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Kirstie Alley's expansive but cosy cottage in Maine - the one with the
2.5 metre lobster statue on the front lawn - the hostess shows her love
to friends and family by making chicken and noodles, and apple pie (to
die for, she says). On this day, however, she's offering up a selection
of desserts from a local baker. "Here's your choice," Alley
instructs a visitor. "We have this cake, which is sort of vanilla,
with a teeny little bit of a lemon taste. And you have this pie, which
is a plum-blueberry pie. Or you can have both. That's the beauty of
being in a fat person's house."
If it seems strange
to hear an actress refer to herself with Hollywood's dirtiest three-letter
word, well, consider it Alley's supreme act of rebellion. The woman
who rose to fame on Cheers in the late '80s, trading on her
bedroom eyes and bombshell body, is so comfortable with her current
weight of 92kg that in July she announced plans for a new cable show
called Fat Actress - a comedy-reality series slated to air
eventually on Seven and starring Alley in the title role. Now, after
years of keeping quiet while the tabloids obsessively chronicled her
weight, Alley is finally ready to set the record straight in an interview
with WHO. "The weird thing is, I don't like the way I look - and
I like who I am," says the 53-year-old, who has devoted much of
the past four years to raising her kids, Lillie, 10, and William True,
11. "I like who I am better than I've ever liked myself."
Sitting barefoot and smoking
cigarettes (a habit she resumed only recently), Alley appears far slimmer
than the 135kg frequently cited in the media: "a gross exaggeration,"
says the 1.73m star. Alley says that paparazzi photographers shoot her
from lower angles to make her look bigger and contends that some photos
have been doctored. "I'm forever walking around in grocery stores
and people go, 'You don't look that fat! How did you lose that weight
so fast?"' she says. "I haven't lost a pound."
She also takes issue with talk that her career has stalled. "I've
made a baffilion dollars in the last four years and I haven't stopped
working," says Alley, who produced and starred in the 2003 TV movie
Profoundly Normal and completed filming While I Was Gone,
a drama based on the Sue Miller novel.
 
And yet there is no doubt that the actress has lowered her profile in
recent years. Alley says she has been travelling extensively and focusing
on her children, of whom she shares custody with ex-husband Parker Stevenson,
52. "Four years ago I made a decision," she says. "I'm
gonna be the best mother I can be." The decision coincided with
the end of her three-and-a-half year relationship with actor James Wilder
and the demise of her comedy Veronica's Closet. "She creates
a whole wonderful world for her children," notes her close pal,
actress Kathy Najimy. "She is in that pool, on that trampoline,
in that dollhouse with her children."
With domestic tranquillity came a less disciplined approach to diet
and exercise. "I got lazy," she says bluntly. Alley admits
that "I haven't worked out for three years. I'm just going for
the stuff that looks yummy." Among her favourite indulgences: a
certain soft drink. Last year, when she hit the 90kg mark, "I drank
14 Stewart's grape sodas a day. I would drink one, and by the time it
was almost done I'd be popping another one just like a nut." Notes
her good friend John Travolta: "She is a lot like me. When I gain
weight, I enjoy it. She has been very jolly with it." Alley acknowledges
a craving for "that Martha Stewart life. If I had my way, I would
have 20 cake domes, and I'd have them all lined up."
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Why does she let herself go? "The truth about me is, when I'm
really upset about something, I don't chat. If I'm really happy, then
I live my life like it's Christmas vacation," she says. "And
you know, people go, 'Oh, I gained 7 lb over the holidays. 'Well,
if your holiday just lasted four years ... " What's more, "I
do not consider fat a disease," she says. "I mean, c'mon,
who had the f-king gun to my head? Nobody! What gene in my body says
I have to eat four cakes instead of two? It's a choice." Besides,
says Alley, "I would rather be 50 lb [23kg] overweight any day
of the week before I would jeopardise my health and become some Beverly
Hills skinny-ass bitch."
But
if Alley seems unbothered by her size, the tabloids have taken a different
stance. "My weight in the rags is being treated like a tragedy,"
she says. "Tragedies in my mind would be like AIDS, starvation,
illiteracy, child abuse." Yet since January, when she began developing
Fat Actress, Alley secretly welcomed the attention. "I just thought,
'Bring it on.' There couldn't be any better publicity than this.
On
the show, which will be improvised, Alley will play a character based
on herself, and many of the series' scenarios will derive from real
incidents, such as the time Alley disrobed in front of a boyfriend
and was met with the comment, "'Wow,you're a big girl.' I weighed
1141b [52kg] and I looked like friggin' Calista Flockhart!",
she says.
The middle child of Robert, 80, a timber company owner, and Mickie,
a housewife who died in 1981, Alley grew up in Wichita, Kansas. As
a girl, "I'd say to my dad, 'I'm gonna grow up and have four
cars and do all these big movies and have a huge house and I'm gonna
eat cake batter for dinner.'" Yet by her mid-20s, Alley had abandoned
her acting dreams and ended a brief marriage. While working as an
interior designer in Wichita she also began battling a cocaine addiction.
"It wasn't so much that I was doing the drugs that upset me,"
she says. "What upset me is that I could feel myself dying spiritually."
The turning point: reading Dianetics by Scientology founder
L. Ron Hubbard; at 28, Alley sought help for her drug problem and
became a Scientologist. After re-dedicating herself to acting, she
landed her big break in 1982's Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan.
With steady pay cheques, Alley's weight began to yo-yo. "There's
a joke between my actress friends and me," she says. "We
all laugh about how we were skinny out of necessity. When I started
acting, I had no money, so money certainly wasn't gonna go for food.
It was gonna go for shoes. Or a bikini. The second we started having
success - it sounds dumb, but you can have anything you want to eat
every day." In 1987, she made her debut on Cheers, seducing
the world with her potent combo of comedic skill and physical beauty.
"People go, 'Oh, her sexy, svelte self when she was on Cheers,"
says the actress. "That's not the way I felt. If I thought about
myself, I'd be thinking, 'Oh, you're not as beautiful as Michelle
Pfeiffer". Pressure from the bosses when she did gain weight
added to her insecurity "I've been called in to studio executives'
offices during Cheers, when I got up to a whopping 136 lb
[62kg]," she says. "I was called in on Veronica's Closet
when I weighed a whopping 151 lb [68kg]."
These days, Alley is content to divide time with her kids-plus seven
dogs-among her houses in Maine, LA and Oregon. At the Maine cottage,
Alley, Lillie and True can often be found at the local cemetery ("It's
an old one and parts of it are really scary") and at community
bingo games. And yes, Alley does plan to lose weight - but on her
terms. If I don't like the way I look, and I don't, I have to work
out a plan that suits me," she says. In the meantime, Fat
Actress - and the chance to finally reveal the full Kirstie "has
made me really excited," she says, about the second part of my
life."
Reported
by Allison Gee in Los Angeles.
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