Calista Flockhart was confronted with body shaming.
The 59-year-old and still petite actress says her years of work on the show “Ally McBeal” were ruined by constant media speculation about her weight and height. The series that made her a star aired from 1997 to 2002.
“I don’t think that could happen today,” she told The New York Times. Today we're talking about body shaming. I haven't thought about this in a long time, but it's really not okay to blame someone for having an illness that many people struggle with.
Calista Flockhart said she often worried that speculation about her health would be enough to ruin her chances of getting a job after Ally McBeal. This worried her so much that her health was affected. “I was an easy target, I think. It was painful, it was complicated. I loved working on Ally McBeal and that made it even harder. I was sleep deprived and depressed. I thought it would ruin my career. I thought no one would ever hire me again because they would have assumed I had anorexia and that would have been the end of everything,” she said.
“Honestly, I've never been in a situation where I had to watch my weight,” said Calista Flockhart, adding that her mother also had a small stature. “My mother is 1.50 m tall and weighed 42 kg when she got married. We can talk about a tiny little elf. I only have small bones and I’m lucky,” she concluded.
But in order to devote herself to her family life, the actress who played the famous lawyer in the legendary series left the sets. In 2001, the Ally McBeal singer adopted her son Liam and the following year she met Harrison Ford, whom she married in 2010. Calista Flockhart returns as Lee Radziwill in Feud: Capote vs The Swan on FX this year.