Elisa Donovan has recently opened up about her previous struggles with severe anorexia, which nearly took her life.
On Wednesday, she revealed that she nearly suffered a heart attack while filming Clueless due to her eating disorder anorexia, also called loss of appetite.
Donovan recalled, “I was suffering greatly from anorexia, and I had been in denial about it. I had maybe three or four days off in one week, and I almost had a heart attack.”
The 50-year-old actress, who played Amber Mariens in the iconic 1995 teen comedy, said one of her friends had to rush her to an urgent care center at the time.
She recalled, “The doctor started talking to me about eating disorders and all these things. And I said, ‘Well you’re crazy,’ because I thought I was too fat to be anorexic, which is part of the malady.”
“At that moment, I was so afraid I was going to lose my job,” she continued. “My life had started taking off in the way I wanted it to with my career, and I was concerned that this was now suddenly going to prevent me from that.”
The actress said she realized at the time that she needed help with her food issues. She said, “Initially, the only reason I started to really get help was because I was worried I’d not be able to continue, but then ultimately, that isn’t what helps you to recover. It has to come from a more pure place of wanting to be better.”
Donovan also revealed that her decision to seek anorexia treatment “began in the middle of shooting” of Clueless. She said of the film, “It changed my life in a lot of ways. It helped me to get healthy.”
In a 2009 celebrity blog post with PEOPLE, Donavan shared that it took “many years of therapy, determination and love to overcome my disorder.”
“Having recovered from anorexia many years ago, I’ve made it a way of life not to talk about my body, or your body or anybody else’s body,” she wrote at the time. “I learned long ago that at their core, eating disorders and ‘body image’ issues have very little to do with the physical body at all. They’re about control, perfection and the size of our feelings and desires — not the size of our hips.” The story was published on PEOPLE.
