Julia Roberts Is Blown Away To Learn She Isn't Really A Roberts

The "Ticket To Paradise" star was the latest celebrity to uncover their true ancestry on "Finding Your Roots."
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Julia Roberts may forever be “Pretty Woman,” but the cinema icon just learned that she really isn’t a Roberts. (Watch the video below.)

On a recent episode of PBS’s “Finding Your Roots,” DNA testing and census research revealed that the Oscar winner descended on her father’s side from a family named Mitchell, not Roberts.

“You’re Julia Mitchell. You are not a Roberts biologically,” host Henry Louis Gates Jr. told the star.

“Wow,” Roberts replied. “Is my head on straight still? Am I facing you?”

“My mind is blown,” she added.

The “Erin Brockovich” actor learned she was not related to the person she thought was her great-great-grandfather Willis Roberts. He was dead well before her great-great-grandmother, Rhoda Suttle Roberts, gave birth to the movie icon’s supposed great-grandfather John Roberts.

The father of John, it turns out, was a married man named Henry McDonald Mitchell Jr., who had an affair with Rhoda Suttle Roberts. Mitchell lived a few miles away, while his mother lived just doors from Suttle Roberts, Gates said.

The show compared DNA samples from the celebrity and a cousin of her father’s to others in a database, finding a cluster of matches that pointed back to Mitchell.

While Roberts tried to wrap her “arms” around the revelation, she still concluded: “I do prefer the name Roberts.”

This wasn’t the first historical dish to emerge about Roberts of late. In October, she disclosed that the late Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King paid the hospital bill for her birth. The Kings became close with Walter and Betty Lou Roberts through the drama program they operated in Atlanta.

“Finding Your Roots” has come up with some cool genealogical discoveries in the last few years, from finding that Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and RuPaul are actually cousins, to confirming that actor Ed Norton is related to Pocahontas.

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