'FAT LADY' STINGS
Opera gal lost weight & found woes
Renowned opera singer Deborah Voigt made headlines in 2004 after a London opera company fired her for being “too fat.”
Now the slimmeddown songstress — who once weighed more than 300 pounds— shares how gastric by pass surgery helped her lose weight but pushed her to the brink of despair.
In 2003, Voigt was slated to star in a modern take on “Ariadne auf Naxos” at Royal Opera House in London, England, but the director canned her because the costume was a “little black dress.”
“Now tipping the scales at 330 pounds, I did not fit the director’s idea of this new, svelte Ariadne,” Voigt, 54, writes in her memoir “Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva” (Harper Collins), out on Jan. 27. “To put it bluntly: I didn’t fit the dress.”
But Voigt also rails against critics praising male singers like Luciano Pavarotti for their “huggable, teddybear roundness,” while slamming the girth of female soloists.
“Why is it okay for the male opera stars to be big and not the women?” she writes. “The double standard is alive and well in the opera world when it comes to men’s and women’s bodies.”
Still, Voigt reveals how her size did matter — onand offstage. At size 26, she often couldn’t fit into costumes and was told by her thenhusband that audiences laughed at her.
“We lived in the world where ‘it ain’t over till the fat lady sings,’ ” Voigt writes, “and people expected their opera singers to be big. So to hear that an opera singer, of all people, would be fired for being too fat . . . was ludicrous.”
The stout songbird used her payment from the failed London role for gastric bypass surgery.
Within a year, she lost 100 pounds but inadvertently swapped food addiction for alcohol. In between performances, she lost herself in dangerous affairs with men met online and alcoholfueled blackouts that eventually landed her in rehab. It was there that the prima donna finally let go of her demons.
“If Puccini and Verdi didn’t see fit to compose happy endings for their tragic heroines, then this reluctant, downtoearth diva was going to write one for herself,” she said.