Once upon a time, Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Roberts were engaged. She was a starlet and he was Hollywood royalty: it was a match that any red carpet would be lucky to have. And then — there are lots of theories as to why — they split.
At the last minute, the Pretty Woman actress, 23 at the time, cancelled their forthcoming 1991 wedding. In an interview with Jess Cagle on the People/Entertainment Weekly network, Sutherland (who was 24 at the time) said that he's not holding a grudge.
"I think she was being realistic for herself. I think that's much better," the 24 star said, according to Daily Mail.
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Sutherland and Roberts met on the set of their 1990 movie Flatliners. They started dating during production, and were together for a year.
According to a People story from the time, the wedding was set to be a huge affair: "Since this was a union made not in heaven but in Hollywood, some 150 of the glitziest and ritziest were primed to be standing teary-eyed and overdressed at (where else?) 20th Century Fox's Soundstage 14, which had been done up to mimic a garden-like paradise," People reported in 1991. And then, suddenly, Roberts fled.
"We were young and we were both very much in love, we had decided that we wanted to get married, but then this other thing kind of took over," Sutherland explained, according to the Daily Mail. "She was arguably the most famous woman in the world, and this wedding that was supposed to be something between the two of us became something so big."
Instead of the wedding, People reported, Roberts took off to Ireland with Sutherland's friend, Robert Patric. The two dated for a short while afterwards.
No matter the reasoning, Sutherland, now 49, isn't shading his ex's decision. "I think it took a lot of courage," he told Cagle, according to Daily Mail. "Even amongst all of that other stuff, to be able to say, "I can't do this."