Julia Roberts Says Not Going to College 'Is a Regret': 'It Wasn't in My Cards'

"My family didn’t have the money. And I had no scholarship potential," Julia Roberts shared, when asked why she did not pursue higher education

Julia Roberts is reflecting on why she never attended college.

In a new conversation between Roberts, 56, and filmmaker Richard Curtis published in British Vogue, the Leave the World Behind star identified not receiving a higher education as 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 movie Notting Hill, which the 67-year-old wrote — jokingly asked if Roberts "wasn't clever enough" for college, the Academy Award-winning actor laughed.

"No, I mean, my family didn’t have the money. And I had no scholarship potential," she said. "That kind of thing. But as my kids have gone through the college process now, and looking for schools and talking about what they are interested in learning more about and all that, it does just fill me with a longing for that academic space."

"I want to learn about anthropology! Where’s that academic space for someone like me?" she added. "It doesn’t really exist, but…"

Related: Julia Roberts Thinks Richard Gere's Pretty Woman Character Edward Is Dead: 'And Now She Runs His Business'

Roberts was born in Smyrna, Ga., in 1967. In a 2022 interview with Gayle King, Roberts shared that Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King, who were friends with 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 grew friendly with the King family after Coretta Scott King "called my mother and asked if her kids could be part of the school because they were having a hard time finding a place that would accept her kids."

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

“My mom worked a full-time job and raised three 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 was gone and out of the house. She never showed the strain of it.”

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People.