has been tinted a deeper red and pressed into a smooth, flat bob to go with the tailored houndstooth slacks she's sporting during a recent stay in New York City--her home between movies. And the $12-million smile?

Julia Roberts was thrilled to get the star-making role in "Pretty Woman" but she says it wasn't easy to tell her mother that she would be playing a prostitute in the movie. "My mom works for the Catholic archdiocese of Atlanta," Roberts says in a Rolling Stone magazine interview. "I mean, my mom's boss baptized me. I called her at work and it was like, 'Hi, mom, I got a job!' She said, 'You did? What'd you get?' And I said, 'Oh, it's a Disney movie! I've got to go, talk to you later.' "

"A Dangerous Method," the intellectually stimulating look at the formative days of psychoanalysis, presents Viggo Mortensen in a transformative performance as Sigmund Freud, Michael Fassbender as his restrained protégé and rival, Carl Jung, and a bold Keira Knightley as the patient-turned-practitioner who came between them. But it was almost a Julia Roberts movie. "I first heard of and was intrigued by the story of Sabina Spielrein in a book by Aldo Carotenuto, 'A Secret Symmetry,'" says screenwriter Christopher Hampton of the character played by Knightley.

With a top-drawer cast headed by Ryan Reynolds, Julia Roberts, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson and others, "Fireflies in the Garden" is a story of a deeply dysfunctional family suddenly fraying even faster at the seams. Unfortunately there is as much fraying being done by the film itself, which partially explains why it's been on the shelf for years. "Fireflies" unfolds in two separate eras — the abuse-marked childhood of Michael Taylor and about 20 years later as we catch up with the troubled but successful romance novelist he's become (Cayden Boyd plays the younger, Reynolds the older)

Just a few years out of film school with an award-winning short in his backpack, Dennis Lee moved from New York to Hollywood at age 36 to make movies. Met with the usual crescendo of rejection, he cobbled together $500,000 from family and friends to direct "Fireflies in the Garden," the first screenplay he had written. Just weeks before he was to start shooting his tale about a domineering father's lasting impact on his family, Senator Entertainment, an American offshoot of a German film company, said it would give Lee $8 million to make the film.

Hollywood has been fertile ground for brothers. It has accommodated the Warner brothers, the Marx brothers, the Coen brothers, the Farrelly brothers, the Hughes brothers, the Wayans brothers. So where are all the sisters? "There's so many brothers!" exclaims Jennifer Todd, who partnered with her older sister Suzanne for 13 years to produce blockbuster movies as Team Todd. She is probably thinking of the Weitz brothers, the Wachowski brothers, the Wilson brothers. "It's endless!"

"Larry Crowne" is an inside-out movie, acceptable around the edges but hollow and shockingly unconvincing at its core. When that core is two of the biggest movie stars around — Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts — it's an especially dispiriting situation. Hanks and Roberts topline this adult romantic comedy about supposedly real people, the kind of movie that would be welcome were it not doomed by its tone of hopelessly contrived Hollywood sincerity. Hanks, who also directed and co-wrote with Nia Vardalos (responsible for the cloying "My Big Fat Greek Wedding")

SERIES Who Do You Think You Are? When Steve Buscemi travels through New York, Philadelphia and the battlefields of Virginia he discovers a questionable character among his ancestors in this new episode (8 p.m. NBC). Shark Tank: Jeff Foxworthy and tech tycoon Mark Cuban join the school in this new episode of the unscripted series (8 p.m. ABC). Merlin: Warriors converge on Camelot for a no-holds barred tournament, and Gilli (Harry Melling) is eager to take part in this new episode (10 p.m. Syfy)

Sam Chwat was a master of accents who taught Robert De Niro to talk like an Appalachian ex-convict, Olympia Dukakis to talk like a Holocaust survivor and Peter Boyle to talk like a bigot from the Deep South. A modern-day Henry Higgins, he also trained some actors to lose accents, helping Julia Roberts drop her native Georgia drawl and Tony Danza his distinctive Brooklynese. Chwat even turned his training on himself, muting his own "Noo Yawk" accent to prevent clients from miming the wrong cues.

There is a very particular art to playing the ordinary. Few actors do it well ? Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney always come to mind. Of those, most fail to get their due come Oscar night ? thoughts of Giamatti and Linney rise again. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at least in modern times, rather prefers its lead actor and actress performances to hit an electrifying emotional chord that can neither be ignored nor, seemingly, denied. The heroes, the handicapped, the monsters, the innocents, the leaders, the literary, the redeemed, the doomed, the artists, the doomed artists ?