A few days ago, actress Julia Roberts turned 55 and on her birthday she revealed an unknown detail about the day she was born.
Few people may have known that the “Pretty Woman” star had a connection with civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., and until now it was not known that he had to help the family with financial problems.
When Roberts was born in 1967, her parents struggled to pay for hospital bills and me a September interview the actor reveals that help has come from an unexpected part.
He was “rescued” by Martin Luther King Jr.
The actor’s family is said to have been good friends with the activist and his wife, Coretta Scott King, in the 1960s.
In an interview with Gayle King, who is incidentally unrelated to King Jr., Roberts says her parents couldn’t afford to pay the hospital bill after her birth, but the generous couple stepped in.
– Martin and Coretta paid the hospital bill. The King family helped us out of a predicament, Roberts says in the interview that took place at the HistoryTalks event.
The 55-year-old doesn’t explain exactly why his parents, Walter and Betty Lou Roberts, couldn’t afford to foot the bill on their own.
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King Jr. was loved and faced much opposition from the American people as he fought for equal rights for African Americans as whites in the United States. In 1964 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment to equality and non-violent methods.
The year after Roberts was born, the activist was killed in an assassination attempt. He lived to be 39 years old.
He opened the school for the King’s children
In the 1960s, Walter and Betty Lou Roberts ran the Actors and Writers Workshop theater school in Atlanta. The school was a meeting place for young and aspiring actors and a frequent visitor was Yolanda, the daughter of King Jr ..
At the time, segregation in the United States was at its worst and there were few places for African Americans and whites to congregate in public, including the King family.
But the King family was warmly welcomed into the Roberts family theater, the Hollywood star continued in the interview.
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– Coretta called my mother one day and asked her if the children could start coming to the theater, because it was difficult to find places that would accept her children. “My mom said of course they could come,” Roberts said in the September interview.
After the King Children joined the theater in Georgia, the two families also became good friends. This must have happened several years before the “Notting Hill” actor was born.
