‘Everybody Loves Raymond’s Doris Roberts Could Drink You Under The Table

Everybody loves Doris Roberts, the comic actress who won an armful of Emmys playing Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond. When cast members gathered for a recent reunion, Patricia Heaton shared her fond memories of the late star. “Doris could drink everybody under the table," Heaton laughed about the woman who played her domineering mother-in-law, according to Entertainment Weekly. “Champagne, that was her drink.”

Roberts’ gift for drinking is a common theme when co-stars remember the actress. “We had a little get together for her,” Ray Romano told TMZ after Roberts passed. “She was one of a kind. She can outwork it, outdrink it, good kisser.” Romano clarified that he was just kidding about the kissing part, but there’s truth in every joke so …

The weird thing about everyone’s posthumous jokes about Roberts’ prodigious drinking? Many of the main cast members of Everybody Loves Raymond struggled with booze. Take Brad Garrett, the actor who played Ray’s brother, Robert. During the show’s first season, “I was what they call a high-functioning alcoholic,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “I hid it really well.”

If Roberts could outdrink Garrett, then she could really put it away. “I would hit a fifth a day sometimes, and that’s a lot,” Garrett wrote in his memoir, When the Balls Drop. Geez, Brad, you think? 

Garrett eventually gave up drinking after the show’s first season, followed by Heaton a few years later. She got on the wagon in 2018, following an embarrassing evening with family after several glasses of wine. “I was making a joke to the table, and I started saying, ‘You know, in our family it’s a tradition…’ And I could not pronounce the word ‘tradition,’” she told Elizabeth Vargas on the Heart of the Matter podcast. “And my son at the end of the table says, ‘Oh great, mom. You can’t even talk.’”

Heaton was humiliated by “looking drunk” in front of her sons and their friends, so she took advice from Peter Boyle, yet another star from Everybody Loves Raymond who struggled with alcohol. He’d gotten sober by the time he starred in the sitcom and told Heaton his trick for staying away from the sauce at cast parties. “I just think about the first drink,” he told her. “And I think about it leading to the second one, and then to the third one, and I just walk through it in my brain. And by the time I think about that, I know I don’t want to be in that position.”

Maybe that’s why Roberts could drink all of her castmates under the table — nearly all of them quit.