SanSebastian

Julia Roberts will receive the Donostia Award on September 20

Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem, Richard Jenkins and director Ryan Marphy to present ''Eat Pray Love'' at the 58th San Sebastian Festival

Eat Pray Love will be presented in the Official Selection of the Festival, out-of-competition.

Eat Pray Love takes its story from the bestseller of the same name by the author and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert. Recently divorced, Julia Roberts (Liz Gilbert) embarks on a journey around the world that becomes a quest for self-discovery. In her travels, she discovers the pleasure of eating in Italy, the power of prayer in India, and the inner peace and balance of true love in Bali. Eat Pray Love will hit the Spanish screens on September 24.

This is the second feature from Ryan Murphy, who made his big screen debut with the tragicomedy Running with Scissors, featuring a top-notch cast including Annette Bening, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes and Alec Baldwin. Murphy has also created two enormously successful TV series: Nip Tuck and Glee.

Julia Roberts needs no introduction. She has participated in some of the biggest movie hits produced in the last 20 years. Her first major parts were in the teenage comedies Mystic Pizza (1988) and Satisfaction (1988). By 1989 she had already bagged her first Oscar nomination with Steel Magnolias. International fame was just round the corner with her next film, Pretty Woman, (1990), for which she landed yet another Academy Award nomination. She was Tinkerbell in Hook (1991), going on to spend the following years starring in dramas and thrillers like The Pelican Brief (1993), Mary Reilly (1996) and Michael Collins (1996). In 1997 she returned to comedy, starring in another smash hit, My Best Friend’s Wedding, along with Cameron Díaz, opening movie of the San Sebastian Film Festival in 1997. In 2000 she won the Best Actress Oscar with Erin Brockovich. Since then, we may have seen her in The Mexican and Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Closer (2004) or Ocean’s Twelve (2005). Over her career, she has had the opportunity to work with several of the big-name directors, like Steven Soderbergh, Gary Marshall, Mike Newell, Woody Allen, Neil Jordan, Joel Schumacher, Stephen Frears and Steven Spielberg. In recent years she has started leaving time between her big screen appearances to raise her children. Eat Pray Love is her latest movie.

Julia Roberts is therefore the latest in the line of great movie figures to have received San Sebastian’s honorary award in recognition of their film careers: Glenn Ford (1987), Vittorio Gassman (1988), Bette Davis (1989), Claudette Colbert (1990), Anthony Perkins (1991), Lauren Bacall (1992), Robert Mitchum (1993), Lana Turner (1994), Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve (1995), Al Pacino (1996), Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irons y Jeanne Moreau (1997), John Malkovich and Anthony Hopkins (1998), Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Vanessa Redgrave and Anjelica Huston (1999), Michael Caine and Robert de Niro (2000), Julie Andrews, Warren Beatty and Francisco Rabal (2001), Jessica Lange, Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper and Francis Ford Coppola (2002), Isabelle Huppert, Sean Penn and Robert Duvall (2003), Woody Allen, Annette Bening, Jeff Bridges (2004), Ben Gazzara and Willem Dafoe (2005), Max Von Sydow and Matt Dillon (2006), Richard Gere and Liv Ullman (2007), Meryl Streep and Antonio Banderas (2008) and Sir Ian McKellen (2009).