Julia Roberts recently revealed that the late Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, paid the hospital bill for her birth when her parents couldn’t afford it.
While Roberts was talking with Gayle King, she explained that her parents befriended the Kings while living in Atlanta and running a theater school.
“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,” Roberts said, referring to segregation in the 1960s. “My mom was like, ‘Sure, come on over,’ and so they all just became friends, and they helped us out of a jam.”
It previously has been reported that a Ku Klux Klan member blew up a car outside one of Betty and Walter Roberts’ plays in response to King Jr’s daughter Yolanda being cast in a role where she had to kiss a white actor.
King said Roberts’ parents’ decision was 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 Friday by sharing a selfie of herself sipping a mug of coffee and pink-and-gold balloons.
“Feeling the love and magic on my ⚡️55th ⚡️ Birthday ! My cup runneth over 🥰,” she captioned the Instagram photo.
“The life that I have built with my husband, and the life that we’ve built with our children, that’s the best stuff,” she said. “To come home at the end of the day, triumphantly, to them.”
