Julia Fiona Roberts is an American actress and producer. She established herself as a leading lady in Hollywood after headlining the romantic comedy film Pretty Woman, which grossed $464 million worldwide, she has won three Golden Globe Awards, from eight nominations, has been nominated for four Academy Awards for her film acting, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Erin Brockovich. Her films have collectively brought box office receipts of over US$2.8 billion, making her one of the most bankable actresses in Hollywood. Her most successful films include Mystic Pizza, Steel Magnolias, Pretty Woman, Sleeping with the Enemy, The Pelican Brief, My Best Friend's Wedding, Notting Hill, Runaway Bride, Erin Brockovich, Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, Charlie Wilson's War, Valentine's Day, Eat Pray Love, Money Monster, Wonder. Roberts was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for her performance in the HBO television film The Normal Heart.

In 2018, she starred in the Prime Video psychological thriller series Homecoming. Roberts was the highest-paid actress in the world throughout most of the 1990s and in the first half of the 2000s, her fee for 1990's Pretty Woman was US$300,000. As of 2017, Roberts's net worth was estimated to be $170 million. People magazine has named her the most beautiful woman in the world a record five times. Roberts was born on October 28, 1967, in Smyrna, Georgia, to Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Grady Roberts, she is of English, Irish, Welsh and Swedish descent. Her father was a Baptist, her mother a Roman Catholic, she was raised Catholic, her older brother Eric Roberts, from whom she was estranged for several years until 2004, older sister Lisa Roberts Gillan, niece Emma Roberts, are actors. She had a younger half-sister named Nancy Motes. Roberts' parents, one-time actors and playwrights, met while performing in theatrical productions for the armed forces, they co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop in Atlanta, off Juniper Street in Midtown.

They ran a children's acting school in Decatur, while they were expecting Julia. The children of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King attended the school. As a thank-you for his service, Mrs. King paid Mrs. Roberts's hospital bill, her parents married in 1955. Her mother filed for divorce in 1971. From 1972, Roberts lived in Smyrna, where she attended Fitzhugh Lee Elementary School, Griffin Middle School, Campbell High School. In 1972, her mother married Michael Motes, abusive and unemployed; the couple had Nancy, who died at 37 on February 2014, of an apparent drug overdose. The marriage ended with Betty Lou divorcing Motes on cruelty grounds. Roberts's own father died of cancer. Roberts wanted to be a veterinarian as a child, she played the clarinet in her school band. After graduating from Smyrna's Campbell High School, she attended Georgia State University but did not graduate, she headed to New York City to pursue a career in acting. Once there, she enrolled in acting classes. Roberts made her first big screen appearance in the film Satisfaction, alongside Liam Neeson and Justine Bateman, as a band member looking for a summer gig.

She had performed a small role opposite her brother Eric, in Blood Red, filmed in 1987, although it was not released until 1989. Her first television appearance was as a juvenile rape victim in the initial season of the series Crime Story with Dennis Farina, in the episode titled "The Survivor", broadcast on February 13, 1987, her first critical success with moviegoers was her performance in the independent film Mystic Pizza in 1988. In 1989, she was featured in Steel Magnolias, as a young bride with diabetes, received both her first Academy Award nomination and first Golden Globe Award win for her performance. Roberts became known to worldwide audiences when she starred with Richard Gere in the Cinderella–Pygmalionesque story, Pretty Woman, in 1990, playing an assertive freelance hooker with a heart of gold. Roberts won the role after Michelle Pfeiffer, Molly Ringwald, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Karen Allen, Daryl Hannah turned it down; the role earned her a second Oscar nomination, this time as Best Actress, second Golden Globe Award win, as Motion Picture Best Actress.

Pretty Woman saw the highest number of ticket sales in the U. S. for a romantic comedy, made US$463.4 million worldwide. Roberts starred as one of five students conducting clandestine experiments that produce near-death experiences in the supernatural thriller Flatliners, in 1990, her next film was the commercially successful thriller Sleeping with the Enemy, in which she took on the role of a battered wife who escapes her abusive husband, played by Patrick Bergin, begins a new life in Iowa. Roberts played Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg's Hook, starred as a nurse in Joel Schumacher's romance film Dying Young.

"The Miracle of Peckham" is an episode of the BBC sitcom, Only Fools and Horses. It was the second episode of series 5, was first broadcast on 7 September 1986. In the episode, Del witnesses a miracle at his local church. While Rodney worries about what a muscular man named Biffo is going to do to him for drunkenly stealing his trumpet the previous night, Del Boy goes to church to seek forgiveness for some stolen goods he has purchased; the parish priest explains to Del. They witness an apparent miracle: a statue of the Virgin Mary on the altar appears to be weeping. Del senses an opportunity to make money and save the hospice, tells Rodney to alert the media. Within days and cameramen from all over the world are in Peckham to cover the story. Del presents himself as a modern-day prophet. After several more miracles, enough money is raised to save the local hospice, it suddenly dawns on the priest that the miracles always occur when it is raining. Upon inspecting the church's roof, he finds. Only does it emerge that those lead tiles were the stolen goods Del had sought forgiveness for, but he points out that the money raised from the resulting "miracle" did save the local hospice.

The priest, much to Del's surprise, blesses him for doing it. As they exit the church and Rodney shake hands with the many reporters and cameramen, until Rodney finds out that he is shaking the hand of Biffo, who demands to know where his trumpet is. Rodney tries talking his way out of it, but runs away with Biffo giving chase. Del senses an opportunity to make some more money from this, offers the nearby reporters and cameramen a chance to film some "genuine inner city violence"; the idea for the script goes all the way back five years earlier to "The Second Time Around", where Grandad told Rodney about how Del used to donate to the church roof fund. Carl Orff: O Fortuna from Carmina BuranaNote: In the VHS/DVD versions, Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" is replaced by a similar-sounding piece of music. "The Miracle of Peckham" at BBC Online

Walter Heinrich Munk was an American physical oceanographer. One of the first scientists to bring statistical methods to the analysis of oceanographic data, Munk's work is noted for creating fruitful areas of research that continue to be explored by other scientists. For these achievements. Munk received a number of prestigious awards including the National Medal of Science, the Kyoto Prize, induction to the French Legion of Honour. Munk worked on a wide range of topics, including surface waves, geophysical implications of variations in the Earth's rotation, internal waves, deep-ocean drilling into the sea floor, acoustical measurements of ocean properties, sea level rise, climate change. Beginning in 1975, Munk and Carl Wunsch developed ocean acoustic tomography, to exploit the ease with which sound travels in the ocean to use acoustical signals for measurement of broad-scale temperature and current. In a 1991 experiment and his collaborators investigated the ability of underwater sound to propagate from the Southern Indian Ocean across all ocean basins.

The aim was to use the acoustic signals to measure changes in global ocean temperatures. The experiment was criticized by environmental groups, who expected that the loud acoustic signals would adversely affect marine life. Munk continued to develop and advocate for acoustical measurements of the ocean throughout his career. Munk's career was complicated. World War II disrupted his doctoral studies at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, led to his participation in U. S. military research efforts. Munk and his doctoral advisor Harald Sverdrup developed methods for forecasting wave conditions which were used in support of beach landings in all theaters of the war, he was involved with oceanographic programs during the atomic bomb tests in Bikini Atoll. For most of his career, he was a professor of geophysics at Scripps at the University of California in La Jolla. Additionally and his wife Judy were active in developing the Scripps campus and integrating it with the new University of California, San Diego.

Munk's career included a number of prestigious positions, including being a member of the JASON think tank, holding the Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Oceanography Chair. In 1917, Munk was born to a Jewish family in Austria-Hungary, his father, Dr. Hans Munk, his mother, Rega Brunner, divorced when he was ten years old, his maternal grandfather was a prominent banker and Austrian politician. His stepfather, Dr. Rudolf Engelsberg, was head of the salt mine monopoly of the Austrian government and a member of the Austrian governments of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg. In 1932, Munk was performing poorly in school because he was spending too much time skiing, so his family sent him from Austria to a boys' preparatory school in upper New York state, his family envisioned a career for him in finance with a New York bank connected to the family business. He studied at Columbia University. Munk hated banking. In 1937, he left the firm to attend the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

While at Caltech, he took a summer job in 1939 at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Munk earned a B. S. in applied physics in 1939 and an M. S. in geophysics in 1940 at Caltech. The master's degree work was based on oceanographic data collected in the Gulf of California by the Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup director of Scripps. In 1939, Munk asked Sverdrup to take him on as a doctoral student. Sverdrup agreed, although Munk recalled him saying "I can't think of a single job that's going to become available in the next ten years in oceanography". Munk's studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, he completed his doctoral degree in oceanography at Scripps under the University of California, Los Angeles in 1947. He wrote it in three weeks and it is the "shortest Scripps dissertation on record." He realized that its principal conclusion is wrong. In 1940, Munk enlisted the U. S. Army; this was unusual for a student at Scripps: all the others joined the U.

S. Naval Reserve. After serving 18 months in Field Artillery and the Ski Troops, he was discharged at the request of Sverdrup and Roger Revelle so he could undertake defense-related research at Scripps. In December 1941, a week before the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined several of his colleagues from Scripps at the U. S. Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory. For six years they developed methods related to amphibious warfare; this research involved marine acoustics, led to his work on ocean acoustic tomography. In 1943, Munk and Sverdrup began looking for a way to predict the heights of ocean surface waves; the Allies were preparing for a landing in North Africa, where two out of every three days the waves are above six feet. Practice beach landings in the Carolinas were suspended when waves reached this height because they were dangerous to people and landing craft. Munk and Sverdrup found an empirical law that related wave height and period to the speed and duration of the wind and the distance over which it blows.

The Allies applied this method in the Pacific theater of the Normandy invasion on D-Day. Officials at the time estimated. Munk commented in 2009: The Normandy landing is famous because weather conditions were poor and you may not realize it was postponed by General Eisenhower for 24 hours because of the prevailing wave conditions, and he did decide, in spite of the fact that conditions were not favor