When Julia Roberts married Danny Moder, she was the most famous actress in the world and he was a cinematographer unknown to the general public. Two decades later, they are still happily married with three children, proving that love flourishes outside of Hollywood convention.
On July 4, 2002, Julia Roberts and Daniel Moder said yes I do on a ranch in Taos, New Mexico. Roberts was then at the height of her career and was probably the most in-demand actress in the world. A year earlier, she had won an Oscar for Erin Brockovich, a film for which she earned $20 million (she became the first woman in Hollywood history to do so), and she was racking up appearances in blockbusters like Ocean's Eleven. And Moder was then a camera assistant (he later became a cinematographer) without many credits and completely unknown to the general public and even to the industry.
Their relationship and subsequent wedding greatly surprised the world and the film mecca, somewhat reminiscent of the love story that Roberts starred in fiction alongside Hugh Grant in Notting Hill. 20 years later, the marriage has established itself as one of the strongest in Hollywood and the two are still as close as the first day, as the actress demonstrated this week by posting a photo on Instagram of both giving each other a passionate kiss. "Twenty! I can't stop smiling, I can't stop kissing you," Roberts wrote to accompany the post.
Moder did not want to be left behind either and published a photo of the beginning of their relationship: “Today we begin our 20th year of marriage. We took this photo on a dusty road before we had the big idea. Now I am together with this beautiful girl day after day. One epic day after another.”
The Roberts and Moder thing was an almost instant crush, but they waited a while to get married because they both had other partners. When they met on the set of The Mexican in 2000, the film in which she starred with Brad Pitt, he had been married to the Argentine make-up artist Vera Steimberg for three years and the Pretty Woman actress was in a relationship with the actor. Benjamin Bratt.
In fact, before Moder came into her life, Roberts was only known for relationships with celebrities, most of them actors like Liam Neeson, Jason Patric, Dylan McDermott or Matthew Perry. The most relevant were the ones she had with Kiefer Sutherland, with whom she broke up in 1991, just three days before the wedding, and with the country singer Lyle Lovett, with whom she was married between 1993 and 1995.
Moder finalized her divorce in 2002 and married the actress once the legal part was settled. A year later, Roberts sat down with Oprah Winfrey for an interview with O magazine and spoke openly about her marriage. Winfrey herself realized the happiness that the interpreter gave off and asked her about it:
“It has a lot to do with my marriage. My husband, Danny, has enlightened me. Through being married I have met people and experienced things that have fueled my life in an incredible way,” Roberts replied.
"So, have you proven the theory that a rich and famous person can marry someone who is not famous and have the marriage succeed?" Winfrey continued.
"Yes. Jobs don't marry, people marry. It may sound cliché and I've said it a thousand times, but I think I'm fundamentally the same simple person I've always been. I only dedicate myself to something ostentatious and absurd that leads people to think that I am someone ultra-fascinating, "said the actress.
In the years immediately after her wedding, Roberts's career continued to soar. In 2003, she again broke the record for the highest paid actress in Hollywood by receiving 25 million dollars for her participation in Mona Lisa's smile. And in 2004 she released two movies that were box office hits: Closer and Ocean's Twelve.
At the end of that year, at the age of 37, she gave birth to the twins Phinnaeus and Hazel and the cinema took a backseat. In 2005 she only made a cameo for a Dave Matthews Band video clip and in 2006 she provided her voice for Ant Bully and Charlotte's Web. A year later he came back through the front door in Charlie Wilson's War, but he also had his third son, Henry, so he has already decided not to work at the pace he did in the 90s and early 2000s. Instead of that , focused on choosing her projects very conscientiously, not always commercial (such as Agosto, for which she was nominated for an Oscar again) and on prioritizing her children so that they would have a normal childhood, out of the spotlight as much as possible. .
“It wasn't a deliberate decision to work less, but I was having a hard time finding things that interested me and then I was surprised at how quickly the years go by,” Roberts said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “Then there is also the question of balancing my husband's work schedules, my children's school schedules or summer vacations. I can't jump into a project just because I want to. I feel a lot of pride when I stay at home with my family and when I am a housewife.”
Both Roberts and Moder have done their best to keep their children away from Hollywood exposure growing up. To the point that the actress confessed to Express in 2014 that “they don't know what I do for a living. That hasn't entered his life yet. They are little children and I am just their mother, so they don't have to deal with anything else."
The twins, however, are approaching the age of majority and the moment they have to go to university, and Hazel made her debut last year on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival to accompany her father in the presentation of the film Flag Day , for which he was director of photography. Moder is also very given to sharing on Instagram images of his other two children practicing sports such as skateboarding or surfing, of which he is very fond.
