Calista Flockhart’s 1999 interview with Connie Chung

She definitely had an eating disorder.

Courtney Thorne Smith came out and said that she had an eating disorder while working on Ally McBeal and that it started because of the show.

Make of that what you will.

Calista's teeth always bothered me. Didn't they have bleaching back then?

I feel bad for her. That's an awful answer and just made her seem even more psycho, but it was a bullshit question.

The media are such garbage and always have been.

She lucked out by marrying A-List star Harrison Ford and has never had to work a day in her life since.

R3 Eating disorders cause your teeth to get dull and gray.

Portia de Rossi has also basically said that Flockhart was anorexic during Ally McBeal.

Good for her dropping out of sight and keeping a low profile. A friend met her at move-in day at Amherst when she was dropping off the kid and said she seemed nice and normal.

This was a pivotal moment in the culture.

R7 She's been working regularly for years.

Yes, she has been working regularly for years. She was in Brothers and Sisters and also the first few seasons of Supergirl.

She's also had a shitload of plastic surgery, so her body dysmorphia carried on from Ally.

Years ago I saw her on the cover of a magazine and she was so thin, even bones protruding out, that I thought it was an older woman in her 50's or 60's.

I remember being so irritated by her that I turned the interview off within probably about 30 seconds, then regretted it because it was all anyone talked about the next day.

She seems to me to be made of ice and rage and this is the first time I’ve ever seen her. Yuck.

What's up with those inane awkward laughs?

She’s hungry

Well, for one thing, R14, she sure doesn’t like it when her blatantly obvious mental health condition isn’t treated as something other people should be jealous over and aspire to. Why she expects the laugh to cover that, though? She’s just wrong. It doesn’t.

just stopped eating food. She was thin when the show began but showed up a few years later at an awards ceremony with protruding bones visible in a backless gown.

Bridget Fonda has been retired as an actor for over a decade.. Her weight gain has been attributed to being mentally ill, abused and a direct threat to her overall health

I remember reading Audrey Hepburn, "naturally thin" consumed nothing other than mineral water and apples during a film shoot. The pressure is there to be thin and stay thin.

Funny you should mention Bridget R18. Wasn't she offered the role of Ally McBeal but turned it down? I can totally see her in that part.

Connie is a real idiot. Calista's obvious lies wouldn't be so bad if Connie wasn't so one note.

*Connie makes cutesy small talk then OUT OF NOWHERE turns on a dime*

“Do you have an eating disorder?” (soft voice)

*HUGE awkward pause while Calista realizes Connie is NOT her friend*

“Uhh, No. No” *eyes narrowed, sees that 20/20 set her up and this will be a shitshow*

*Switches to intimidating eyes, Calista seething*

“What do you THINK I’m going to say?!”

*sarcastic, swishes head in diva manner, then switches to deadpan*

“Yeah. I DO. I would never say that in a million years”

F. UCK. ING. I. CON. IC. !!!!!!!!!!!

Ryan Murphy probably has the script already.

She had a good run. But she doesn't have star quality.

She does have camp quality, however. This is pure gold one liners.

Best part was it wasn’t intentionally meant to be ridiculous. It’s even more so today.

R19 It’s been years since I read Dodd Darin’s book about his parents Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee but I recall he said Sandra ate nothing but a wedge of iceberg lettuce a day for weeks at a time when she was a starlet.

She looks okay now, unlike the other 60% of American people who are classified as "morbidly obese."

R18 r20 but Bridget got a second chance to play anorexic in Lake Placid written by you guessed it! David E. Kelley, creator of Ally McBeal

Wow, she came across as bitchy.

Calista would have had way more fun on "Maury."

"No, are you jealous?" Oooooooooooooooh, baby! "No, are you jealous? YOU FAT CUNT!", is what her eyes said. I don't engage in nostalgie de temps perdu, but fuck, there seems to be such much anodyne filtering of everything in celeb interviews in the present that it's like watching two robots act. Everything is scripted to remove any discord, anything that could possibly identify the interviewer or the interviewed celeb with any possible human characteristic.

Harrison ford has weird taste in women

Harrison Ford is perpetually stoned so....

dropped out of sight? How quick they forget. She was on The Sally Field Programme.

Mrs. Maury Povitch is a terrible interviewer.

The Sally Field Programme has been off the air for 11 years.

David E. Kelley has a type: anorexic. Even his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer looks borderline anorexic.

Ally McBeal was hot for a moment, besides Flockhart, it seems the only actor/actress who got a career jumpstart from that show was Lucy Liu. Robert Downey Jr. was already an established name, he was in rehab at the time , he joined the show to rebuild his career and it certainly worked in his favor, he was very good in it.

R38 Krakowski, De Rossi, Thorne-Smith got another long running series, MacNichol won the Emmy, no?

You gays are crazy. She wasn’t shady. Connie was and there was an irritated look and that’s all.

I remember being horrified when she bought that baby. She couldn't feed herself yet she was taking on the care of an infant? In retrospect, though, no doubt had a nanny or two.

That poor kid....Mommy is an anorexic diva and Daddy is an elderly pot head who thinks it's ok to fly planes when you're an elderly pot head.

If the kid got in to Amherst, he’s got to be smart. Famous parents aren’t enough.

Hopefully she’s been a good mother. At least give her some points for pulling back from Hollywood and trying to live a more normal life.

I don't remember this being a thing, but I didn't have a TV/computer at the time. I do like how she shot back, "What do you think I'm going to say?" I think it's highly possible she didn't eat much and had mostly to do with the industry she was in. And I can see why she would be sensitive about having to talk about it, in part, because she's a woman.

At 48, 6'0", and 150 lbs give or take a few, I occasionally am told by friends to eat more. It's annoying to hear, but there are worse things in life. I do eat quite healthy and walk a lot.

I remember when I was in college, I weighed much less (perhaps not full height yet). I wasn't deliberately trying to keep weight off. I just didn't have much money and was never really that hungry. But, I definitively should have eaten more.

[Quote] Yes, she has been working regularly for years. She was in Brothers and Sisters and also the first few seasons of Supergirl. She's also had a shitload of plastic surgery, so her body dysmorphia carried on from Ally.

Definitely felt like some Vaseline was slathered over the lense when she played Cat Grant on Supergirl.

Harrison just likes them scrawny I guess? I get it, better than those big busty wobbly terrifying ones.

I don't blame her attitude at all.

She has been very thin for as long as she has been famous.

From Ally McBeal to Brothers & Sisters to Supergirl, she has always appeared to be about the same weight/size.

She has always basically said "it's not a problem." She's pushing 60 and she has not become a truly emaciated eating disorder patient of the sort we have all seen on talk shows and documentaries, who are frail and whose skull bones you can see clearly through wasted flesh.

She's just skinny. I have always thought it is bizarre that the public and the press have always beat her up about it.

She may have been right with that "are you jealous?" snipe if you think about it. All media all the time talk about losing weight and compliment people when they lose weight.

Skinny people are harassed to their faces about being skinny, and that kind of face-to-face confrontation presupposes that the person being confronted is in a position of power.

Overweight and obese people are treated respectfully or else patronizingly to their faces and are invited to speak in self-empowering ways in the public, while being harassed and humiliated from distances. This presupposes that overweight people are powerless and need to be given grace and are treated like victims and underdogs.

I don't know why anyone would ever criticize anyone for being fat or thin, having brown or grey eyes, peachy or ebony skin, straight or crooked teeth, straight or kinky hair. It makes no sense to me to hold someone's appearance against them and confront them for the physical characteristics that make them look unique.

Yes, a person with a serious, life-threatening eating disorder should be confronted to face reality and undergo medical intervention, but that is never what any press were doing to Calista Flockhart. They were harassing her. That was 30 years ago, half a lifetime ago, and she appears to have been a stable weight all these years and she appeared healthy and vital then and she still does. What the fuck is the problem?

I thought she was lovely and adorable in [italic]The Birdcage.[/italic]

She's thin...but not horrifically so, unlike the girl on YouTube who is a skeleton. There was a thread on her, but I can't find it. Some people are lucky and don't gain weight, no matter what they eat. I wish I was one of them.

I read great reviews of her in the play BASH decades ago and I bought a VHS copy of her performance that I think was used as an awards screener. She was very good—not a trace of the neurotic dramedy type of character she usually plays on TV.

R47 has never been the the UK. I was viciously fat-shamed by some ripped, shirtless boulevardier in the market at Oxford. I don't think all societies tiptoe around the fatties.

She's doing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Zachary Quinto in SoCal soon. She'll make a weird Martha.

R49 Even if she counts every calorie (which is a compulsion), she's 'not horiffically' underweight, as you say. That's my whole problem about how she has always been treated. She doesn't look unhealthy.

The great irony is that the *only* singular way proven by repeated scientific studies to extend lifespan and generally improve health is to consume fewer calories than the daily recommendation and to be slightly underweight. It seems like it is the most healthful way to live, all things in moderation. Yet people who are thin are always treated like they've got serious mental illnesses and moral failings.

It's tacky to say 'they're just jealous,' but in this case, I do wonder if jealousy is the primary reason so many people are so critical of thin people.

Don't forget that Portia de Rossi had major body issues as well exacerbated by the show.

It's unacceptable to fat shame...it's become taboo (except here on DL..lol), but it's fair game to go after people who are thin or slightly underweight. It's one thing to be thin, but another when it literally is skin and bones....like a skeleton with a layer of skin. That's when intervention is needed. Watching calories and portions, but still eating with healthy choices is smart.

She did look unhealthy and like a child. She also seemed proud of it, given the answers in the interview linked by OP.

I will never understand why skinny people are asked if they have eating disorders, when it's automatically assumed that fat people have them. "I've always been thin" is just as credible as "I've always been fat". The 2 right answers are "I don't eat enough food" and "I eat too much food".

It's not rocket science. When you're too fat or too skinny, you have an unhealthy relationship with food. Food is not something to be avoided because it scares you or shoveled in because it comforts you.

Yeah R53...there probably is some jealousy.

How can anyone take one look at her and think that she was she not terribly malnourished and unhealthy?

I remember this cover.

I found this charming in how innocently tone deaf it was. Nowadays Fat Twitter would’ve had her head for this. I miss the days where we could just laugh at the dumb narcissistic actress and all move on with our lives.

In that era, turn of the millennium and a year or two on either side, there was a platoon of women on TV shows who had been thin in the first place, and they were taking it an ever-increasing level. Flockhart and other actresses on Ally, Courteney and Jennifer on Friends, Lara Flynn Boyle on The Practice, Paula Devicq on Party of Five (Devicq had had gorgeous hair, and in the last two seasons, it appeared to be falling out as the rest of her got thinner and thinner).

Anyone could see side-by-side photos showing that these same women had been thin before, but this was a new development. And, yeah, there are many reasons for someone to have sudden weight loss, but it didn't seem to be the case that they all were suddenly receiving chemo and couldn't keep food down.

I understood the pressures of the industry and the impulse, but I think it was probably a good thing that people were reacting negatively to the skeletal red-carpet looks they were seeing, because we stopped seeing THAT level of gauntness in female celebs. At least, acting celebs. I don't know what was still going on in the world of modeling.

LMAO at R59! I’ve never seen that before. What the hell did she do so wrong on that show? Because she was thin? She was a successful single lawyer! They’re making it out like she was shooting gangbang scenes.

Actresses who worked with David E Kelley seemed to develop a lot of problems. I bet he's unpleasant. I remember watching Lake Placid and thinking only a real asshole would write this.

Interesting how long Flockhart and Harrison Ford lasted.

Can’t decide if R43 is Calista or Lori Loughlin

R62 From the Time article: "Instead, much of feminism has devolved into the silly. And it has powerful support for this: a popular culture insistent on offering images of grown single women as frazzled, self-absorbed girls. Ally McBeal is the most popular female character on television. The show, for the few who may have missed it, focuses on a ditsy 28-year-old Ivy League Boston litigator who never seems in need of the body-concealing clothing that Northeastern weather often requires. Ally spends much of her time fantasizing about her ex-boyfriend, who is married and in the next office, and manages to work references to her mangled love life into nearly every summation she delivers. She has fits in supermarkets because there are too few cans of Pringles. She answers the question "Why are your problems so much bigger than everyone else's?" with the earnest response "Because they're mine." When Ally gets any work done, how she keeps her job, why she thinks it's O.K. to ask her secretary why she didn't give her a birthday present--these are all mysteries. Ally probably wouldn't seem so offensive as an addition to the cast of Seinfeld, but because this is a one-hour drama filled with pseudo-Melissa Etheridge music and emotional pretense, we are meant to take her problems more seriously than George Costanza's. "Ally McBeal is a mess. She's like a little animal," notes Nancy Friday, a sex-positive feminist if ever there was one. "You want to put her on a leash." And what does Ally's creator David Kelley have to say about Ally as a feminist? "She's not a hard, strident feminist out of the '60s and '70s. She's all for women's rights, but she doesn't want to lead the charge at her own emotional expense." Ally, though, is in charge of nothing, least of all her emotional life."

I was a teenager when Ally McBeal came out. I honestly thought she was in her 40s or middle aged because she looked so old to me.

When I heard she was dating Harrison Ford I thought she was close to his age.

Her teeth look brown.

The Tic-Tac diet is hell on the enamel.

Is flockhart gay? Her relationship with Harrison seems genuine but bizarre. Carrie Fisher was gay and Harrison had some kind of relationship with her. At least he is not married to an elderly black lady like a lot of gay stars .

R68 ^ which elderly black ladies do you mean ?

I always thought she was a cute girl, thin or not. She's doing alright these days, married with kids, still working. She was in the Birdcage with Robin Williams, who's dead, so I'd venture to say she's winning...

R65, yes thank god we have more positive female role models these days like Lia Thomas.

Did she have a nose job? That explains her son's looks.

She looks much better with darker hair.

There are “a lot of gay stars” married to “elderly black ladies”?

R73 matt Damon, Michael Caine,Robert deniro, Brad Pitt for awhile,

What I find most shocking about all of this watching those clips is how all those shows romanticized living at the office basically 24/7. Boy, are those days dead. The show looks positively archaic.

I liked the "dancing baby" on the show...

If I recall, she gave this interview BECAUSE of a lot of press about her weight loss, so it was odd that she was so surprised that it was brought up.

Also, her teeth are gray. That doesn't happen in the naturally skinny.

I always thought this show and other cultural touchstones in the late 1990s were anti-Gen-X backlash. Suddenly women were supposed to be super thin, always showing off their bodies in conservative, solid-color dresses and suits, worried about nothing but babies and boyfriends, everyone was about work work work, etc. It was as if showrunners and studios and the media decided they'd had enough of slackers with their feminism and their gay acceptance and their free will, so they started shows specifically designed to counter all that.

R43 That's not how college admissions works.

WHET to Lisa Nicole Carson?

I always thought she was very unattractive. Very rodent looking, with bad hair and a bad nose job.

She got a huge push when that annoying Ally McBeal show was on and was so overexposed, I've actively avoided anything with her in it since.

Carson had a bipolar disorder diagnosis and at least one hospitalization. She gave an interview in 2015 in which she revealed that she took a lot of years off and hoped to return to acting now, but her most recent credit was five years ago (The New Edition Story).

I remember seeing her on some talk shows at the time she was in a lot of things (Eve's Bayou, ER, Ally McBeal), and it was clear that something was wrong, but I couldn't tell whether it was drugs, mental illness, or both. I also remember a change in her performances on ER toward the end of her run as Benton's ex-girlfriend. Like they were having to really labor in the editing room just to get something usable.

R72 Flockhart adopted her son.

Yeah.

R33 Maybe he wants a woman who won't eat the food he keeps around for his munchies?

She's had several nose jobs.

And her latest nose job. An improvement on the previous ones.

Self-mutilation rituals .

The new Audrey Hepburn? Puh-lease.

I wonder if she already had an eating disorder when she played bulimic Mary Margaret on an after-school special type show on HBO decades ago. I will always remember Mary Margaret buying binge foods and then eating them in the back of a station wagon in the woods.

She has dated a series of straight men such as Robert Downey Jr and even has a child .

Art imitates life for a lot of actors, I've noticed.

R91 Robert Downey Jr. straight?

LOL!

Should call herself Calista Fathart.

I totally forgot about her (never watched Ally McBeal). I wonder what her marriage is like. Harrison Ford seems like a straight-up asshole from everything I've read, and I can't figure out why. He had/has a great career and a shit-ton of money and no doubt can afford the very best weed, he lives out of the spotlight, so why such a grump, Harry?

She admitted she had anorexia after that interview.

Some of you lack comprehension skills.

"Are you jealou?" was not directed AT Connie Chung. Connie says people tell her she looks thin all the time. So Calista says yeah and then they are comrades in arms for a minute in Calista's lighting fast changing of positions in the war. And "Are you jealous?" is supposed to be a thing they could BOTH say to people who make comments about them being so thin.

She clearly said it TO Connie. Her voice simmering with resentment and the icy, quivering hatred in her eyes at that moment was clearly directed at Ms. Chung. There was a feral glint shining off of her sparkling gray teeth when she spit her response at her. It was obvious Calista had to forcibly restrain herself from physically attacking and murdering the hapless commentator.

R93 you ignore that she has a child. Most directors are gay so no surprise she hooked up with a few gay directors . Why would she hook up with a heterosexual like Harrison Ford and stay long time with him. Ford has kids.

I secretly think that it is good for young women to have low grade eating disorders. They look good that way, get attention from men. Eventually get married and gain a little weight and have children. What's wrong with that?

She looked like shit, and yes, much older than she actually was because she was so skinny. Most women look as awful when they're skin and bones as they do when they're whales. I do agree with the poster above that the fashion for women / girls changed heavily in the late 1990s/early 2000s as a backlash to the female comfort clothing of Gen X. Compare how the girls dressed on say, Twin Peaks to how they dressed on any early 2000s high school show a decade later. And even further with Euphoria today, which apes the horrible and over sexed Y2K fashions.

Also, a majority of the 90s supers (save the codifier of heroin chic Kate Moss) had some semblance of curves - Naomi, Cindy, Linda etc. were not sticks like Calista here.

R98 Nope. You're just too simple minded to read the many layers of Calista's insanity.

[quote] Carrie Fisher was gay and Harrison had some kind of relationship with her.

I read The Princess Diarist by Fisher. The original Star Wars was filmed far from home, in England. Carrie was around 18. Ford was in his 30s and married. Yes, they had a sexual relationship during filming. It obviously meant a LOT to Carrie, based on her book. I was disappointed that the entire book was about Ford.

On the other hand, it was probably a convenient sexual outlet for Ford, who was far from home.

That interview is GOLD. But Callista is cute and I dig her. She's mean and snotty and passive aggressive and pretty smart on her feet too. Adorable.

Connie Chung, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer were all hideous monstrous spiders trying to trap celebrities in their web. Media women really were conditioned to be be hard bitches back then. Skinny hard bitches with PRETTY hair.

Still this was fun for Callista to get the best of Connie. Then she turned sweetly bad girl and she and Connie shared a secret moment over the ipecac when Callista invited Connie to share her retort to others " Are you jealous.?

Callista is cute. Snotty and defensive but can turn on the pretty and hold her own. I bet she and Harrison really enjoy each other. They're both misanthropic.

And drunk r33

Oh Wow, I totally forgot Lisa was in The New Edition Story R82. She played Ricky Bell's mother and was very entertaining in that role.

R51, m-m-m-my d-d-d-dear, you were f-f-f-f-fat shamed in the m-m-m-m-m-market at Oxford because you cr-cr-cr-crashed Ch-ch-charle's exhibition in London.

Fuck! "Charles's"

R103 Carrie Fisher is a lesbian .both her parents were gay. Her book was clearly lies. Liz Taylor and Richard Burton were gay. Actors are gay.

Just watched the interview clip, Calista is the antithesis of what I like in women. Everything about her to me is like nails on a chalkboard - uninteresting, minimalist, superficial..ugh.

Lavender marriages often involve odd pairings. There's a gay couple who run our local post office. He's handsome with squealing voice and she is an ugly mean dyke. I don't get how thet can stand each other without love glue. Still a lot of social stigma

r12 What were they saying?

Harrison likes to marry rodent-y blondes and have his affairs with buxom brunettes.

I don’t think Carrie was gay. She seemed to be unrequitedly in love with Ford for a long time. He is the most miserable-seeming pothead I’ve ever seen.

R113 she only dated gay guys. Both parents gay .

Paul Simon is gay?

IS Paul Simon gay?

Just because he's very short and bald and mousy with a light voice is no reason to accuse Paul Simon of being a homosexual.

R116 yes. So is Garfunkel.

And apparently Paul and John. According to DL anyway....

R119 prolly. Most elite entertainers are gay. Paul and John's girl friends were inexplicably ugly.

R59 I remember THIS cover.

the show acknowledged the cover at r59

Ally had a nightmare about being on the cover of Time.

Calista must have been so offended by that TIME cover.

What was the premise of the cover? How did Ally McBeal represent the death of feminism?

R116, yes. All men are gay, except David Letterman and Conan O'Brien.

(according to DL)

R125 males and females in singing/acting at elite level . Maybe individual sports as well like tennis and cycling. Datalounge

R97 was absolutely right. That's the way I took it as well. Just because someone tosses off a line to another person, it doesn't mean the comment was meant for them. There's no reason to be so incredibly bitchy about it, either.

Yet another with the "Slimmer's Disease". Don't you believe her!

Harrison Ford is one actor I can't say whether he is gay. I'm confused why a lesbian like calista hooked up with him for longterm

Hey Eldergays, Gen X-ers and older millennials. Memba Ally McBeal? This is her now... feel old yet?

I surprisingly never saw that interview (I followed all that bullshit “skinny watch”) back then but nothing she says isn’t true. Of course women who skinny shame are jealous - they hang on for dear life to the notion that any woman that dare to be smaller than they are are gripped by some massive ED (whether they really are or not).

In this case both were true - Calista was/is a naturally small boned and skinny woman, but after season 1 she took that to new levels and no longer looked just skinny but skinny and sick. Her natural size however is skinnier than about 98 percent of women who refuse to accept that as fact.

And is it not also true that you can’t dare ever “express concern” to an overweight woman, even if unhealthily so? That’s even more true today. And that even if she did have an eating disorder like she’s going to admit it on national TV?

Good for her for speaking her mind, even if she was a bit bitchy about it (but I would be testy too)

she is wrong. people get called out for being a fatass, are judged and discriminated against.

Yes R131, but she was also lying and did in fact, have anorexia. She admitted to it a few years later.

I never understood her appeal . She’s funny looking

Anorexics have a lot of inner rage in them

You'd have inner rage, too, if the last thing you ate was a lettuce leaf two weeks ago, you fucking asshole!

The girls in my bourgeois bohemian collective housing at college decided I, a male, but a friend, was to acknowledge to another girl there were concerns about her anorexia. It didn't go well. 1985.

No straight man alive is masturbating over a Calista Flockheart Holocaust starving victim frame.

They want big bouncy booties and titties. No one is jealous of Ms. Stick. You ain't it Ms. Thang.

The toothpick "action figure" kills me

Wow @ R139. They would never get away with a skit like that in 2022.

And that’s too bad for us, R140. We need more comedy that calls out public figures on their bullshit.

I wonder what she eats now.

Do she and Harrison still have sex . . . with each other?

R143 did they ever?

"Cindy, this is just some bones. Would you run from Calista Flockhart?"

Flockheart is still thin but not scarily so, her weight is stabilized and she has moved on

R113 Steve McQueen was the Opposite.

He married skinny brunettes and loved to have sex/affairs with busty blondes.

Women get that thin for the sake of other women, not for men. Women are vicious with each other.

R148 So true. I read something a long time ago about Courtney Cox walking past Terri Hatcher at Burbank Studios and immediately spitting out the jelly bean she was eating. It was the era of anorexia. Calista was not alone.

If they had made a movie about Joyce Maynard, Flockhart could’ve played her. They look a bit alike but sound the same and have the exact same speaking mannerisms.

None of it was necessary, and eating disorders are obviously awful, but good for Portia for STILL being the most attractive woman on the show, without having to go to the extremes that Flockhart did. And she wasn't a cunt, either. But she did eventually marry one.

I beg to differ R151.

In the article linked at R84, it says she admitted to anorexia in the last year of the show. I don't think she was anorexic the entire run. She's probably just someone that doesn't over-indulge or consume a lot of empty calories.

My sister, while not as thin as CF, has never had a weight problem. She eats candy or sweets once a month or so and never eats past being full. She can make a bag of M&Ms last months. I, on the other hand, can't get them to last an hour. Even when eating them one at a time!

Oh please, that bitch was skin and bones during the whole show. All women with eating disorders love to claim that they're just "naturally thin" and "take care of themselves." David E. Kelley deserves to be blamed for the fact we now have no actresses that look like actual women, just skin and bones with boyish bodies.

She does *not* bray.

Pre-nose job and fame, Calista PLAYED an anorexic in trouble in an HBO movie. That's the first time I saw her, and yes, she was anorexic FOREVER.

[quote]David E. Kelley deserves to be blamed for the fact we now have no actresses that look like actual women, just skin and bones with boyish bodies.

And of course while most of the women in the cast were obviously anorexic or showed physical signs of bulimia, the men were typically as average-looking or unattractive as could be.

I thought Jane Krakowski was by far the healthiest (and best looking!) one of the regulars on that show. I remember articles coming out about how she was "fat" - she just looked like a normal woman. The heroin chic era gave so much permanent brain damage to the media.

R157, what are physical signs of bulimia? Decayed teeth is all I can think of (vomit contains stomach acid), because bulimics can be fat.

Connie Chung was such a strange interviewer. She was always trying to make headline news by making someone trip up--I'm sure that's because Maury Povich was goading her to be confrontational.

Remember when she goaded Newt Gingrich's mother into whispering on the air Newt's opinion of Hillary Clinton ("She's a bitch!")?

R158 Jane looked chubby compared to the other women, but had the best body. There was a rumour David E Kelly asked the other females to lose weight so Calista wouldn't look so skinny

Chipmunk cheeks, R159, something that isn't always as obvious as the nickname implies. Sometimes it's a more subtle swelling near the jaw.

As a side note the outfits on the women were ridiculous for lawyers

R159 Also a lot of "fur" on the body. It's called lanugo and is like a peach fuzz on the arms and legs.

Or they're storing nuts for future use, R162.

Bitch was fat!

Lucy Liu didn't seem to get an eating disorder on the show even though she had a slim body. She should also have won the Supporting Emmy she was nominated for, she made Ling Woo hilarious and endearing.

Calista was like a batshit crazy version of Natalie Portman.

Unbearably bland, terrible actor, trying to “little girl” her way through life.

Flockhart should have won an Emmy too, instead the gave Helen Hunt FOUR for the same bland performance!

I will always be grateful to Helen Hunt for denying Calista an Emmy.

R169 Lightweight!

Lucy is an example of a naturally slim woman, not the rest of those skeletors. Funny enough, she’s not considered at all pretty or thin by East Asian standards. Most Asian-American actresses are very far off from those standards which are even more insane than the American ones.

R149 that is beyond fucked up.

I liked Calista in the film Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her where she has a scene reading tarot for Glenn Close. But Ally McBeal never interested me unless they had a guest star I wanted to see. I don't think the interview is the bitchfest some want it to be. Clearly the "Are you jealous?" is not said to Connie Chung but is what they might say to someone else who comments on them being thin.

R75 one thing i will give the younger generations is that they seem to understand that there is fundamentally no reward for live to work ( rather than work to live). For so long Americans were shoveled the propaganda that putting in a billion hours a week would lead to wonderful things, their co workers would eventually become their best friends, etc. I think finally a lot of people are coming to terms with the fact that this is nonsense. It's why so many office workers are pushing to continue WFH.

I first saw her in The Birdcage and was disturbed by her almost childlike styling to match her childlike body and (what I then considered) her middle-aged woman face.

Calista! Isn't that a wonderful name? It sounds vaguely pharmaceutical.

Go to the pharmacy, tell the pharmacist "I'll have a tube of Calista.....with reservoir tip!"

In actuality, anorexics think everyone is jealous of their thinness and willpower, it is part of their pathology.

The reality is, the questions they receive about their weight are due morbid curiosity and repulsion. Morbid curiosity and repulsion are also why the obese are questioned about their weight, although the chubsters of the world aren’t delusional enough to believe anyone is jealous.

Calista looked like hell in Ally McBeal and in that Emmy dress, and had the boniest body this side of Rachel Zoe.

I thought she looked awful in the The Bird Cage. Sickly.

[quote]Connie Chung, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer were all hideous monstrous spiders trying to trap celebrities in their web. Media women really were conditioned to be be hard bitches back then. Skinny hard bitches with PRETTY hair.

r104 I actually miss the days when you had Connie, Barbara, Diane, Oprah really taking these hussies to task. Now its all about kissing ass!

Anyway, this interview was almost 25 years ago and I'm not going judge anyone for what they said decades ago, like it happened yesterday. r154 yes rail thin was the look in the 90s and 2000s, but for the most part people are into body inclusivity these days

some without makeup pics.

I used to run a Calista Flockhart fan page on Geocities back in the 90’s. I’ll never not love her. What an austere, svelte muse.

There were so many articles about Jane Krakowski being "the fat one" on Ally McBeal. It was early enough that most of those articles aren't online, but someone archived this one from 2000.

Lisa Nicole Carson had the knockout body of the cast (even compared to Krakowski, IMO), but she fell off the face of the earth due to her mental health issues.

[quote] "I beg to differ [R151]."

I see your point. I guess she hadn't quite reached her personal physical best by then. But I think she was more attractive than Flockhart.

R184 Lisa did have a great body but her boobs were distracting big, and from the third season they stopped even dressing her like a lawyer when she was in court, her tits were halfway out her dress and she was doing some stupid baby voice.

You're absolutely right about her wardrobe, R186. The women's wardrobes in general were shitty on "Ally McBeal," as others have mentioned, but they eventually gave Carson a disrespectful, porn-y look.

She always had a thin, waifish body, though there were clearly points where she had edged into anorexia territory. She had the build of an ex-ballerina, similar to Keri Russell.

LNC is gorgeous, but just looking at her chest makes my back hurt. That can’t be comfortable.

Carson blames her hospitalization on smoking PCP, an illegal animal tranquilizer.

David E Kelly let the show go to shit in s5, became a joke

Portia’s memoir about her eating disorder is excellent.

She was already prone to binging and purging for a few reasons (her father’s early death, trying to be a teen model despite big boned and being told she had small eyes and a big nose, hiding her lesbianism) and joining the cast of Ally sent her into a tailspin. Her first day she asked Courtney where everyone ate lunch and Courtney paused then told her “it’s not that kind of set”.

You better stop it, Connie Chung!

[quote]Anyway, this interview was almost 25 years ago and I'm not going judge anyone for what they said decades ago, like it happened yesterday. [R154] yes rail thin was the look in the 90s and 2000s, but for the most part people are into body inclusivity these days

For the time being. It could all change again in ten-years' time. Probably.

R192 he did the same thing to Picket Fences which was a mess in Season 4. Not a long attention span.

[quote]David E Kelly let the show go to shit in s5, became a joke

The only redeeming thing about the last season was the addition of the gorgeous James Marsden.

Mary McDonnell had a botched facelift around 2007, and it wrecked her work on Battlestar Galactica.

But at least she came out looking like Calista Flockhart's mom.