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Julia O'Hara Stiles (born 28 March, 1981 in New York City) is an American actress. Starting at a young age she performed with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company. Her first film was a non-speaking role in I Love You, I Love You Not with Claire Danes and Jude Law. She also had small roles as Harrison Ford's daughter in The Devil's Own and in M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake. Stiles's first starrring role was in Wicked playing a teenage girl who murders her mother so she can have her father all to herself.
Her first major role was playing Kat Stratford opposite Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew set in a Seattle high school. She won an MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance for the role. She subsequently did two more Shakespearean adaptations, playing the Desdemona role in Tim Blake Nelson's O, Othello in high school, with Mekhi Pfeiffer in the title role; and Ophelia in Hamlet, opposite Ethan Hawke.
Her next film was Save the Last Dance, where she played an aspiring ballerina forced to leave her small town in southern Illinois when her mother is killed to live with her struggling musician father in Chicago. At her new, nearly all-black school, she falls in love with Sean Patrick Thomas, who teaches her hip-hop dance steps. That role won her two more MTV awards, for Best Kiss and Best Female Performance.
Stiles is a student at Columbia University, majoring in English. In 2001 she hosted Saturday Night Live and eight days later introduced a music nominee at the 76th Annual Academy Awards. She returned to Saturday Night Live on May 5, 2001 in a cameo playing Jenna Bush. In the summer of 2002, she played the lead role in Twelfth Night for Shakespeare in the Park.
She has played a CIA agent in The Bourne Identity and its sequel The Bourne Supremacy, a 1950s student at Wellesley College in Mona Lisa Smile, and a Wisconsin co-ed swept off her feet by a Danish prince in The Prince and Me. In the spring of 2004, she made her London stage debut in a revival of Oleanna with Aaron Eckhart.
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