Stars Pay Tribute to Roberts
March 6 -- NEW YORK — George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh, and Sopranos star James Gandolfini were just a few of the formally clad celebs who turned out Sunday night to pay tribute to Julia Roberts at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The pretty woman and Oscar nominee was the 16th star to be honored by the American Museum of the Moving Image.
But even the likes of acting legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, both previous AMMI honorees, didn't cause the kind of crush that Julia did. The front foyer of the hotel was closed off and 60 photographers and 750 guests were escorted through police barricades into the Park Avenue entrance.
Following a clip from their No. 1-ranked new film, The Mexican, in which Roberts shares more screen time with Gandolfini than with her character's romantic interest (played by Brad Pitt), Gandolfini told the assemblage how he'd almost begun his toast to Julia. The night before, he'd been partying with some buddies in New Jersey, "writing a poem for Miss Roberts. But when I woke up," he said, "I saw it was too hard and dirty to read here."
His own heritage is "very old-world Italian; [I] don't trust anyone," says Gandolfini, but despite that, he said, "within five minutes, I saw this girl was so smart, so cool" that he was instantly won over. "If 40 years from now [AMMI does] this again, I will be here to say the same thing."
Soderbergh, Clooney, Sarandon Praise RobertsSteven Soderbergh, Roberts' Erin Brockovich director and a fellow Oscar nominee, was also on hand and praised Julia for "grace, wit, [and] generosity of spirit."
George Clooney, who's co-starring with Roberts in Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, gave tongue-in-cheek praise to "J-Ro, as we call her," for being "a confidante whom I could call up anytime at night, and almost immediately she would have her assistant call back." On a more serious note, he called her a "consummate actress … a great beauty and great girl."
Susan Sarandon, who co-starred with Roberts in Stepmom, reminisced, "We've eaten tuna fish together with one fork out of a can. She's funny [and] much smarter than she has to be [and] a good sport. In the midst of coming of age in this business — God knows it's so difficult, most people don't even attempt it — she was able not only to focus on becoming a great actress but also a great person."
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