Matthew Perry dumped Julia Roberts because he was frightened she would leave him.

The Friends actor had a romance with the Pretty Woman star in the 1990s after persuading her to appear on the popular sitcom but confessed that he called time on the relationship as he didn't think he was good enough for the Hollywood actress.

Writing in his autobiography Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, which is being serialised in The Times newspaper, Matthew said: "Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable.

"So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.

"She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can't begin to describe the look of confusion on her face."

The 53-year-old star recalled how the romance began when Julia was asked to appear on Friends in 1995 and producers encouraged him to contact the actress after she suggested she would only feature if she could be in a storyline with Matthew's character Chandler Bing.

He said: "I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read, 'The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers.'

"Not only did Julia agree to do the show, but she also sent me a gift — bagels, lots and lots of bagels."

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Perry revealed that the pair exchanged hundreds of fax messages during a "three-month courtship".

He recalled: "Three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive. I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived. Nine times out of ten, one had."

Source: Bang