Portia DeGeneres has come a long way from troubled young actress to successful, openly gay and happily married star, with an autobiography due out soon.
My knees went weak and I felt like I was shot through the heart with an arrow,” says Portia DeGeneres, recalling the most important moment of her life, the one that changed everything. It sounds like a line from a Mills & Boon romance, but their eyes literally did meet across a crowded room – actually, at a photo shoot in Hollywood. Though both were in relationships at the time, that was it, they had to be together. This is the moment when Portia met her wife-to-be Ellen DeGeneres and sparks were definitely flying.
In pictures: Stars who’ve changed their names
“I never thought I would experience that kind of feeling, being a lesbian,” says Portia. “That overwhelming experience of seeing someone across a room and falling in love with them.” Ellen retells it in much the same light. “We were just supposed to be together,” she told a US magazine not long after. They’d actually met three years earlier, backstage at a rock concert, when Portia had plucked up the courage to buy Ellen a drink. “I thought she was the most amazing person I’d ever met,” Portia recalls.
She weighed 76kg then, the heaviest she’d ever been, and she’s still amazed to this day that Ellen didn’t notice. “Ellen says she can’t remember me being heavy. But then she doesn’t see it at all. She just saw who I really was – she liked my brain.”
Ellen invited her back to her house that night to party on with a group of friends, but Portia was still hiding her sexuality from the public and didn’t have the courage to follow through. “I was too nervous,” says Portia. “I don’t regret it, though, because clearly it wasn’t the right time for us to be together.
“We both really, really liked each other and there was definitely a lot of chemistry there, but it was a ridiculous thought for me to be closeted and terrified of being discovered, and then date the most famous lesbian in the world. It wasn’t going to happen. I had such a long way to go before I could even be seen in public with a woman, much less be seen in public with that one,” she adds, laughing.
Yet, by December 2004, things were very different. Both Portia and Ellen freed themselves from their relationships and a passionate courtship ensued. Next came a proposal from Ellen, complete with a three-carat pink diamond engagement ring. “Ellen knew that it was important to me to have an engagement ring and I love diamonds,” coos Portia.
Read more of this story in the November issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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