Details From Julia Roberts’ Private Life Are Catching Fans Off Guard
While Julia Roberts has been widely seen as one of Hollywood's favorite leading ladies for the last three decades, her reputation as “America’s sweetheart” hasn’t always matched her life outside the spotlight. From her checkered romantic history to her fractured familial relationships, and from accusations of infidelity to claims of diva behavior, Roberts has a habit of catching her fans off guard. Heck, even the icon herself says she's confused by her good-girl reputation. And taking a closer look at her personal life, it's no wonder!
America’s sweetheart?
Let’s begin with how Roberts herself has always seemed perplexed by how the media portrays her. During a 2003 interview for O magazine, Oprah asked, “America’s sweetheart. Does that label mean anything to you?” and the actress replied, “No, because it's all a projection, and projection is very changeable.”
She added, “Projection comes not so much from what I'm doing, but from the point of view of the person perceiving me. So, it's like a joining of two things, one of which I have no control over or understanding of.”
She’s never understood the phrase
Roberts then revealed that she always thought “America’s sweetheart” meant something very different than “America’s favorite female star.” She laughed, “I somehow thought it meant I was tiny. Doesn't the word sweetheart sound so sweet and tiny?”
Then, when it came to the label being applied to another upcoming star — such as Reese Witherspoon — the star mused, “Somebody else is always going to be the next sweetheart. It’s all contrivance — label them as fast as you can so you can keep them all straight.”
“Tinkerhell”
Regardless, over the years Roberts’ “America’s sweetheart” image has had to weather a few storms. For example, in 1991 she starred as Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg’s “Peter Pan as a grown up” tale Hook. She reportedly behaved so badly on set that the crew dubbed her “Tinkerhell.”
At the time, a Premiere magazine article claimed the star — who was in her early 20s at this point — was a “curious presence” in the movie, and was “sometimes somber, sometimes at the near edge of hysteria.”
She didn’t think she was temperamental
In ’91, Roberts claimed to Entertainment Weekly that she’d never heard anyone call her “Tinkerhell.” She did admit to being frustrated while making the special-effects-heavy movie, though, as this resulted in a lot of downtime.
She explained, “I’m a normal person. I mean, if I sit in my trailer for six hours doing nothing, I’m going to say, ‘What the [heck] is going on?’ I have normal frustrations like everybody else, but I don’t consider myself temperamental.”
Spielberg wasn’t a fan of their time together
Unfortunately for Roberts, her director perhaps didn’t feel the same. Spielberg told 60 Minutes that he wouldn’t be keen to work with her again, but did qualify this sentiment by saying, “It was an unfortunate time for us to work together. But I think Julia is a really, really good actress.”
Indeed, it’s believed he was referring to the star’s engagement to Kiefer Sutherland, which fell to pieces while she was shooting Hook — all amid rumors she’d discovered he was cheating on her. In the end, she called things off only days before their wedding. But more on that later.
The situation hurt her reputation
In 1999 Roberts admitted to Vanity Fair that she had been hurt by Spielberg’s comments. She said, “I saw that, and my eyes popped out of my head. I couldn't believe that this person that I knew and trusted was actually hesitating to come to my defense.”
She added, “Hand to God: not a thing I read [regarding Tinkerhell] was truthful, and it really hurt my feelings. Because not only did it make me sound mean, but it was a situation where people who knew the truth talked about it in a way that wasn't untruthful.”
Roberts and Nick Nolte were like oil and water
A few years later, more rumors of discord on one of Roberts’ movie sets began to crop up. This time it was reported that she and her I Love Trouble co-star Nick Nolte were at loggerheads, with the Los Angeles Times’ Judy Brennan claiming, “Those involved in the production say that Nolte and Roberts didn’t get along.”
Brennan continued, “They claim tempers flared early on, peppered with a few Roberts tantrums along the way. Roberts reportedly wasn’t thrilled with Nolte’s machismo, so she would deride and insult her co-star.”
Both “charming” and “completely disgusting”
Brennan went on to allege that Nolte would purposely aggravate Roberts because he was already so fed-up with her attitude. This supposedly led to the two actors refusing to share scenes with each other and acting opposite stand-ins instead!
To her credit, the movie star herself admitted to Entertainment Weekly, “We had great, um, high-spirited needling of each other, trying to get a rise out of each other.” She also told The New York Times that, while Nolte could be charming, he could also be, “completely disgusting.”
You don’t want to cross Roberts
It’s not only actors and directors who have found themselves on the wrong side of Julia, though — in 2009 a critic also got on her bad side! When Fox News’ Roger Friedman attended the premiere of Duplicity — which starred Roberts alongside Clive Owen — she made a beeline for him.
Friedman claimed, “Roberts didn’t hesitate to cut me dead. She was rude, downright nasty, and dismissive. She snubbed me in front of other people to make her point, and later cut in between me and director Tony Gilroy to make her point. Her behavior was unexpected and chilling.”
Revenge for a bad review?
What had Friedman done to offend Roberts? Well, it may have been a case of mistaken identity! A friend of hers told Friedman that she remembered him writing a negative review about her 2006 Broadway debut Three Days of Rain.
Her publicist even told him, “She knows you broke the embargo on her play and wrote bad things about her,” and a top agent at the party said, ‘Julia said, ‘That’s the man who writes bad things about me.’” Only, here’s the thing — he hadn’t!
It wasn’t pretty
The truth was quite the opposite, in fact: Friedman had actually given Roberts a positive write-up! He’d enthused, “She’s going to be a sensation in the papers… My guess is this will open the door for her to alternate doing plays and movies, and that can only be a good thing.”
Either way, though, whether Friedman had given her a rave review or had been more critical, that’s his job. And he didn’t think it “could have justified the scene at last night’s party. It was not pretty, and it was meant to be devastating.”
Forthright in her opinions
Speaking of “devastating,” over the years, Roberts has gained a reputation for being blunt, and perhaps this was one of those occasions. In 2024 she told British Vogue, “I speak very plainly. That’s kind of how I see myself. I’m very forthright.”
She claimed, “There are a lot of personalities in the world that don’t accept that easily, and it can seem really harsh, even if I feel like I’m just being honest about something and just saying this is how I see it. I never am trying to be unkind.”
Roberts “often holds back”
Indeed, Roberts’ brutal honesty extends to the admission that she purposely avoids being overly friendly on-set and in public. Notting Hill director Richard Curtis claimed she’d told him it’s because people “will always slightly take advantage of it… ask you to meet their mum and come to dinner and everything. And you just felt you had to focus on your job.”
In response, she explained, “I feel I sometimes have to hold back because there’s too many question marks over what the space will expand into. And sometimes people are so familiar with me.”
A dating history for the ages
Given how Roberts has been one of the most famous women on the planet for much of her adult life, she has long been a magnet for the press. Before settling down with husband Danny Moder, though, she gave the media plenty of fodder with her storied dating history.
Her first romance with a co-star came out of her very first movie role in 1988’s Satisfaction. She was only 19 at the time, and dated her leading man — 35-year-old Liam Neeson — for a year. Reportedly they even lived together for a spell before calling time on the relationship.
Nearly walking down the aisle with Kiefer Sutherland
In 1989’s Steel Magnolias, Roberts bagged herself an Oscar nomination — and a fiancée in co-star Dylan McDermott! Everything seemed to be going swimmingly in that relationship, until the star fell for Kiefer Sutherland, her co-star in 1990’s Flatliners. Once again, she became engaged fairly quickly, and a glitzy Hollywood wedding was arranged.
As mentioned earlier, though, she called it off 72 hours before the big day. At the time she cryptically told Entertainment Weekly, “I feel like Kiefer, for whatever reasons, tried to make it seem like he was the victim of the situation. But he shouldn't try to make himself look better by taking shots at me.”
Jason Patric helped her move on — suspiciously quickly
Scandalously, at the same time the wedding was canceled, it was also reported that Roberts had jetted off to Ireland with The Lost Boys star Jason Patric — Sutherland’s best friend! Rumor had it that they were all over each other on the plane and had lunch together in Dublin on the day she had originally been scheduled to walk down the aisle.
Yet she told Entertainment Weekly, “I choose at this moment not to speak about Jason for the reason that it is far more dignified and deserving of respect than to put it out there and to allow people to give their opinion on it at lunch.”
Marrying a country-music icon
A few years after her fling with Patric, Roberts shocked the world again by marrying country music star Lyle Lovett barely weeks after they had begun dating! They tied the knot as far away from Hollywood glitz as possible, in a small Lutheran church in Marion, Indiana.
After the wedding, Lovett told People magazine, “We’ve never gone more than a week without seeing each other since we got married. But before that we’d never spent more than seven days together!” This union wound up lasting less than two years.
She was “sickeningly” happy with Benjamin Bratt — until she wasn’t
After some more dalliances in the ‘90s, Roberts finally settled into a four-year relationship with Benjamin Bratt. She told Vanity Fair, “We met in a restaurant. He walked in, and I looked up at him, and it was like something hit me over the head with a bat.”
She even told Oprah, “We’re just ecstatically happy. We're drunk with joy 24 hours out of the day. We’re sickening.” It would all end in tears once again, though. Still, at least this time the movie star was able to move on to her forever love, albeit at the expense of his then-wife.
Marrying and starting a family with Mr. Right
Roberts’s marriage to cinematographer Moder is proof that it is very possible for a celebrity — even one as famous as she is — to marry someone who isn’t equally famous, and make it work. She walked down the aisle with him in 2002; they now have three children together.
As she told Oprah, “The jobs don't get married. The people get married. It sounds clichéd and I've said it a thousand times, but I do think that I am fundamentally the same relatively simple person I've always been.”
She doesn’t think she’s as fascinating as the media makes out
Roberts continued, “I just have this flashy, wacky job that confuses people into thinking that I’m somehow ultra-fascinating.” As she acknowledges, she’s just like anybody else who goes to work in the morning, sleepy and in desperate need of coffee. It just so happens that her work is on a movie set!
She joked, “On the set, I get pretty relaxed. These guys see me at 5:00 a.m… In those circumstances, you can see what a person’s really made of. Some great friendships can be formed because you see one another at your best and worst.”
She was part of a marital scandal
While she may be a — relatively — normal devoted wife and soccer mom these days, people may forget that when she initially got together with Moder, it was quite the scandal. You see, at the time they met on the set of The Mexican in 2001 Roberts was dating Bratt.
On top of that, Moder had been married for four years to Vera Steimberg, a make-up artist. Indeed, an unnamed source told Life & Style magazine, “Julia’s extramarital romance with Danny came close to ruining her life.”
Moder’s wife didn’t take it well
The source claimed Roberts “had a crush on Danny from the moment they met.” Controversially, it also alleged, “She went after him in a big way.” This supposedly included ensuring she was assigned the hotel room right next to him. Soon enough, the two were engaged in an illicit affair.
When it came time to tell their respective partners what had happened, Bratt reportedly moved on with little fuss, but Steimberg was another story entirely. The source revealed, “Extricating Danny from his marriage to Vera was emotionally wrenching.”
Roberts the “home-wrecker”
Naturally, given Roberts’ status as the biggest actress in Hollywood, her story of marital infidelity was soon splashed across the pages of every newspaper and magazine in America. After she and Moder married in July 2002 a writer for ABC News even published a scathing article attacking her morals.
Amazingly, it was entitled, “’America’s Sweetheart’ May Be Married, But She’s Still a Home Wrecker.” Public perception had well and truly turned on the superstar, with the source saying she was now viewed “as a bullying mean girl. It was an absolute P.R. disaster.”
The villain of the piece?
Arguably Roberts’s biggest faux pas during that period came when she was pictured wearing a shirt which read “A Low Vera.” Was this thinly veiled shade being thrown Steimberg’s way? Moder’s father Michael reportedly thought so.
In fact, he was believed to have been particularly unimpressed with the movie star’s jab at his ex-daughter-in-law. A source told People magazine, “Mike is a principled guy, and he likes Vera.” As P.R. expert David Johnson told Life & Style, it all went against her squeaky-clean image. In essence, “She looked like a villain.”
Roberts denied being the cause of Moder’s divorce
In 2003 when Roberts spoke with Oprah, though, she refused to comment about the T-shirt in detail. The host asked, “Why did you wear that T-shirt? What was that about?” and the star answered, “You know what that was about? It was private.” She then added, “I stand by my T-shirt.”
She also denied breaking up Moder’s marriage, stating, “I’m an easy person to point the finger at — ‘She did it’ — and I see that. I don’t begrudge people the easy finger-point. It just doesn’t happen to be so.”
Built on a “solid” foundation of love
According to Roberts, knowing Moder was married did have a “huge” effect on her, but she also claimed, “He sorted his whole thing out, separate and apart from me. And I sorted my life out, separate and apart from him. I think that’s the only reason we were able to ultimately fall in love with each other and be together.”
She insisted the two have always loved each other deeply, saying, “When you look at the perils that Danny and I have already gone through, it had better be tethered to something solid, or else it would disintegrate.”
Rebuilding the “America’s sweetheart” image
In the aftermath of the scandal, Roberts quietly set about restoring her image. During an appearance on Good Morning America, she smiled, “I was born to love and be the wife of this man.” She began reducing her acting workload and concentrated more on being a wife and mom who regularly promoted charitable causes.
The source told Life & Style, “Being as down-to-Earth and un-Hollywood as possible has made Hollywood embrace her again.” Yet Johnson cautioned, “She’s rebuilt her image, but she’s still not back to where she was originally.”
She’s always been close to George Clooney
On a happier note, over the years Roberts has formed an enduring on-screen and off-screen friendship with George Clooney — one which inevitably led to rumors of romance. In 2001, in between Bratt and Moder, she told David Letterman that the media “has to make it messy.”
She continued, “It has to be all about me going out with George Clooney — a kind, lovely man, but not my boyfriend!” Instead, they simply worked together a bunch of times, from the Ocean’s Eleven movies to the thriller Money Monster and romcom Ticket to Paradise.
They were “never really a thing”
In 2022 Access Hollywood’s Kit Hoover asked, “Did you ever have a no-dating policy back in the day, years and years ago before you were ever in a relationship?” An incredulous Roberts laughed, “To not date each other? I don’t think we needed to state it!”
Clooney added, “Julia was always in a relationship, or I was in a relationship. And we were fast friends right away. So, it was nothing, but it’s been nothing but fun for us. So, I don’t think that was ever really a thing.”
Like kissing her best friend
In fact, romance is the furthest thing from Roberts’ and Clooney’s minds — even when they have to film intimate scenes together! During an appearance on the Today show, they were asked if it was awkward to kiss on-screen, and Clooney joked, “It is when my wife and kids come by to visit!”
She then said, “It’s kind of ridiculous. It is like kissing your best friend,” to which Clooney delivered the punchline, “Well, thanks for that. You know I was the two-time Sexiest Man Alive?”
A feud with her brother?
Roberts’ fans may “know” she has had a strained relationship with her brother Eric over the years — but not why. In June 2022 Eric appeared on the Behind the Velvet Rope podcast and insisted that there had never been any real beef between him and “America’s sweetheart.”
He claimed, “Julia and I have always been fine. I think years and years ago, I was doing a press tour for some movie — it was just when Pretty Woman released — and so they’re asking a bunch of questions about Julia. And I said, ‘Hey, excuse me. Can we talk about me?’”
“Blown out of proportion”
Eric claimed the media had taken that quote and run with it, making it seem like he was jealous of Roberts or otherwise angry at his sister. He explained, “Suddenly, I keep hearing about [problems] I have with my sister that I don’t have with my sister.”
He continued, “They’re just popping up all over the place, and I’m asked about them as if they’re real issues. ‘Oh, I wasn’t aware of that.’ [It] blew up and blew up and became all these things it wasn’t.”
Roberts definitely wasn’t happy with him in the ‘90s
In truth, Eric may have been downplaying things, because his view doesn’t fully align with something Roberts told Rolling Stone in 1994. At that time, when asked about her brother, she said, “We don’t speak.”
She explained, “It’s a private matter that for some reason he and his wife have decided to make more public than I think it should. Eric tells his stories, and his wife tells her stories. What I find most fascinating about Eric’s wife, and what she says about me… is that I’ve never met her.”
Substance abuse drove a wedge between brother and sister
Indeed, when Eric was asked about becoming estranged from Roberts, he told Vanity Fair, “I wouldn’t characterize it as a falling-out. I was crazy about my sisters. Loved them, adored them. They were precious to me, and we had times of great closeness.”
Yet then he added, “We all felt very protective of each other, but the hardest person to protect yourself from is yourself.” With this, Eric was addressing the elephant in the room: his substance abuse problems, which had a terrible effect on his relationship with the movie star.
He now realizes he may have been a burden
“I was exhausting to be around,” confessed Eric. “Complainy, blamey, unable to enjoy enjoyment. Everyone in my world needed a break sometimes, and that must have included Julia.” As he freely admitted, “I did all the psychotropics. I got myself arrested. I went back to pot.”
He continued, “I’ve been a pothead all my life, with several sober breaks I refer to as binge sobriety.” He also admitted to doing colossal amounts of cocaine in the ‘80s. He did stress that, in that era, “Everybody from executives to craft service was doing cocaine.”
Reconnecting with Roberts
Over time, though, once Eric had got clean, he was able to forge a relationship with Roberts again. He revealed that, when she gave birth to her twins in 2004 he and wife Eliza had gone to the hospital to quietly drop off some gifts. He didn’t expect to actually interact with his sister.
Instead, to his delight, he found himself “ushered into their room and was immediately awash in brotherly and uncle-ly love.” He says that simple gesture altered everything, and since then the siblings have had Thanksgiving dinners together and regularly communicate via email.
They “stay out of each other’s hair”
Whatever the true nature of their relationship, Eric was adamant, “My sister and I, though, we’ve always talked… I love knowing my sister. She’s a cool chick, my sister. She’s doing a lot of stuff and — I don’t ignore it.”
He admitted, “I just stay out of her hair with the press. That’s all. And she stays out of mine. I mean, honestly, if you’re doing a movie of your own, and the press just wants to talk about any member of your family, it is kind of a little like, ‘Why?’”
Roberts’ crazy connection to MLK Jr.
We’ll leave you with the ultimate recent shock involving Roberts’ private life. In October 2022 she practically knocked the internet off its axis with the truly stunning revelation that none-other-than Martin Luther King Jr. had paid for her birth!
The movie star was being interviewed for A&E’s HISTORYTalks, and she told Gayle King, “My parents had a theater school in Atlanta called the Actors and Writers Workshop. And one day Coretta Scott King called my mother and asked if her kids could be part of the school because they were having a hard time finding a place that would accept her kids.”
Fans couldn’t believe it
“My mom was like, ‘Sure. Come on over,’” continued Roberts. “And so, they just all became friends.” As Gayle noted, “In the ‘60s, you didn't have little black children interacting with white kids in acting school. And your parents were like, ‘Come on in.’ I think that's extraordinary. And it sort of lays the groundwork for who you are.’”
The Roberts and Kings subsequently stayed friends over the years. But when the future star was born in 1967 her parents couldn’t afford the hospital bill — so the Kings stepped in and covered the costs! All this is to say… without Martin Luther King Jr., the world might not have had Pretty Woman!