TORONTO — Actress Portia de Rossi, who has been married to Ellen DeGeneres for five years, says there was a time when she didn’t want to be gay.
“I didn’t want to be a lesbian,” de Rossi said on The Conversation with Amanda De Cadenet.
“I’d never met one, for a start, and I just thought that they were strange and that they hated men and they were very serious. I had all these ridiculous images in my head,” she explained.
The 40-year-old Arrested Development star, who was born Amanda Lee Rogers, said she had no role models at the time.
de Rossi said she went out of her way to hide her sexuality while starring on Ally McBeal, which ran from 1998 to 2002.
“I was terrified that people would think that I was gay — or know that I was gay,” she said. “I shut down the emotional life. It was very isolating and very, very painful.”
The actress dated Francesca Gregorini, the daughter of ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, for four years before starting a relationship with DeGeneres.
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