Battling a decades-long eating disorder, Diane Keaton embraces her scars of aging but is called “ugly” and “fat” by cruel fans

Diane Keaton, the septuagenarian who’s amassed generations of fans in her almost 60 years of acting, is the master of many things on screen.

Off screen however, the Hollywood “it girl” was a “master at hiding,” dark secrets kept by a young woman that she now admits are “creepy.”

Leading with an abundance of humility, Keaton is an advocate of natural aging, and proud of her silvery mane, along with her appearance as a woman in her late 70s.

“I tell myself I’m free to do whatever the hell I want with my body. Why not? I may be a caricature of my former self; I’m still wearing wide-belted plaid coats, horn-rimmed glasses, and turtlenecks in the summertime. So what? Nobody cares but me,” she said in an interview with the Daily Beast. “I don’t see anything wrong with face-lifts or Botox or fillers. They just erase the hidden battle scars. I intend to wear mine, sort of.”

Though actor, author, director and singer is one of Hollywood’s most respected actors, she is not immune to unsolicited judgements from the public.

In 2014, after she appeared at the Golden Globes, an online user targeted her with a Tweet that says, “Wow. Diane Keaton got fat.”

Recently, without any apparent provocation, another critic said, “Well Diane Keaton isn’t nice, she ugly inside and out!”

What needs to be understood is that the gorgeous star–with an enviable slim physique–is in recovery for a toxic relationship she has with food.

Appearing on the Dr. Oz Show, Keaton revealed, “It was horrible. It was, of course, the lowest point of my life…I was a fat person, I was an obese person, who had somehow tricked myself and managed to hide it. So when you’re living with a lie for four years…” Explaining her battle with bulimia, she continued, “All I did was feed my hunger, so I am an addict. It’s true. I’m an addict in recovery, I’ll always be an addict. I have an addictive nature to me.”

Her insecurities were triggered at the very start of her career when she was teased with the lead in Hair, in exchange for her losing 10 pounds. The production also offered an extra $50 to the actors willing to strip down at the end of Act 1. Keaton refused.

To deal with the pressures, she ate, a lot. And then she threw up, emptying her stomach of everything she consumed.

Every dinner she would have 20,000 calories in the form of “a bucket of fried chicken, several orders of fries with blue cheese and ketchup, a couple of TV dinners, a quart of soda, pounds of candy, a whole cake, and three banana cream pies.”

Recognizing she had a problem, she met with a therapist five times a week over a year, to overcome the binge eating disorder.  

“Now it’s (addiction) work orientated or trying to raise my children as best I can, even though they’re…not really children anymore,” said Keaton, of her adopted children.

Roasting his multi-talented friend at the 2017 American Film Awards gala, where Keaton was presented a Lifetime Achievement Award, Woody Allen joked about her eating disorder, that she hid from him while they were dating.

“I didn’t know many things until I read her books,” Allen joked. “I didn’t know she was bulimic… I would be taking her to these high-end restaurants. $400 for dinner. If I knew she was throwing them up, I could have taken her to Pizza Hut.”

Though Keaton was among the star-studded crowd that erupted into laughter, her bulimia was very serious to her.

Insisting that she didn’t lose the weight to meet the demands of the Hair producers, Keaton said she continued to keep the weight off and “became a master at hiding. Hiding any evidence–how do you make sure no one knows? You live a lifestyle that is very strange. You’re living a lie.”

She adds, “People were nice enough, but I felt like an outsider,” she says. “I had a problem–it was sick and creepy. Bulimia takes a lot of time out of your day.”

Rom-com royalty, the star, who’s never been married, revels in motherhood. Keaton has one daughter, Dexter Keaton White, 27, and a son, Duke Keaton, 23, both whom she adopted when she in her 50s.

“I didn’t think that I was ever going to be prepared to be a mother. Motherhood was not an urge I couldn’t resist, (and) it was more like a thought I’d been thinking for a very long time. So I plunged in,” she said.