Clueless star Elisa Donovan nearly suffered heart attack during filming due to anorexia

Clueless star Elisa Donovan almost suffered a heart attack during filming as she battled anorexia.

The actress played Cher’s rival Amber in the iconic 1995 teen comedy, with the role marking her first big screen appearance.

While the role of ‘full-on Monet’ Amber kickstarted Elisa’s career – and brought ‘whatever’ with the W hand gesture into the pop culture lexicon – she was suffering behind the scenes with an eating disorder.

Speaking on the Celebrity Catch-Up podcast, Elisa, now 50, said that she almost had a heart attack while filming the movie aged 23. 

She said: ‘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.

‘My friend Jennifer drove me to the… 24 hour emergency care place, and 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.’

It was filming Clueless that spurred Elisa to get help, as she said: ‘At that moment, I was so afraid I was going to lose my job. My life was 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.

‘So 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.’

Elisa said that her decision to seek treatment began in the middle of shooting Clueless, adding: ‘It changed my life in a lot of ways, that movie. It helped me to get healthy, truly.’

The star continued to play Amber in the Clueless TV series, and went on to appear in A Night At The Roxbury and shows including Judging Amy, NCIS and Melissa & Joey.

Elisa also starred in another teen classic, played Sabrina’s roommate Morgan in the college years of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. 

Outside of film and TV, Elisa has worked with teenage girls dealing with eating disorders, and is now mum to daughter Scarlett with husband Charlie Bigelow.

Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy, Stacey Dash, Paul Rudd and Donald Faison, was loosely based on Jane Austen’s Emma, and followed a rich girl in Beverly Hills who decides to give the new girl at school a makeover. 

Over 25 years on from its release, it is still considered one of the best teen movies of all time, and in 2018, it was announced that it was being remade into a drama series.

The series will centre on Dionne after Cher goes missing, and was described as a ‘baby pink and bisexual blue-tinted, tiny sunglasses-wearing, oat milk latte and Adderall-fuelled look at what happens when the high school queen bee Cher disappears and her lifelong number two Dionne steps into Cher’s vacant Air Jordans’.

MORE : How people with eating disorders are lockdown’s secret victims

MORE : Justin Bieber turned to religion as fame impacted his mental health: ‘I thought all the success was going to make everything good’