The leisure trade is dealing with an existential crisiswith less content being produced and much fewer jobs for the takingFortuitously, Eric Roberts acquired sensible to this state of affairs properly earlier than anybody else did, even earlier than we binged TV exhibits as a supply of pleasure. “They now provide you with no time to rehearse they usually pay you much less,” says Roberts, who’s greatest identified for his live-wire movies. “You possibly can’t sit round and watch for the massive paycheck anymore.”

As Roberts writes in his new memoir, “Runaway Prepare: Or, the Story of My Life So Far” — out now — he leaned arduous into this new regular years earlier than everybody else was scrambling for scarce jobs. Roberts additionally feels that pinch, which is why he “says sure to all the pieces.” “We are sometimes overdrawn, broke and scared. I do know individuals who had been within the forged of ‘Titanic’ [who] cannot pay their lease,” Roberts writes in his memoir.

However Roberts has no use for fame anymore; he simply desires to work. Within the e book, which Roberts wrote with journalist and novelist Sam Kashner, he boasts of getting 750 credit on his IMDb web page. By the point he sat down for this interview in August, that credit score record had ticked as much as practically 850. “I am an actor, before everything,” he says. “Every thing else is secondary.”

A standout amongst a era of New York theater actors who transitioned into movie within the Seventies, Roberts burst into public consciousness in Bob Fosse’s 1983 biopic “Star 80” as Paul Snider, the homicidal husband of Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten (portrayed by Mariel Hemingway). . Roberts dissolved into his character, a manipulative small-time hustler whose self-hatred metastasizes into murderous rage.

Different high-profile roles adopted, akin to fugitive Buck McGeehy in Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1985 motion thriller “Runaway Prepare.” The actor acquired an Oscar nomination for that position, and it transported him onto talk-show couches and tabloid covers. Flush and feeling himself, Roberts purchased a penthouse residence on Manhattan’s Higher East Facet and a home in Greenwich, Conn. He additionally started to abuse cocaine. In time, he would lose the residence and the home; the medicine remained.

However “Runaway Prepare” the e book just isn’t some weepy expiation for previous sins, a Hollywood reclamation job designed to kick-start a once-buzzy profession. Roberts is aware of all too properly that he has made horrible decisions, that his erratic habits broken his relationships with family and friends, together with his sister Julia Roberts (their relationship stays contact and go; Roberts avers that “we’ve agreed to not speak about one another’s careers.”) Nonetheless, Hollywood lore is awful with addicts who’ve thrived regardless of their dangerous habits, and for some time, Roberts walked the tightrope.

As Roberts describes in cringey element within the e book, his fall from grace got here a bit of bit at a time, then all of sudden. He constantly wrested defeat from the jaws of victory, arguing himself out of performing roles with Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, amongst others. “I used to be excessive after I confirmed up for my audition with Ron Howard,” says Roberts.

Roberts was an erratic maniac, little question, however a lot of what he realized concerning the darkish arts of self-immolation got here from his father, Walter, a screenwriter throughout the glory days of radio drama who then began his personal theater in Atlanta, the place Roberts was raised. A bitter, boastful striver, Walter inspired his son to behave, solely to savagely criticize him when he did so, which confused and angered his son.

Roberts’ father was a small-time grifter and as soon as tried to enlist him to rob a pharmacy for much-needed money. At night time, Roberts’ mom steadily beat him with a dowel. Blessed aid from the lash of the dowel got here when Roberts’ mother and father break up. Walter was awarded custody of Roberts; sisters Julia and Lisa went to dwell with their mom. Walter continued to whittle his son right down to dimension. “My father taught me rather a lot concerning the technique of being knowledgeable actor, however he would denigrate me at each flip,” says Roberts. “As a child it was very troublesome. How do you take care of a father like that? It was arduous to course of.”

Even when Roberts one way or the other scraped up the cash to maneuver to New York, his father continued to hound him with an countless stream of letters by which he would alternately browbeat him as an underachieving mediocrity, reward his expertise, ask for cash and accuse him of abandonment. . “I used to be nonetheless getting hundreds of letters,” says Roberts. “I nonetheless have them. It was insane, dude! Ultimately, I noticed it’s a must to love folks for who they’re, however you’ll be able to’t allow them to stroll throughout you. Even when it was honest and loving, it felt misplaced and imply.”

Regardless of this epistolary “thoughts management,” Roberts soldiered on, touchdown his first TV gig in 1977 on the cleaning soap opera “One other World.” Roberts’ smoldering, high-beam depth caught the eye of Joe Papp, a panjandrum of New York theater who forged Roberts in a Public Theater manufacturing of the Civil Warfare drama “Insurgent Girls.” Roberts earned his Actors’ Fairness card, then scored his first movie position as Dave Stepanowicz, the scion of a New York crime household, in 1978’s “King of the Gypsies.”

But at the same time as Roberts was endearing himself to a wider viewers, he was enraging administrators together with his insistence on staying in character 24/7. “I might yell at folks for no purpose, lock myself within the trailer and violently kick the door from the within,” Roberts writes about “Star 80.” “I started manifesting [Snider] to the purpose that it was imperiling all the manufacturing and infuriating Fosse.”

After that, it was arduous to shake the “downside actor” label, particularly given the hair-trigger eccentrics he was manifesting so convincingly on movie. Roberts’ drug dependancy did little to assist his trigger. “Blow was in every single place,” he says. “I imply, you go to the prop truck on a set and they might have an enormous bowl of cocaine for everybody. How may I get any work executed?”

“I am unsure how all this labored out for me, truthfully,” Eric Roberts says. “If it weren’t for my spouse, I may need been useless by now. I do know that sounds dramatic, but it surely’s a reality.”

(Deborah Feingold Pictures)

Roberts’ personal and public lives converged, as if he had been utilizing Stanislavski’s sense reminiscence in reverse, conjuring up bizarre scenes from his movies as materials for his private use. His stepson Keaton, whom Eric helped increase, moved out as a youngster, unnerved by Roberts’ erratic and sometimes violent habits. In 1995, Roberts was arrested for shoving his spouse Eliza towards a wall.

Suffice to say, he did not stroll into rehab; A court docket order acquired him there, for 18 months.

When he emerged, considerably purged of his personal self-hate, Eliza was ready for him. She pulled him up, brushed him off and transitioned him right into a life the place he would sublimate his addictive impulses into regular work. She is Roberts’ supervisor and consigliere, and the pairing has paid off properly. This 12 months alone, Roberts has acted in 73 productions — a western miniseries, a number of low-budget sci-fi movies and one thing known as “My Redneck Neighbor: Chapter 1 — The Rednecks Are Coming.” He is additionally a contestant on the brand new season of “Dancing With the Stars,” premiering Tuesday.

And Keaton got here again. A singer-songwriter and TV and movie composer, he has subsequently labored with Roberts. As for Emma, ​​Roberts’ daughter with former accomplice Kelly Cunningham, Roberts says, contemplating that they have not been concerned in one another’s lives and do not talk with one another that a lot, their relationship is “cordial and supportive, however not shut .”

Given what number of occasions Roberts has tried to sabotage his life and his profession, he’s properly conscious that it may have gone the opposite method. “I am unsure how all this labored out for me, truthfully,” he says. “If it weren’t for my spouse, I may need been useless by now. I do know that sounds dramatic, but it surely’s a reality.”

Eric Roberts might be signing copies of his memoir, “Runaway Prepare,” at 7 pm Sept. at 25 Barnes & Noble on the Grove in LA