Julia Roberts has revealed her surprising connection to Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King after the couple helped to pay her parents' hospital bills.
In her September interview with Gayle King for A+E Networks and History Channel's HISTORYTalk, the 55-year-old actress shared a sweet story involving her parents' relationship with the civil rights leader and his wife.
"Let's start with the day you were born - who paid for the hospital bill?" the 67-year-old host asked. "Her research is very good," Roberts said with a smile, before revealing that King and Coretta covered the bill.
According to the Pretty Woman star, her parents, Walter and Betty Roberts, "couldn't pay for the hospital bill" and so the late minister's family paid for it as a way of returning a kind gesture that the Roberts family had made.
Check out the interview below:The resurfaced story comes after Zara Rahim, a former strategic adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted the interview clip to celebrate the actress' 55th birthday.
"My parents had a theater school in Atlanta called the Actors and Writers Workshop, and one day Coretta Scott King called my mother and asked if her kids could be part of the school because they were having a hard time finding a place that would accept her kids," Roberts said in the interview.
"And my mom is like, 'Sure come on over.' And so they just all became friends, and they helped us out of a jam," she said, to which Gayle noted: "Yeah because in the '60s, you didn't have little Black children interacting with little white kids in acting school."
"And your parents were like, 'Come on in.' I think that's extraordinary, and it sort of lays the groundwork for who you are," the host praised. Roberts replied: "Oh, absolutely."
Bernice King, the Civil Rights activist and Coretta's youngest child, confirmed the story by tweeting the clip and writing that she was "grateful" that the heartwarming fact was making the rounds on social media.
"Grateful that #JuliaRoberts shared this story with @GayleKing and that so many people have been awed by it," the 59-year-old wrote.
"I know the story well, but it is moving for me to be reminded of my parents' generosity and influence. #CorettaScottKing #MLK," she added.
In addition to this, the Notting Hill actress was also friends with Yolanda King, the eldest of MLK's children, who died in 2007 from complications related to a chronic heart condition.
Yolanda had starred in a play produced by Roberts' parents' workshop in which she kissed Philip DePoy, a white actor, which caused a member of the Ku Klux Klan to blow up a car outside the theater.
DePoy wrote about the horrifying incident of domestic terrorism in an essay for ARTS ATL in 2013 and said: "I kissed a girl, and 10 yards away, a Buick exploded… The girl was Yolanda King, daughter of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr."
"I was primarily Caucasian and Yolanda wasn’t. That’s what the trouble was about. I don’t know who owned the Buick, but I know who blew it up," he added.
