Julia Roberts has had a recent turn in her 25+ year career as America's Sweetheart - to a fearless performer. She was a force to be reckoned with in last year's Oscar nominated August: Osage County , even opposite Meryl Streep, Roberts was the leading lady who carried the film. For this, it was no shock to me that she gripped me once again as Dr. Emma Brookner in Ryan Murphy 's TV movie The Normal Heart , which premiered this week on HBO. Roberts plays a brave doctor (based on Dr. Linda Laubenstein) who suffers from polio, who, although glued to her wheelchair, spends her days as one of the only doctors researching and attempting to save gay men's lives in the early 1980s during the HIV-AIDS crisis. Based on Larry Kramer's 1985 Off-Broadway production, Kramer serves as screenwriter on this film version of The Normal Heart, which took director Ryan Murphy years to obtain the rights to. Mark Ruffalo plays the lead as Ned Weeks, the openly gay New York writ