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Eric Roberts leaves B-movies behind in his latest roleLaeSCWPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICEWESTWOOD, Calif.en he was a little boy, actor Eric Roberts used to shut himself in the bathroom and hold a dub meeting with his imaginary friends.“I had a half a dozen imaginary friends,’ says the actor, sitting in a maroon arm chair in a hotel room hoe.“They all had names. They all had real feces. They all had a real personality. We’d all meet inthe bathroom — it was the most private place in my house. We d talk about what we woe going to do, how we were gonna rob a big bank,’’ he chuddes.Roberts entertained his pretend pais from 5 to II, long after most kids have relinquisi fanciful playmates.“1 was a londy kid,” he shrugs.The actor who tunneled his way into universal admiration in movies like “STAR 80,” “Runaway Train,” and “The Coca-Cola Kid,” saw himself eclipsed in the early ’90s by his younger sister, Julia Roberts, and her Mach-speed career.But Roberts, 39, is partly responsible for that. He has spent the last 10 years churning out movies fester than Big Macs (and about as distinctive).Between 1978-86 he starred in 10 films. Sincethen he has done 40 movies, and most of them have sped onto the bargain video shelves, their covets adorned with supple victims dressed by Victoria’s Secret.“Alter ‘Runawav Train’ didn’t make me a box office star, 1 said quality doesn’t count so, — it,111 go for quantity,” he says.Those 40 movies made him wealthy, nut they really didn’t make me happy. 1 didn’t get what I was after — to be a character actor like Robert Donat. Then ‘It’s My Party’ comes along. It’s dropped in my lap and I’m back where I started and I’m glad to be there.“It’s My Party,” is Roberts’ latest — leagues ahead of the B-movies he’s commandeered forthe last decade. The film is based on the real-life story of writer-director Randal Kleiser.Roberts plays a gay man dying of AIDS whoEric Roberts stars as a man dying with AIDS in the film “It’s My Party.”summons the people who’ve been crucial in his life to one last celebration.The movie is about how they handle their own fear of death, and how' they honor him in the going.At the tender age of 20, Roberts learned first-hand about death. His father, who was just three years older than Roberts is now, died.“He was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus and dead 33 days later. I spent his last 32 days with him and it left me with the knowledge that when you die, you lose everything as we know it. Andeverybody else loses only you. In thatundemanding I learned how ro be strong for my father. It was not me it was happening to, it was him. What I brought intothis project as my ammunition was my understanding of that. ’He has brought a lot more, including a history that sounds more like a Hemingway novel than a Hollywood pret-ty-boy bio.A bright kid, he entered school a year early and skipped two grades. He was valedictorian, but was expelled from the military boarding school he attended before he could graduate. He finished off his education in public school.Roberts’ parents ran an acting workshop in Atlanta. But the family split when he was 14. He has seen his mother only once in 25 years and hasn’t spoken to her since she left.“1 think my mother's rearing of children was a little vioiendy excessive for my taste,” is all he’ll say. though he has claimed that his mother abandoned the family.
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Chicago Daily Southtown News Marketer
Chicago, Illinois, US
Wed, Apr 03, 1996
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USA 03 Jun 2021
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