Actress Julia Roberts, once again voted World's Most Beautiful Woman by PEOPLE, turned 50 yesterday. She still has that killer smile, although she makes use of it more seldomly nowadays - older and wiser, it seems to me.

I suppose most cinemaphiles love Julia, and can name the movie that did them in - into their personal "love her forever!" phase. <3

For me it wasn't the movie she is most cited for: Pretty Woman. She was overwhelming in that, cementing her particular non-classic brand of beauty. However unreal the plot might have been - every man was pretty sure, he would have clicked just as Mr. Gere did, in his rich-man-for-poor-girls role.

No, my personal wowing cinematic kick in the gut was Erin Brockovich. Single mothers are the true heroes of Western society, I feel, and here the super-mom not only does right by her kids, as well as she can, but her sense of what's right locks jaw on the terrible thing she's discovered working for her new boss. And then, with his flabbergasted help, she takes on the legal world without so much as one page of a bar exam in her pocket. This movie was a lot more grown-up, and her role pressed all the right buttons for how I love a woman to be...

Other faves of her long - & still strongly ongoing! - career for me: Pentagon Papers, Notting Hill (!), Closer, Ocean's 11/12, August: Osage County.

P.S.: When she came into the world, I had just begun tuning into U.S. (TV & comic) culture as a child. I have had a long-running positive resonance with that culture, and many other aspects of that country. But right now, I notice how that good feeling & basic trust is beginning to slowly shatter - if Trump or Pence can bring the world to the brink of ruin in just a few months or years, that's also the fault of a much-too-traditionalist recipe of dealing with the world's incongruities, countrywide. Always repeating parrot-like a Dream, that essentially always tells you whatever the country does as a whole is right, is not particularly astute! This inherent nationalism is breaking out all over over there and all nationalism tends eventually toward extremism. As we Germans have (hopefully) learnt from having gotten badly burnt - twice in the "nasty German" half-century before Ms. Roberts started on hers...