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But past 50 and single – her 14-year second marriage, to the father of her kids, actor Parker Stevenson, ended in 1998, and she broke up with actor James Wilder in 2000 – Alley came to justify her size as essential to weeding out potential dates.
"I said to myself, ‘If some man really loves me, it will never again be for my very hot body. He who can see me through the layers of flab will be the real man for the real me.’"
She scoffs at that now. "It was like a stupid, female version of Cyrano de Bergerac."
Still, her true revelation didn’t come until she witnessed early footage of Fat Actress. "I didn’t realize I was that fat," she says. "Seriously."
Still, she had enough of a hint to include a joke in the first episode about her agent calling with an offer to promote Jenny Craig. Her hysterical reaction – "You’re killing me!" – wasn’t a big stretch.
Jenny Craig members usually go to program centers for their weekly weigh-ins, but Alley had hers at home to avoid paparazzi. ("I would do mine wearing nothing," she says. "I was nervous because . . . any woman knows how that feels!" Aside from the weigh-ins, she says she follows the program, which normally costs between $12 and $17 a day, as anyone would. (The company also provides the plan free to 10 of her friends and relatives; her sister has lost 60 lbs. so far.)
She eats portion-controlled packaged food and supplements it with fruit and vegetables, totaling between 1,200 and 1,500 calories daily. It wasn’t easy at first. "It took me four months to really know that I didn’t have to eat huge amounts." At restaurants, "even half of what I ate before was 10 times too much."
