RUNAWAY TRAIN

The character actor recounts five bumpy decades in Hollywood.

Best known as the brother of toothy megastar Julia (née Julie), the elder Roberts has racked up quite a reputation in the business, as much for bad behavior as for his actor’s craft. First he logged time in New York, working, unhappily, as a waiter while auditioning for roles, finally landing a bit part in a soap opera, Another World—and losing it over a longtime addiction to cocaine. “I don’t know everything that I did wrong, but to do a soap opera, you really have to have your shit together,” he writes. He didn’t, but being fired opened up other roles, and soon he made star turns in films such as The Pope of Greenwich Village and Runaway Train. In them, Roberts allows, he interpreted his characters in ways that clashed with the director’s vision: instead of playing Paulie as a tough mobster in Pope, he played him as a dimwit with big dreams; then, in Runaway Train, he insistently played another dimwit, this one doing time for statutory rape, leaving Jon Voight to run with his character as a ruthless murderer. Roberts’ longtime drug use took its toll; as he writes, “I’m probably the only actor in Los Angeles who’s appeared on both Celebrity Ghost Stories and Celebrity Rehab, which is funny because it’s been a long time since I felt like a celebrity.” Sure to make family holiday get-togethers tense are frequent swipes at Julia: she’s a movie star, he writes dismissively, while he’s an actor. Of interest to budding thespians is his account of how, given sweeping changes in the movie business, he’s been making 100 films (mostly of the Lifetime variety) a year but is barely scraping by financially, about which he remarks, “I’m doing penance for how difficult I was to work with and to be around.”

A refreshingly honest apologia.