Hollywood’s highest-paid actress, Julia Roberts, has returned to the movie screen playing an independent-minded working-class woman in the legal drama “Erin Brockovich.”

Roberts now rakes in $20 million a film to rival male stars like Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler, which seems fitting for “Brockovich” because it tells the real-life story of a California legal clerk who leads a crusade to wrest a $333 million settlement – the largest payoff ever made in a direct-action lawsuit – from a public utility for polluting a small town.

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