It's just coincidence that Roberts, whose million-dollar grin has helped make her the top-earning actress of her generation, is in a film called Mona Lisa Smile, according to the film's British director Mike Newell, making his first film since 1999's Pushing Tin.

He adds that Roberts is one of those rare movie stars who can almost guarantee a huge opening weekend at the box-office. He recalls a Mona Lisa Smile test screening in which 500 female audience members cheered and laughed throughout the movie.

"They saw Julia and, like a horse to the first fence of the season, they kind of rise and their expectation goes up and they begin to laugh," he says. "She's an icon for them, and what they were seeing was what she always does for them: she empowers them. Not in a self-important, intellectual, in-the-head sense, but she punches through the walls that they find in their lives. I've never worked with anybody with that kind of star power."

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