Eric Anthony Roberts (born April 18, 1956) is an American actor. His career began with a leading role in King of the Gypsies (1978) for which he received his first Golden Globe Award nomination. He was nominated again at the Golden Globes for his role in Bob Fosse's Star 80 (1983). Roberts' performance in Runaway Train (1985), as prison escapee Buck McGeehy, earned him a third Golden Globe nod and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He is the older brother of actress Julia Roberts.
In a career spanning over 40 years Roberts has amassed more than 700 credits, including Raggedy Man (1981), The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), Runaway Train, The Specialist (1994), Cecil B. Demented (2000), National Security (2003), A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), The Expendables (2010), Inherent Vice (2014), The Institute (2017), and Head Full of Honey (2018). His equally varied television work includes three seasons with the sitcom Less than Perfect, as well as recurring roles on the NBC drama Heroes and the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless, as well as Saved by the Light, the legal drama Suits, Fox's The Finder, and the only non-UK actor to play the Master in the 1996 Doctor Who television film.
Since the 1970s, he is one of few actors to have more than 700 credits including blockbusters, independent films, animated films, TV series, animated series, short films and student films.
Early life
Eric Anthony Roberts was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, on April 18, 1956, to Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Grady Roberts, one-time actors and playwrights, who met while touring with a production of George Washington Slept Here for the armed forces. In 1963, they co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop in Atlanta off Juniper Street in Midtown. They ran a children's acting school in Decatur, Georgia. Roberts' mother became a church secretary and real estate agent, and his father was a vacuum cleaner salesman. Roberts' younger siblings, Julia Roberts (from whom he was estranged until 2004) and Lisa Roberts Gillan, are also actors.
In 1971, Roberts' parents filed for divorce, which was finalized in early 1972. He stayed with his father, who died of cancer in March 1977, in Atlanta. After the divorce, his sisters moved with their mother to Smyrna, a suburb of Atlanta. In 1972, their mother married Michael Motes. In 1976, they had a daughter, Nancy Motes, who died February 9, 2014, at age 37, of an apparent drug overdose. Michael Motes was abusive and often unemployed. In 1983, she divorced Motes, citing "cruelty"; she later said that marrying him was the biggest mistake of her life.
