Body image issues can be particularly acute for people in entertainment careers, and performers are so often icons and role models of appearance.
Psychotherapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz helps creative people in TV/Film, performing and fine arts.
In one of her articles, she asks:
“How are you getting in touch with your artistic expression through the messiness of challenging feelings about your body?
“How is your creative flow impacted by shame you feel about your body?
“At times, your feelings about your body become the obstacles to your creativity.”
- See more in her article
When Body Shame Blocks Creativity: How EMDR Helps
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Janet Jackson commented in an interview years ago about unhealthy body image feelings and how they can arise:
“I don’t see myself as a sexy person…
“For a long time, I had a hard time finding things I liked about myself physically. I’d never look in the mirror…’cause I didn’t really like what I saw.
“One day I looked in the mirror because I wanted to find something that I liked about myself — and I started crying. I didn’t see anything.
“I would always wear clothes that made my butt look smaller because I was so self-conscious about it.”
She was asked where her body issues came from…
See much more in article Do you feel shame or stress about body image as an artist?
(Photo: Janet Jackson from her Facebook page.)
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In her memoir Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, Portia de Rossi writes about a dark side of pursuing a “perfect” look.
“Anorexia was my first love.
“I didn’t decide to become anorexic. It snuck up on me disguised as a healthy diet, a professional attitude.
“Being as thin as possible was a way to make the job of being an actress easier.”
From the book summary:
“Portia de Rossi weighed only 82 pounds when she collapsed on the set of the Hollywood film in which she was playing her first leading role.
“This should have been the culmination of all her years of hard work—first as a child model in Australia, then as a cast member of one of the hottest shows on American television.
“On the outside she was thin and blond, glamorous and successful. On the inside, she was literally dying.”
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Toni Collette provides more perspectives:
“I don’t understand why you have to look like a model to be a successful actor, what a character looks like is an extension of what they feel,” she says.
“This is going to sound offensive, but for female actors there is a uniform of being you are meant to aspire to.
“There’s this new batch of younger women who all look the same: the same rail thin body, the same blond hair – it’s like they all go to the same hairdresser.
“It’s kind of scary, and not the kind of image you should be putting out.
“What audiences and I respond to is what you can’t see, what can’t be fully explained.
“What’s between the lines, unseen.”
[Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2006]
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Body image and authentic characters
Patricia Arquette portrayed prison worker Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell in Escape at Dannemora (Showtime 2018), followed by ‘Dee Dee Blanchard’ in The Act (Hulu 2019).
Photo: she gained 40 pounds to play ‘Tilly.’
Writer Sophie Gilbert noted in her Atlantic article that Arquette kept much of her added weight to play Dee Dee:
“Various people she was close to, Arquette told me later, people she loves, tried to convince her that the weight gain wasn’t necessary, that she could wear a fat suit instead.
“They were worried about how deglamorizing herself might affect her career.
“But Tilly—who in the series is embroiled in relationships with both of the inmates whose escape she helps facilitate—had a number of sex scenes, and Arquette wanted them to be as authentic as possible.”
Arquette said: “I want to have these conversations about women being sexual who don’t have that certain Hollywood body type.
“If you look around you in the real world, does everyone look like that? Aren’t we supposed to be telling the stories of human beings?”
(From Patricia Arquette’s Second Act by Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, Mar 17, 2019.)
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Probably many of us – male and female – appreciate relatively thin women who are actors and other performers, particularly those with talent, depth and passion for their work. But thankfully there are many women in film and television with other body types who are also dynamic artists – and hopefully studios and casting directors will continue to help portray authentic women, real human beings.
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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