Julia O'Hara Stiles was born March 28, 1981. in Palisades, New York. Born to John O'Hara, an Irish American teacher and businessman, and Judith Stiles, a potter of English and Italian ancestry. She has two younger siblings, Jane and Johnny. Stiles was raised in SoHo by liberal, lapsed Catholic parents. She started acting at age 11, performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company and securing work by submitting photographs of herself in costume to the company and asking that she be kept in mind for juvenile roles. Stiles began her acting career in television roles. After two appearances as the computer punk "Erica Dansby" on the PBS series Ghostwriter in 1993 and 1994, she appeared as a guest star on the medical drama Chicago Hope. She has been seen in two made-for-TV movies: in Before Women Had Wings (1997) on CBS, she played opposite Ellen Burstyn and Oprah Winfrey in an adaptation of the novel by Connie May Fowler; and she played a teenage girl who finds herself pregnant and runs away from her unforgiving father (Bill Smitrovich) in NBC's miniseries The '60's (1999), a film Caryn James of The New York Times dismissed as "conspicuously idiotic." Stiles was the public face of the film, with NBC using her face, painted with a peace sign and the American flag, both in its advertising and on the cover of the soundtrack album. Although Julia's first lead role was in Wicked (1998), Julia's first film was a non-speaking part in I Love You, I Love You Not (1996), with Claire Danes and Jude Law. She also had small roles as Harrison Ford's daughter in Alan J. Pakula's The Devil's Own (1997) and in M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake (1998). Her first lead was in Wicked (1998), playing a teenage girl who murders her mother so she can have her father all to herself. Critic Joe Balthai wrote she was "the darling of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival" and Internet movie writer Harry Knowles said she was the "discovery of the fest," but the film was not commercially released in the U.S. and went direct-to-video in 2001, after Stiles had become better known.