In her new autobiography, Portia de Rossi explains how it was Ellen DeGeneres’s love that helped her overcome anorexia.
She was living the Hollywood dream – a major role in a top US telly show, a pay packet to match and the fame she’d long craved. But behind the perfect veneer, Aussie-born actress Portia de Rossi battled anorexia so severe it almost killed her.
In her new memoir, Unbearable Lightness, the 37-year-old actress describes in terrifying detail just how bad her illness had become – and how the love of her now-wife, chat show host Ellen DeGeneres, 52, helped heal her.
“Learning to be more honest is probably the biggest influence that Ellen has had on me. We’ve talked a lot about this, which is a big thing for me,” Portia recently told a reporter. “Ellen has never really worried about her weight and is more on the side of feeling angry that for women to be perceived as beautiful, they need to be skinny.”
With Ellen’s support, Portia began writing the book, which chronicles her battle with anorexia from her days as a teenage model in Australia to the peak of her fame. While playing Nell Porter in the hit show Ally McBeal, Portia says she subsisted on 630 kilojoules a day, and took 20 laxatives.
She also exercised obsessively, sprinting on a treadmill at home and in her trailer on set. Instead of walking from room to room in her house she did lunges, and would even pull her car over on the way to work to do “wind sprints”.
Related video: Portia takes Ellen’s name.
