Portia de Rossi

Portia de Rossi (born: Amanda Lee Rogers, married: Portia Lee James DeGeneres) is an Australian-American actress, model and philanthropist, known for her roles as lawyer Nelle Porter on Ally McBeal and Lindsay Fünke on Arrested Development. She also portrayed Veronica Palmer on Better Off Ted and Olivia Lord on Nip/Tuck. She is married to Ellen DeGeneres.

Early life:
de Rossi was born as Amanda Lee Rogers in Horsham, Victoria, Australia. She's the daughter of medical receptionist, Margaret Rogers and Barry Rogers. Barry Rogers died when Portia was nine. She grew up in Grovedale, a suburb of Geelong, Victoria, and modelled for print and TV commercials as a child. In 1988, at the age of 15, Rogers adopted the name Portia de Rossi, by which she remains best known; in 2005, she explained that she had intended to reinvent herself, using the given name of Portia, a character from William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and an Italian last name. She has admitted, in an interview she gave to the London Daily Mail, to having struggled with anorexia throughout her teens and young adulthood, from which she credits the love of Ellen DeGeneres for having saved her.

Education:
de Rossi spent her high school years in the Melbourne Girls Grammar School in Melbourne. In one episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, when Ellen and Portia visited Australia, they went to the school for a visit.

Marriage:
De Rossi was married to documentary film-maker Mel Metcalfe from 1996 to 1999, initially part of a plan to get a green card, but she did not go through with it. She said that "it just obviously wasn't right for me". In a 2010 interview on Good Morning America, she explained that as a young actress, she was fearful of being exposed as a lesbian. From 2000 to 2004, de Rossi dated singer Francesca Gregorini, the daughter of Barbara Bach and the stepdaughter of Ringo Starr. She said that most of her family and Ally McBeal castmates did not know she was a lesbian until tabloid pictures of the couple were published She declined to publicly discuss the relationship or her sexual orientation at the time. De Rossi and Gregorini broke up in late 2004 because de Rossi began dating Ellen DeGeneres, whom she met backstage at an awards show. She became engaged when DeGeneres proposed with a three-carat pink diamond ring.They were married at their Beverly Hills home on 16 August 2008, witnessed by their mothers and 17 other guests. In 2013, de Rossi announced that she and DeGeneres were not planning on having children.