Julia Roberts discovers that she should actually be called Julia Mitchell-Corriere.it

Julia Roberts should actually be called Julia Mitchell. The true identity of the 55-year-old actress was revealed in a recent episode of the docu-series “Finding Your Roots”, where Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. reconstructs the family tree of celebrities through DNA archives and painstaking research work. The meticulous investigation thus made it possible to discover the truth about the Hollywood star’s family: in the mid-nineteenth century his paternal great-great-grandmother, Rhoda Suttle, married Willis R. Roberts, who however died in 1864, or more than ten years before the birth of Roberts’ great-grandfather, John Pendleton Roberts, born August 26, 1878.

“Stunned”

“It is not possible that Willis Roberts was your great great grandfather, because he was dead,” explained the host of the program to the actress who, understandably shocked, replied “So I’m not a Roberts?”. Before dispelling her doubts, Dr. Gates Jr explained that while digging deep into the Georgia archives, his team had been unable to find any details about the identity of her great-great-grandfather, so they searched for her biological father. man using DNA samples from Roberts herself and one of her father’s first cousins. Then comparing the results with those of other people in the publicly available databases, the researchers found a group of matches that ties Julia and her cousin to Henry MacDonald Mitchell Jr. In fact, the biological great-great-grandfather of the «Pretty Woman» star, who however, at the time he was married to a woman named Sarah and already had six children. “So we are Mitchell?” Roberts asked in astonishment and the conductor could not help but confirm the truth. That is, that she is Julia Mitchell and not Julia Roberts, at least biologically. “I’m amazed – admitted the actress – this was a really unexpected turn!”. Of course, there’s no way of knowing whether Roberts’ great-grandfather John ever learned the identity of her real father, but it stands to reason that her mother Rhoda wanted to keep it a secret to avoid scandal. «In any case, I prefer the name Roberts!», Julia concluded, laughing.