Julia Roberts has broken her silence, speaking about the death of her half-sister, Nancy Motes, who passed away in February this year after an apparent drug overdose.
In an interview that took place less than a month after the tragedy, the 46-year-old Pretty Woman star battled tears as she opened up about the sadness of losing her sibling in the May issue of WSJ Magazine.
“It’s just heartbreak,” Julia said of Nancy, who was 37 when she died. “It’s only been 20 days. There aren’t words to explain what any of us have been through in these last 20 days. It’s hour-by-hour some days, but you just keep looking ahead.”
Nancy Motes
Motes, who worked as a production assistant on Glee, took to Twitter to lash out at her famous sister in the weeks leading up to her death.
“So my ‘sister’ said that with all her friends & fans she doesn’t need any more love. Just so you all know ‘America’s Sweetheart’ is a B—H,” she Tweeted on Jan. 19.
“Do you want to be a fan of someone so cruel? She’s not even that good of an actress. Happy you totally F—ed with me?” she tweeted the same day.
Motes struggled with obesity and even underwent gastric bypass surgery, which led to a dramatic weight loss in 2010.
She said her decision to have the operation came after years of painful comparison to her sex-symbol sister and told British newspaper The Sun her older sibling could be quiet cruel with her criticism of her weight battles.
“When I was in high school and she was an adult, she would just let me know that I was definitely overweight,” she told the UK newspaper. “She would make it quite clear to me — and in a not-so-nice manner.”
Motes, whose other siblings are actor Eric Roberts and actress Lisa Roberts Gillan, said she always felt like a black sheep among her thespian family.
While Roberts – who shared a biological mother with Nancy – did allude to the pair’s tumultuous relationship in her candid interview, she also opened up about retreating into her family to try and cope with her grief.
“You don’t want anything bad to happen to anyone, but there are so many tragic, painful, inexplicable things in the world.
“But [as with] any situation of challenge and despair, we must find a way, as a family. It’s so hard to formulate a sentence about it outside the weepy huddle of my family.”
Julia Roberts winning her oscar
The A-lister – who lives away from the Hollywood hustle and bustle in a $9.5 million dollar Malibu eco-mansion with her husband, Danny Moder and three kids – says she manages to live peacefully out of the spotlight.
“I don’t consider myself a celebrity, [at least not] how it is fostered in our culture today,” revealed Roberts. “I don’t know if I’m old and slow, but there seems to be a frenzy to it.”
The actress joked that even her children, twins, Hazel and Finn, nine, and son Henry, six, didn’t know what a big star their mother was until recently.
“For a long time, they weren’t even aware I had a job because I was home so much. Now they get it.”
