Remembering The “Fellini Summer” Of Julia Roberts: A Broken Engagement, An Emergency Hospital Stay, And Clashes With Steven Spielberg

Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland were the Robsten of their day: two white hot stars who fell in love on-set, but this time around she was the charismatic overnight sensation and he was the moody artist from a Hollywood family (I guess we could call this a “reverse Robsten”). Their relationship was instant tabloid fodder, beginning with Roberts breaking her engagement to her Steel Magnolias co-star Dylan McDermott and Sutherland finalizing his divorce from Camelia Kath. Within months they were engaged, but the drama never slowed down.

In early 1991, for unknown reasons, Sutherland moved out of Roberts’ house and into the St. Francis Hotel (now the Gershwin Apartments), across from his favorite pool parlor. Newsweek alleged that he took up with a go-go dancer named Amanda Rice, who performed as “Raven”, and though Sutherland denied an intimate relationship at the time, the two did end up dating later on. (Make of that what you will.) But Sutherland soon returned home, though Rice sold her story to a tabloid several months later.

Around the same time, in May 1991, the Los Angeles Times reported that Roberts was hospitalized for “the flu,” which was Nineties-speak for what today we would call “exhaustion.” (In a fun Xenu twist, Rice later became a spokesperson for Narconon, Scientology’s answer to Narcotics Anonymous.) Despite the drama, though, the wedding was still on. At least for a few weeks.

Enter Jason Patric. You may remember Patric as the square-jawed star of Speed 2: Cruise Control, but at the time he was best known as one of The Lost Boys and Kiefer Sutherland’s good friend. He had dated Roberts before she got with Sutherland, although where exactly he falls on the Liam Neeson-Dylan McDermott-Kiefer Sutherland timeline is not clear. (Oh yeah, Roberts —like Helen Mirren before her— dated Liam Neeson in the 1980s.) What is abundantly clear, however, is that fellow patrons at the Canyon Ranch Spa spotted Patric with Roberts in the days before her wedding. Then they returned to Los Angeles together, and then three days before the wedding, Roberts’ and Sutherland’s publicists made a joint announcement that their wedding was “postponed“. The wedding dress went unclaimed, the cake made for Sutherland’s bachelor party was consumed by the restaurant staff. The bridesmaids’ dresses were described as “seafoam-green silk,” so the real bullet dodged are the four women who did not have to wear those dresses and their dyed-to-match shoes.

The day of the wedding that wasn’t, Roberts was seen eating burgers with Patric in LA, then they jetted off to Ireland. Jason Patric, once an invited guest only to be disinvited by Kiefer Sutherland, absconded to the Irish countryside with Julia Roberts, the most famous woman in the world turned the most famous runaway bride. In hindsight, that’s probably a big hint as to why he got disinvited.

At the same time as all this wedding drama was going down, Roberts was making Steven Spielberg’s Hook, one of the most high-profile films of 1991. Hook was the subject of much fascination, with constant media attention and a stream of celebrity visitors to the soundstage where it shot. PEOPLE reported that set visitors included Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Cruise, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Prince, and openly speculated the reason for so much gawking was to see if “Julia Roberts…was as emaciated and emotionally fragile a Tinkerbell as rumor insisted.” That same PEOPLE report refers to Roberts a “troubled Tinkerbell”, while the Hook crew allegedly dubbed her “Tinkerhell”.

Hook was not by any account a smooth production—with the movie’s box office at stake, everyone in that PEOPLE cover feature talks around the tension, but in the years since its release it’s become known as a rocky ride, and Steven Spielberg disavows it—but there is an awful lot of gossip around Roberts in particular. Reports that she was very “thin” circulated, and when combined with rumors of a “heroin problem” that made it into the press, everyone wondered about that five-day hospital stay in the run-up to the wedding that wasn’t.

In the weeks before Hook‘s release, Roberts gave an air-clearing interview to Entertainment Weekly in which she said, “…I’ve got clear skin and clean arms, and I’m just thin. Period. The end,” and claimed she never heard anyone call her “Tinkerhell” (well like they’d say it to her FACE). According to Roberts, while Hook was a demanding, perhaps even disorganized, shoot, all these rumors got blown way out of proportion and everything is fine, nothing to see here. But just think about this for a second.

In the weeks before a major film premiere, one of the biggest stars on the planet had to do sit-down-interview-level damage control. If, in the weeks before Avengers: Endgame opened, Scarlett Johansson gave a lengthy interview in which she insisted she was fine and all those stories were made up or just people being mean to her, all of our eyebrows would be raised. Nothing says “something definitely happened” as much as detailed explanation of how nothing happened.

And then, for real, nothing happened. After Hook, Roberts took a break, which was either on purpose or the result of projects falling apart. It was at this time that Roberts was to make Shakespeare in Love, only to walk after she couldn’t convince Daniel Day-Lewis to star in it with her. (She was later romantically linked to DDL.) With her self-described “Fellini summer” ended and Shakespeare in Love off the docket, Roberts preceded to NOT work for the next two years. PEOPLE wondered if she would have to “stage a mid-career ‘comeback’ with make-or-break expectations?” Even today, stars are careful to caretake their momentum; take Jennifer Lawrence, arguably the closest analog we have to 1991 Julia Roberts, for example. She has lowered her profile considerably in the last couple years but still releases a movie per year, like clockwork. So it is worth noting when a major star just doesn’t work for an extended period of time.

But it’s also unsurprising, on the heels of the wedding that wasn’t, the clusterf*ck of Hook, and all those rumors about how (and why) she got so “thin” that Roberts went off the map for a bit. Besides, the kind of fame Roberts had already garnered never really goes away. It smolders even if you let the flames die down, and all it takes to reignite the spark is one decent gust of wind. That came in 1993, almost two years to the day since Hook‘s release, when The Pelican Brief opened and reestablished Roberts as not just a capital-letter Movie Star, but also a grown-up actress, taking on grown-up roles. The “Fellini summer” was well in the rearview, but that doesn’t mean Roberts was drama free. 1993 was, after all, the Lyle Lovett era.

Something to think about on your way out the door: Julia Roberts’ “Fellini summer” was A LOT. There was so much drama—so much, it ranks among the great Gossip Summers in Hollywood history. But buried in the same PEOPLE article that dubbed Roberts a “troubled Tinkerbell” is a mention that Dustin Hoffman would get drunk on the set of Hook and ask women, “Did you dream about me last night?” Roberts inspired thousands of words across multiple articles for her cancelled wedding and romantic escapades that summer. Dustin Hoffman harassed women on set and inspired none.

Sarah Marrs is a writer and film critic whose work has been featured on LaineyGossip, Pajiba, and SYFY Fangrrls, and she is the co-host of The Hollywood Read podcast. She is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, and can be yelled at on Twitter, @Cinesnark. The owls are exactly what they seem.

Where to stream Hook