In Diane Keaton’s memoir, Then Again, she writes that when she was 19, a Broadway director offered her a part in the Broadway musical Hair — on the condition she lose 10lbs. She developed an eating disorder. “I don’t think it was called bulimia then,” she tells People. “It was just this trick you could do. It’s a horrible problem. Ugly and awful.”
This was in the late sixties, but you have to wonder: How many other women were told the same thing? By that director or another? How many Hollywood actresses are still> told to lose weight, today? Keaton went to therapy — the “talking cure,” she calls it — but were there others who didn’t pull through?
In case you were wondering: She got the part. The photograph below, taken in June of 1968, shows Keaton — on the lower level, in the middle, between two costars — on stage performing “White Boys” in Hair. (Legend has it she refused to take off her clothes at the end of Act I when the cast gets naked, even though actors who performed nude received a $50 bonus.)