Julia Roberts reflects on why she never attended college.
In a new conversation between Roberts (56) and director Richard Curtis published in the British language Voguethe Leave the world behind the star called not getting a higher education a “regret” in her life.
“But I couldn’t,” she said. “It wasn’t in my cards.”
When Curtis — whom Roberts first met while working on the 1999 film Notting Hill, that the 67-year-old wrote — jokingly asked if Roberts “wasn’t smart enough” for college, the Oscar-winning actor laughed.
“No, I mean, my family had no money. And I had no scholarship potential,” she said. “Things like that. But as my kids have now gone through the process of studying, looking for schools and talking about what they’re interested in learning more about and all that, it just fills me with longing for that academic space.”
“I want to learn about anthropology! Where is the academic space for someone like me?” she added. “It doesn’t really exist, but…”
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Julia Roberts on the cover of British Vogue.
Lachlan Bailey for British Vogue
Roberts was born in Smyrna, Ga., in 1967. In an interview with Gayle King in 2022, Roberts said that Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, who were friends of her parents, Walter Roberts and Betty Lou Bredemus, paid the hospital bill for her birth because her own parents “couldn’t”.
Roberts’ parents ran a theater school in Atlanta called the Actors and Writers Workshop, as Roberts explained at the time. They became friends with the King family after Coretta Scott King “called my mother and asked if her children could be part of the school because they were having a hard time finding a place that would accept her children.”
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“My mom worked full-time and raised three little girls pretty much on her own,” Roberts told PEOPLE of her mother Betty in a 2017 cover story. “My brother [actor Eric Roberts] is older, so he left and left the house. She never showed tension.”
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Source: HIS Education