How Kirstie Alley took on the Hollywood sizeists
Everyone loved Kirstie Alley’s ‘bigness’, until she actually got big. Although she loathed being fat — and the gross double standards — the Cheers star became the first actress to weaponise it.
In Cheers, the iconic TV series of the 1980s, Kirstie Alley played Rebecca big: big attitude, big husky voice, big shoulder pads, big hips. She wasn’t a “match” for bartender Sam, the central role played by Ted Danson; she had Sam pinned at all times. In an era when men were the comics, she was never the foil, she was it: she ate male co-stars and one-liners for breakfast. She was – as so many millions of admiring men would say, slack-jawed, as she strode off from the Cheers bar with a killer zinger – a “helluva woman”.
Everyone loved Alley’s “bigness”, until she actually got big. Now that she has died it is important to note not just Alley’s greatness as a leading lady, but her great response to living in a greater body. She was, in essence, all sprawl, a force, a volume. Her sparring in Cheers was up there with the on-screen divas of the snappiest Howard Hawks films. In the old Hollywood movie Sunset Boulevard a man says to fading screen legend Norma Desmond: “You used to be big, Norma.” Norma replies: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” In Alley’s case, at her peak in the 1980s, in Cheers and playing opposite John Travolta in Look Who’s Talking, she was big. And then the pictures got too small to contain her.
It was at this point, when Alley gained weight well beyond the narrow margins allowed of a female Hollywood star, that she was cast in a new role: an entirely unwanted one. While Oprah Winfrey and Renée Zellweger had amused the Hollywood paparazzi for a while with their weight fluctuations, in Alley they found their constant punchbag. Alley had sinned by becoming a fat female, and their obsession with punishing her with weekly humiliating photo spreads — “you will be SHOCKED at what Kirstie Alley looks like now!” — went beyond tabloid schadenfreude. In Alley, Anglo-American popular culture had found a vehicle for uncomfortable feelings about rising and pervasive obesity. This was served with a side order of double standards: her co-stars like Travolta were allowed to fill out.
Alley, of course, retreated. Her memoir of sorts, How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life, is dedicated to “all those big-bottomed girls out there who are not always treated like queens … hail, hail, the queens of posterior”. It contains semi-comedic diary entries: “Lied to friend. Said could not go to fancy Hollywood party with her as had children and no sitter. Truth: did not fancy Hollywood party because I am fat and mortified I might see Keanu Reeves.”
In 2004 Alley was told yet again that her size was seriously damaging her career. She went to bed and cried for seven days. Then she decided to stop retreating and attack. She conceived a series called Fat Actress, televised by Showtime. The first episode is called Big Butts, and has Alley playing a satirical version of herself, crawling in tears away from the weighing scales.
Her agent says she won’t get a show until she is thin. Alley asks why she suffers when actors like James Gandolfini or John Goodman are still working — “Jason Alexander looks like a bowling ball!” Her agent says, “They’re all men”, and Alley says, “I can play a man.”
“It felt liberating,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. She had become imprisoned by the tabloids, she was “embarrassed to walk out of my own house”, and now the question was, “how to create with what you have?”.
The series didn’t get a second season, which isn’t too much of a surprise. It is an extraordinary show: in 2005 it was both many decades before its time and miscategorised. It’s not a comedy: it spills with too much rage and politics to be funny. It could easily be the set piece of an inquiry into our complicated feelings about 21st-century fatness.
Alley certainly had complicated feelings: in Fat Actress her character bewails her only gig offered being a partnership with the weight-loss company Jenny Craig. In real life she partnered with Jenny Craig twice, her wildly fluctuating weight the exact basis of their lucrative business model.
She loathed being fat and loathed the pressure to be thin. For the tabloids she was a vehicle. In Fat Actress Alley weaponised the joke. “Her ass is like the back of a cab!” says one executive. In doing so she was the first actress to hit back, and became a vehicle for the tortured feelings of so many women struggling with their weight.
Fat Actress is not just about a fat actress, Alley said in an interview. “It’s really about every woman, what they confront, what they’re intimidated about, what introverts them,” she said. “It’s not hard to introvert a woman, and that’s sick.”
Alley was, magnificently, always a little too much.
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