Eric Roberts says a car accident, a brief coma and the worst depression of his life nearly ended his acting career before Bob Fosse cast him in Star 80.
Roberts, 69, talked about the 1983 film on the April 14 episode of the It Happened in Hollywood podcast hosted by Seth Abramovitch. He said the year before he got the role of Paul Snider, he had been in an automobile accident, had short-term memory loss and trouble with hand-eye coordination, and believed his days as an actor were probably over, if not very much numbered. “It was a really odd, peculiar, hard time for me because the year before that I had an automobile accident and I was in a coma for a little bit,” he said, adding that he was going through “the deepest depression” of his life.
The role came after his manager told him he had a Bob Fosse script that had been obtained from a casting director who was not supposed to give it to him. Roberts said he was a big fan of Fosse, but did not like the script at first because it seemed too black and white and too much like a simple good-girl, bad-guy story. “So I was not really interested in it as a script, but I was interested in it because of Bob Fosse,” he said. He worked very hard on the audition, guessed it took five or six tries before Fosse called to offer him the film, and then spent three months doing research with the director. “He was the coolest man,” Roberts said of Fosse.
Star 80 told the story of Playboy model Dorothy Stratten and her husband, Paul Snider, with Mariel Hemingway playing Stratten. Roberts said people often think it is unusual because of how it ended, but he argued Snider types are everywhere. “Everybody thinks it's [an] unusual tale because of how it ended, but Paul Sniders are a dime a dozen,” he said. “They surround us. They're all around us. They're not unusual. They just don't end up murder suicides. But that goes on all the time.” The film became Fosse’s last movie before his death and brought Roberts a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a motion picture - drama.
More than 40 years later, Roberts has gone on to appear in over 700 movies and TV shows, but he said the road back started with a script he initially resisted and a director he could not walk away from.
