Thoughts on One's Everyday Life: L book of the Week

OMG ! I'm so happy I get to watch Portia's interview with Oprah earlier since I have work when it was shown live on TV. She looked gorgeous during her interview. I can't wait to read her book.

If you don't know her, Portia de Rossi was born "Amanda Lee Rogers" in Horsham, Victoria, Australia,the daughter of Margaret, a medical receptionist, and Barry Rogers. She was raised in Grovedale, a suburb of Geelong. As a child, she modelled for print and TV commercials. She adopted the name Portia de Rossi at the age of 15, stating in 2005 that she had intended to reinvent herself, using the given name of Portia, a character from William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and an Italian last name.

Portia de Rossi is an open lesbian. She was married to documentary filmmaker Mel Metcalfe, from 1996 to 1999, as part of a plan to get a green card, but says that "it just obviously wasn't right" for her. In a 2010 interview on Good Morning America she explained that as a young actress she was fearful of being exposed as gay. From 2000 to 2004, de Rossi dated singer Francesca Gregorini, daughter of actress Barbara Bach and stepchild of Ringo Starr. She said most of her family and Ally McBeal cast mates did not know she was a lesbian until tabloid pictures of the couple were published. She declined to publicly discuss the relationship or her sexual orientation at the time.

De Rossi and Gregorini broke up in late 2004 as de Rossi began dating talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres, whom she met backstage at an awards show. In 2005, she opened up publicly about her sexual orientation in interviews with Details and The Advocate. She became engaged to Ellen DeGeneres after the talk show host proposed to her with a three-carat pink diamond ring. They were married on August 16, 2008 at their Beverly Hills home, with 19 guests including their respective mothers.

She struggled with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa for four years while filming Ally McBeal.

Portia de Rossi supports a variety of charitable organizations, including Locks of Love, a group that provides human hair wigs at no cost for children with complete alopecia and other medical conditions that cause hair loss. She has also supported fundraising efforts for FXB International, an African AIDS relief organization, and The Art of Elysium, an art foundation for terminally ill children. An avid animal lover, de Rossi also supports Alley Cat Allies, an organization dedicated to protecting and improving the lives of cats.

In her free time, de Rossi enjoys riding horses.

On August 6, 2010, she filed a petition to legally change her name to Portia Lee James DeGeneres. The petition was granted on September 23, 2010.

In 2010 de Rossi published a book Unbearable Lightness which talks about the turmoil that she has experienced in her life. To promote the book she appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

5th part will be added later... problems with MEGAVIDEO arghh !!

Here's the latest news about Portia:

Portia de Rossi comes clean about how she used to “swallow her words instead of her food” in a new book that will address the darker period of her life before coming out and finding love with Ellen DeGeneres. In a forthcoming interview with the Advocate, de Rossi explains how much of her life when first breaking into Hollywood was a contradiction.

A “staunch feminist,” she first starred on the hit Ally McBeal, a show which prompted Time magazine to ask “Is Feminism Dead?” She also never used to talk politics, even when she first spoke about her relationship with DeGeneres in a 2005 issue of the The Advocate. Now, de Rossi finds herself in a powerful position to speak up for gay marriage, she says, and will do so in her book.

“I feel like my life can actually kind of stand for something.
And I don’t mean that in a self-aggrandizing way, like, ‘Look at me, I
can make a difference.’ But I feel like, maybe I get why I’m here,” she says.

During a recent appearance on The View to promote her sitcom Better Off Ted,
De Rossi dished it out to conservative host
Elisabeth Hasselbeck on the subject of gay marriage: “Without the word,
we don’t have equal rights…. Every citizen of this country should have
that right.”

--From www.socialite.com

Catch her on Ellen live this Thursday: