On Wednesday’s edition of The Project Tziporah Malkah, formerly known as Kate Fischer, spoke candidly about her dramatic fall from grace.
Tziporah shot to fame at just 14-years-old when she won the Dolly Magazine Covergirl of the Year competition in 1988.
From there, the former model who was even dubbed as the next Elle Macpherson, was to grace the cover of Vogue four times, feature in two INXS music videos and begin a prosperous acting career, famously stripping down to her birthday suit for the Australian film Sirens, starring alongside a-listers by the likes of Portia de Rossi and Hugh Grant.
Tziporah Malkah, formerly known as Kate Fischer, was featured on the cover of Vogue multiple times.
Here Tziporah (R) can be seen alongside her Siren co-stars, Portia de Rossi (L) and Elle Macpherson (Centre).
It was during these years in the spotlight that Tziporah, who is now a contestant on this year’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!, began dating billionaire James.
Speaking with Channel Ten’s Carrie Bickmore, the 42-year-old said, “I hate talking about him, I hate being defined by him. I had a very promising career, I feel like I was a bud snapped off the vine before I had the time to bloom.”
Tziporah went on to explain that her relationship with James wasn’t as picture perfect as it might have originally seemed, revealing that James was extremely controlling in how she was to spend her time.
Tziporah (L) who currently stars on the hit reality TV show, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!, is determined to live a different life to the one she shared with James (R).
“I had to stop work,” she said. “He would say ‘It’s tacky. You’re going to be my wife and it’s tacky that you should go out like you need to work’. I was allowed to do a play at the Sydney Opera House, because that had some substance to it. And I just went shopping and coffee with friends.”
Tziporah added that their five year relationship was undoubtedly strained by the stresses of his work.
“He was under so much pressure and stress. He would come home and sometimes not talk to me,” she said.
“He really, really loved me and it was exciting and everything, but then all that changed — it was like, ‘it’s too hard to have you in my life, you can be Mrs Packer and have all the credit cards, you can do whatever you want, but you have to let me do whatever I want’. And that’s not a marriage — that’s not the sort of marriage I want.”
Tziporah, who now works as a nurses aid, also used her time with Carrie to clear up any confusion surrounding the compensation she received from James at the time of their spilt – money, which she said Packer’s friends and family had deemed “ill-gotten.”
“I looked like this horrible woman who’d run off with the Packer money,” she said.
Stamping out rumours that she had received a payout in the realm of $10 million dollars, Tziporah added, “He didn’t give me $10 million. James paid a million dollars for a house and we lived in it for two years and he said: ‘You can keep it’.”
“So I kept the house and he gave me a few hundred thousand dollars.”
The pair were together for five years before finally calling time on their relationship in 1998.
Heartbroken after the demise of her relationship with James – a relationship in which they had already planned how many children they would have and what their names would be – Tziporah fled Australia for LA in 1998. She had hoped that escaping the limelight and fleeing the enormous shadow the Packer family and its billions had cast over her would help her to find her true self.
During this time, Tziporah revealed to The Project’s host Carrie, that she had a small stint in Hollywood before meeting another man who would later swindle her remaining funds, leaving her “totally broke.”
It was at this point that Tziporah was forced to make her way back to Australia where strained family ties left her with no other option other than to recuperate and heal in a women’s shelter.
“I Googled ‘homelessness Melbourne’. Even though I’d dropped out of show business eight years earlier, people still recognised me. I felt so ashamed. I thought: ‘How am I going to explain this to anybody?’”
Recalling the day she moved into the 22-person shelter she said, “I was pretty numb. I was in a lot of shock.”
“I just sat down on my bed and wept, I’d tumbled from a great height.”
Despite her utter heartbreak and trying times of tragedy, Tziporah is using her reclaimed fame as a way to speak out for homeless women.
“I was a princess in an ivory tower. I didn’t see it. It didn’t occur to me what it’s like to really, really suffer. Since I’ve had this experience, it’s really made me want to come back.”
We wish Tziporah all the very best.
