Her father is of Irish descent and her mother is of half Italian and half English ancestry. in 1999, she portrayed Kat Stratford, opposite Heath Ledger, in Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew set in a high school in Tacoma, Washington. Neither film was a great success; O was subject to many delays and a change of distributors, and Hamlet was an art house film shot on a minimal budget. She told Rolling Stone that she performed all her own dancing in the film, though the way the film was shot and edited might have made it appear otherwise. in David Mamet’s State and Main (2000), about a film shooting on location in a small town in Vermont, she played a teenage girl who seduces a film actor (Alec Baldwin) with a weakness for young girls. She has an effect on people.” Stiles also had a small but crucial role as Treadstone operative Nicolette “Nicky” Parsons in The Bourne Identity (2002), a role that was enlarged in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), then greatly expanded in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Critic Dennis Harvey wrote that Stiles was “wasted,” and Stephen Holden called her “a serious actress from whom comedy does not seem to flow naturally”. Julia Stiles began filming on her latest project, Between Us, in May 2011 with co-stars Taye Diggs, David Harbour and Melissa George.