Alley’s dance with Hollywood
Kirstie Alley, who died last week, was a knockout beauty with real comedy chops whose self-ironic humor softened the “kapow” of her glamour-girl looks.
Whether playing a fictional character (as in “Cheers”), playing herself (in interviews or in her reality TV series, “Kirstie Alley’s Big Life”) or some version in-between (like the fictionalized version on “Fat Actress”), Alley infused every performance with a sly self-awareness.
Alley was a rare standout in Hollywood for being a full-figured, at times even self-proclaimed, “fat actress,” who never stopped being sexy. Everything about her telegraphed lushness, abundance. She wore her dark hair in cascading waves that fell over one eye. Her catlike eyes were framed by permanently arched brows that gave her a slightly ferocious look.
Beneath both the gorgeous and the funny, though, a strain of melancholy increasingly crept into Alley’s persona, and yes, it was about the weight. For while she seemed never to lose her sex appeal, and starred in a string of sitcoms and movies, her struggle with weight was inextricable from her public persona. Tabloids dogged her, punitively chronicling her body fluctuations: “TV bosses tell Kirstie Alley, ‘You’re too fat!’ ” screamed a typical headline of The National Enquirer in 2007.
Alley responded gamely, making weight an overt part of her career. Rather than hiding, or disappearing to some spa to reemerge mysteriously svelte, she owned the issue. She starred in her own sitcom, “Fat Actress,” documenting her character’s (and hence her own) journey to fitness.
“Honestly, I didn’t know how fat I was,” Alley said in a 2004 appearance with Oprah Winfrey, explaining that all the media scrutiny of her weight had led her to sign on as a spokesperson for the Jenny Craig diet program. Two years later, Alley, then 55, returned to Winfrey’s show to show off her 75-pound weight loss. Winfrey and the audience cooed in amazement.
But the moment seemed more poignantly vulnerable than triumphant. Alley proclaimed she had given up her habit of “eating with wild abandon.” She told People that, just before joining Jenny Craig, she’d asked herself, “I’m old. I’m fat. What am I worth?”
In other words, Alley’s public weight loss had become a redemption narrative. Maintaining control of her weight would prove a never-ending battle.
Alley gained back all the lost pounds, and then some. In 2011, she joined another television show — “Dancing With the Stars” — which again wound up training a spotlight on her “weight loss journey.” While she and her partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy earned second place in the competition, but media coverage of Alley’s participation in the show focused on her body and dietary habits, often with numerical precision.
Alley would drop 100 pounds that year — a statistic that was repeated
endlessly, accompanied always by the inevitable before-and-after photos, along with reminders of her age, 60 at that time. Numbers everywhere.
As recently as October of this year, a profile of Alley noted that she “has always followed certain methods to shed a lot of (pounds), and at present, she not only looks slimmer and stunning but a lot younger than her age too.”
So, was Alley complicit in her own objectification? Of course. Over and over, she agreed to divulge details of her diet, her calorie count, her exact weight. But she was coping, with humor and panache, with an antiquated system not of her own invention, a system she had entered decades before anyone had heard of the body positivity movement.
And in this she was a pioneer, even if she couldn’t totally rid herself of the shame that still attends the subject of weight for women, and a culture that constantly assays and assesses us. If she kept retelling a circular story of her so-called falls from grace, she’s not alone there either — America has a special fondness for redemption stories. Let’s remember and appreciate Kirstie Alley for the wry, sexy humor she infused those stories with, and her role at the very beginning of a movement for body acceptance, even if she never got to enjoy it.