When it comes to her loving family, Julia Roberts wears many hats. Not only is she a doting mom to her three kids, Hazel, Henry and Phinnaeus, and a beloved wife to her husband, Danny Moder, but the Pretty Woman star is a great sibling to her older brother, Eric Roberts, and older sister, Lisa Roberts Gillan.
Julia is also the sister of her late half-sibling, Nancy Motes, who died at age 37 in 2014 of an apparent drug overdose. The Notting Hill actress spoke about Nancy’s death two months later in April, calling the situation “just heartbreak” during an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
“You don’t want anything bad to happen to anyone, but there are so many tragic, painful, inexplicable things in the world,” she emotionally shared. “But [as with] any situation of challenge and despair, we must find a way, as a family.”
Nancy’s death was extremely hard on everyone, including siblings Lisa and Eric. “It’s only been 20 days. There aren’t words to explain what any of us have been through in these last 20 days,” Julia said at the time. “It’s so hard to formulate a sentence about it outside the weepy huddle of my family.”
Following Nancy’s sudden death, Eric candidly opened up about how he also struggled with drug abuse throughout his life. As he divulged in a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair, the Best of the Best actor was addicted to marijuana for “about 10 years” before getting clean.
“I would go to meetings with people that mattered, like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn … and I would go stoned. Woody Allen. I met him very stoned, and he dismissed me, as well he should have,” Eric recalled, noting he also dabbled with much harder drugs.
“You’d arrive [on the set], and they’d send you to the prop truck, where there’d be bowls of cocaine,” Eric shared. “I was doing it to the point where my wife said, ‘It’s me or the coke.’”
Fortunately, Eric got the help he needs and is doing better than ever today. “I was asking for help, saying, ‘You see where I’m at — now help me, because I’m worth helping,’” he said. “I get it now. I just didn’t get it when I should have.”
To learn more about Julia’s siblings, scroll through the gallery below.
Closer
