Childhood

Ellen Lee DeGeneres was born on January 26, 1958,
in Metairie, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans.
She spent most of her childhood there, living with her parents and her older brother, Vance.

As a child, Ellen spent much of her free time exploring the city :
“I rode my bike everywhere. All over uptown. You know, people can grow up in New Orleans
without realizing how unique a city it is. I remember thinking that it was a really neat place.”

Her father, insurance salesman Elliot De Generes
and her mother Betty , a speech therapist, were divorced when she was 13 years old.

She recalled using comedy to help her mother through the painful period after the divorce:
“My mother was going through some really hard times and I could see when she was really getting down,
and I would start to make fun of her dancing, then she’d start to laugh and I’d make fun of her laughing.
And she’d laugh so hard she’d start to cry, and then I’d make fun of that.
So I would totally bring her from where I’d seen her start going into depression to all the way out of it.”

Her mother remarried, and her new husband, salesman Roy Gruessendorf,
moved the family to Atlanta, Texas.

In Atlanta, Ellen had to endure not only being a new kid in town at the age of 16, but her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to undergo a mastectomy. As Ellen would later disclose, during that time her stepfather made inappropriate sexual advances towards her, which she kept secret for years. On the surface, things might have looked rosy for a teenager who was a member of the varsity tennis team and had several boyfriends, but Ellen desperately wanted to quit school and get away from her stepfather.

First jobs

She graduated from Atlanta High School in May 1976, and moved back to New Orleans to attend the University of New Orleans, where she majored in communications. After one semester, she left school to do clerical work in a law firm along with cousin Laura Gillen. She also held a job selling clothes at the chain store the Merry-Go-Round at the Lakeside Shopping Center in New Orleans. Other working experiences included being a waitress at TGI Friday’s and another restaurant, a house painter, a hostess and a bartender.

Ultimately she realized that she did not like following other people’s rules,
and she would have to make a career for herself that allowed for independence.
At the age of twenty-three, she started to flesh out a comedy routine, first performing
just for friends and then at local coffeehouses and comedy clubs. Soon she became the master of ceremonies, or emcee, at a New Orleans comedy club.

The beginning

Around the same time, Ellen found a kindred spirit in a similarly young, creative writer and found herself in love with this woman. The pair’s romance was cut short when the woman was killed in a car accident. A grieving she channeled her loss into a monologue where she pretended to call God on the telephone and ask him to explain the seemingly illogical workings of the world. A video of her performing the funny and poignant “phone call to God” act was sent in to a nationwide search by the cable network Showtime, and in 1982 she won the title of “Funniest Person in America and went immediately from local New Orleans comic to nationally recognized up-and-coming comedian.

In 1986, she appeared for the first time on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, who likened her to Bob Newhart. When Carson invited her over for an onscreen chat after her performance, she became the first female comedian in the show’s history to whom this honor was bestowed.

The serie ‘Ellen’

In 1991, Ellen was honored as best female stand-up comic at the 1991 American Comedy Awards.
About the same time, she branched out to begin acting in television series.
She appeared in a couple of short-lived sitcoms, Open House and Laurie Hill, before earning her own show.
These Friends of Mine premiered on ABC in March of 1994, receiving mixed reviews and decent ratings.
The show starred Ellen as Ellen Morgan, an employee (and later owner) of a bookstore called Buy the Book.
It focused on the lives of Ellen and her friends, finding humor in the mundane, everyday events of the characters’lives.

By the beginning of the second season, the show had undergone major changes, including its title, which became Ellen. The reviews and the ratings steadily improved, as more and more viewers connected with Ellen’s oddball humor and appealing, average-gal persona. She earned numerous nominations for Emmy Awards, and in 1997 she won the prestigious Peabody Award for her work on the show.

In the spring of 1997, Ellen made pop-culture history by having her character come out as a lesbian,
becoming the first gay lead character on a network television sitcom. That show, called “The Puppy Episode,” aired April 30, 1997 and garnered forty-six million viewers. At the same time, Ellen herself came out to millions with a cover story in Time magazine announcing that “Yep, she is gay.” The announcement came as no surprise, fans and journalists had speculated that it was coming but it still generated a media storm. Many fans wrote supportive letters, while others were scandalized by the news.

High and low

During the 1997–98 season, Ellen began losing viewers. Many observers suggested that the show had fundamentally changed when the main character’s sexual orientation became the focus of numerous episodes. Some believed that the network simply did not want the controversy generated by the announcement about Ellen’s sexuality. Some major advertisers had pulled out, and the network, fearful of offending viewers, began attaching warning labels to episodes that showed Ellen kissing another woman or discussing her sexual orientation. The show was cancelled after the 1997–98 season.

After her show’s cancellation, she went through a difficult period, both professionally and personally.
Her highly publicized relationship and August of 2000 breakup with actress Anne Heche eroded much of the goodwill fans felt toward her—or at least that is what she believed: “I went through a phase, whether it was true or not, where my perception was, ‘Everyone hates me now,’ and it felt horrible.”
She appeared in a number of films during this period, including EDtv and The Love Letter, but none of these established her as a successful film actress. In 2001, Ellen starred in a short-lived sitcom called The Ellen Show, which was praised by reviewers but never attracted a large audience.

Over the next year, Ellen began showing up on television more and more often. She hosted Saturday Night Live, appeared on an episode of Will and Grace, and occupied the center square on the primetime game show Hollywood Squares.

Suddenly, in 2003, she was everywhere. She returned to stand-up with a hugely successful thirty-five-city tour, culminating with an HBO comedy special called Ellen DeGeneres: Here and Now. She published a best-selling book of comic essays called The Funny Thing Is…, and she lent her voice to what became the highest-grossing animated movie of all time: “Finding Nemo”.
The character of the blue tang fish Dory seemed tailor-made for Ellen’s wide-eyed, naive, and intensely likable person, and in fact the role was written expressly for her.

The Ellen Degeneres show

In the fall of 2003, she found herself once again at the center of a self-titled television program; this time she was not the star of a sitcom but the host of a daytime talk show.
In its first season, The Ellen DeGeneres Show earned positive reviews and solid ratings across the nation.
The successful year was topped off with a record twelve Emmy Award nominations in 2004, the most ever received by a talk show in its debut season.
According to an article in the Washington Post, when she heard the news about the Emmy nominations, DeGeneres responded : “They told me, you got nominations for every single category except the song, and I instantly said, ‘What’s wrong with our song?’” In addition to three technical awards, DeGeneres’s program won the 2004 Emmy for outstanding talk show. She says : “I have fun every day. It’s the best job I ever had.”

Right now

She is happily married with former Ally McBeal and Arrested Development star Portia de Rossi. After the overturn of the same-sex marriage ban in California, she announced on a May 2008 show that she and Portia were engaged. They got married on August 16, 2008 at their home, with 19 guests including their respective mothers.

Ellen is in her seventh season of the Ellen Degeneres show.