Oscar Profile #593: Eric Roberts

Born April 18, 1956 in Biloxi, Mississippi, Eric Roberts is the son of actors who ran an acting school in Atlanta, Georgia, where he grew up. His younger siblings, Julia Roberts and Lisa Roberts Gillan are also actors.

Roberts got his start in the now defunct television soap opera, Another World in 1977. The following year he made his film debut in a starring role in King of the Gypsies for which he received his first Golden Globe nomination. He would later receive additional Golden Globe nominations for 1983’s Star 80 and 1985’s Runaway Train. For the atter film, he also received his first and only Oscar nomination to date.

The actor currently has 664 credits, including more than 70 films in various states of production, a rare distinction for any actor since the 1970s. As he says, he obviously doesn’t turn down anything, but he turned long ago from being a joke to someone about whom they ask, “is there anything he can’t do?”

Roberts’ prolific career also includes such early films as 1981’s Raggedy Man, 1985’s The Coca-Cola Kid, 1986’s Nobody’s Fool, 1992’s Final Analysis, 1994’s The Specialist, 1994’s Love Is a Gun, and 1995’s The Immortals. In 1996, he was a trile threat, starring on the big screen as a man dying of AIDS in It’s My Party, on American TV as one of the killers in a TV miniseries version of In Cold Blood, and on British TV as the only non-British actor ever to play The Master in Dr. Who.

In his personal life, Roberts had a long-term live-in relationship with Oscar-winning actress Sandy Dennis, 19 years his senior, from 1980-1985. That was followed by another long-term live-in relationship with girlfriend Kelly Cunningham, the mother of his daughter, actress Emma Roberts, from 1988-1991. He has been married to Eliza Roberts since 1992.

More recent credits have included roles big and small in such films as 2006’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, 2008’s The Dark Knight, 2009’s The Chaos Experiment, Rock Slyde, The Butcher, and Royal Kill, 2010’s The Expendables, 2013’s Before I Sleep, Assumed Killer, and Dante’s Hell, 2014’s Inherent Vice, Starcrossed, and The Opposite Sex, 2019’s The Reliant and Night Walk, and 2020’s Reboot Camp.

Roberts is a vegan and long-time supporter of animal rights. In 1981, while living with Sandy Dennis, he was injured in a car crash incurred while trying to keep a dog from jumping out of the window. He was in a coma for three days.

Estranged from Oscar-winning sister Julia, the two reconciled in 2004. A grandfather now, thanks to daughter Emma and her boyfriend, actor Garrett Hedlund, Roberts shows no sign of slowing down as he turns 66.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

KING OF THE GYPSIES (1978) , directed by Frank Pierson

Roberts beat two of the era’s hottest male stars, Richard Gere (Looking for Mr. Goodbar) and John Travolta (Saturday Night Fever) for the lead role in the film version of Peter Maas’ chronicle of three generations of New York City gypsies. He plays the grandson of reigning gypsy king Sterling Hayden who names him as his successor over his father (Judd Hirsch). The film’s eclectic cast includes Shelley Winters as the queen of the gypsies, Susan Sarandon, Brooke Shields, Annette O’Toole, Annie Potts, and Michael V. Gazzo. Roberts earned the first of three Golden Globe nominations for his performance.

STAR 80 (1983) , directed by Bob Fosse

Roberts again beat Richard Gere for the role of Dorothy Stratton’s manager-turned-husband and eventual murderer in this highly controversial film . Writer-director Peter Bogdanovich, with whom Stratton was involved at the time of her death, begged Fosse not to make the film because he didn’t know the whole story, Fosse, whose last film this was before his 1987 death, refused. Mariel Hemingway underwent breast augmentation to play Stratton. Roger Rees plays a fictionalized version of Bogdanovich. Carroll Baker plays Stratton’s mother and Cliff Robertson plays Playboy’s Hugh Heffner who sued because he didn’t like the way he was portrayed.

THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE (1984), directed by Stuart Rosenberg

This was the first of four movies that Roberts and Mickey Rourke made together. They play dimwitted petty criminal cousins who unwittingly rob the mob’s police payoff stash that causes the death of a corrupt cop. The only reason the cop is corrupt is that he is trying to make enough money to move himself and his sickly mother to Phoenix. Daryl Hannah plays Rourke’s equally dimwitted girlfriend. Kenneth McMillan is the safecracker involved in the scheme that gets the cop killed. Jack Kehoe is the cop. Geraldine Page is Kehoe’s hard-as-nails mother. Her terrific 8-miute performance earned her a seventh Oscar nomination.

RUNAWAY TRAIN (1985)), directed by Andrew Konchalovsky

Legendary Japanese writer-director Akira Kurosawa co-wrote the screenplay for the film, planning to make it in 1965 but the upstate New York snows that year were unrelenting, and his crew could not work. Twenty years later, Russian writer-director Konchalovsky filmed it in Alaska to great effect. Both Jon Voight and Roberts as escaped convicts were nominated for Golden Globes and Oscars, Voight as lead, Roberts in support. Voight won. The two were later nominated for Oscars in the same categories but lost to William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman and Don Ameche in Cocoon, respectively.

IT’S MY PARTY (1996)), directed by Randal Kleiser

Roberts felt that his portrayal of the young man dying of AIDS was more realistic than Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of the young man in a similar situation in Philadelphia. This barely released film did not get anywhere the Oscars but is notable for the fine performances of Roberts and Gregory Harrison as his former lover. The eclectic supporting cast includes Lee Grant and George Segal as Roberts’ estranged parents, Marlee Matlin as his sister, Paul Regina as a doctor helping him through his assisted suicide, Margaret Cho, Bronson Pinchot, Devon Gummersall, Olivia Newton-John, Bruce Davison, and Roddy McDowall as various friends.