Lisa Roberts Gillan

Coming from a family of actors, Lisa Roberts Gillan had dreams of becoming an actress since she was a child. Her father, who was instrumental in making his son Eric an actor, did not push her or her sister to become actors. However, despite being separated from her father and her brother, Eric, due to her parents' divorce, watching Eric on television further fuelled her dreams. In 1977, she and her sister, Julia, visited the set of 'Another World', which Eric was a part of, during a two-week vacation that they spent with their father and brother in New York City. This experience contributed a lot to Lisa’s later career as an actor.

Lisa Roberts Gillan appeared on television for the first time as a questioner in the TV film 'To Heal a Nation' in 1988. In 1994, she acted in a feature film for the first time, appearing in a short role in 'I Love Trouble', in which her sister Julia played the female lead. Since then, she has appeared in many films and television shows, many of which had Julia in starring roles.

Lisa Roberts Gillan was born as Lisa Roberts on January 1, 1965, in Decatur, Georgia, to former actors and playwrights Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Grady Roberts. She has English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German, and Swedish ancestry. She is the middle child of her parents and has an older brother, Eric, and a younger sister Julia. Her parents, who met while performing in a production of ‘George Washington Slept Here’ for the armed forces, together established the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1963. Her parents also ran an acting school for children in Decatur, Georgia, in which Yolanda Denise King, the daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, was a student. Her father subsequently became a vacuum cleaner salesman and her mother became a church secretary and a real estate agent.

After sixteen years of marriage, her mother filed for divorce from her father in 1971, which was finalized in early 1972. Following the divorce, her brother stayed with her father in Atlanta while she and her sister lived with her mother in Smyrna, Georgia. The same year, her mother got married to Michael Motes, who was often abusive, which later led to their divorce in 1983. She had a step sister, Nancy Motes, who died of an apparent drug overdose in February 2014. Her father also got engaged again in 1972, to Eileen Sellars, whom all his children liked very much. They got married the following year. Eileen died in an accident in 1977, which put him into a deep depression. Within a few months, her father was diagnosed with throat cancer and subsequently died when she was only twelve years old. However, her mother did not tell her and her sister about their father’s illness, and neither did she let them visit him while he was sick.

Her siblings, Eric and Julia, as well as her niece Emma Roberts, the daughter of Eric, are actors. She is married to actor Tony Gillan, with whom she lives in New York. She acted alongside him in the movie 'Ten Benny'. Her mother died of lung cancer on February 19, 2015, following which the two sisters reunited with their brother Eric on 28th February during the memorial service. While she and her sister have been like best friends since their childhood, they had got estranged from their brother due to personal differences.