Eric Roberts is an iconoclast, both in performance and in his personal life. As the older brother of Academy Award winner Julia Roberts, he watched his sister surpass the prominence of his own acting career and has often been vocal about how her rise would not have come without him having laid a path for her to follow. Now, while Julia can stand to be picky about the roles she chooses, in a recently published memoir entitled “Runaway Train: Or, The Story of My Life So Far,” Roberts admitted that his life still exists paycheck-to-paycheck and he often can’t afford to turn a gig down. Even so, he realizes trying to take credit for Julia’s stardom was wrong and is finally atoning for his claims.
“Now one of the things I’d like to apologize for in this book is for publicly saying on more than one occasion, ‘If it wasn’t for me, there would be no Julia Roberts,’” said Roberts. “That’s not only unfortunate, but it’s also untrue. And I hope Julie will accept this more public apology. It was an asinine thing to have said. I was proud of her, but it was pride turned on its head, to my own advantage.”
Roberts went on to call his sister a “very driven woman” and that no matter her path in life, at one point or another, someone would have “plucked her out of the crowd” and made her a star without any influence or assistance from him. Nonetheless, he does claim his own choice to venture to New York City from Atlanta, Georgia, to take his shot at acting did help show Julia what was possible.
“I was born to do this. I moved to New York City when I wasn’t even old enough to drink a beer in public. If Julie had stayed in Atlanta, she’d probably have married a wealthy dude and lived a very different life,” Roberts said. “So I will take credit, once I had broken away from my father (or thought I had) and moved to New York City, for telling my sisters, ‘Come on up, girls; the water’s fine.’”
It was this offer to his sisters that seemed to spark Julia’s own interest. Roberts wrote, “That’s when, it seems to me, she saw my life as a young actor in New York, and saw what I was doing for my livelihood, and she wanted to try it.”
In addition to his past drug use and erratic behavior, Roberts’ comments regarding Julia and his daughter, Emma Roberts, sowed further divisions between him and his family. In 2018, he said in an interview with Vanity Fair, “If it wasn’t for me, there would be no Julia Roberts and no Emma Roberts as celebrities, as actresses, and I’m very proud of that.”
He even went further, saying that he was the one to try and get Julia her first agent, using this moment to assert that his success came first, allowing hers.
“When Julia first came to New York, I went into William Morris and I said, ‘Which one of you is going to sign my sister Julia?’” said Roberts to Vanity Fair. “And I am so proud that everybody knows I was first, because I was first by a long shot. I was first to get Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, so I’m proud of that.”
This story was originally reported on by People.
