Julia Roberts may be “Pretty Woman” forever, but the movie icon just found out she’s not Roberts. (Watch the video below.)
In a recent episode of PBS’s “Finding Your Roots,” DNA testing and census research revealed that the Oscar winner was on his father’s side of a family named Mitchell, not Roberts.
“You are Julia Mitchell. Biologically, you’re not a Robert,” host Henry Louis Gates Jr. told the star.
“Wow,” Roberts replied. “Am I still straight? Am I confronting you?
“My mind is blown,” she added.
Actor ‘Erin Brockovich’ discovered he is no relation to the person he thought was his great-great-grandfather Willis Roberts. She died long before her great-great-grandmother, Rhoda Suttle Roberts, gave birth to the movie icon’s purported great-grandfather, John Roberts.
John’s father was apparently a married man named Henry McDonald Mitchell Jr. who was having an affair with Rhoda Suttle Roberts. Mitchell lived a few miles away, while her mother lived within walking distance of Suttle Roberts, Gates said.
The show compared DNA samples from the celebrity and a cousin of her father to others in a database, finding a cluster of matches that pointed to Mitchell.
While Roberts tried to wrap his “arms” around the revelation, he still concluded, “I prefer the name Roberts.”
This was not the first historical story to emerge about Roberts in recent times. In October, he revealed that the late Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King paid the hospital for his birth. The Kings approached Walter and Betty Lou Roberts through the drama program they managed in Atlanta.
Finding Your Roots has made some interesting genealogical discoveries in recent years, from discovering that Sen. Cory Booker (DN.J.) and RuPaul are actually cousins to confirming that actor Ed Norton is related to Pocahontas.
