Kirstie Alleywho died from cancer on Monday at age 71lost 75 lbs. in 2006 — and debuted her new figure in a bikini is The Oprah Winfrey Show.
But just four years later, she regretted doing itaccording to an interview she gave Larry King in 2010.
In the interview, King asks Alley why she did the reveal.
“Let me tell you something very stupid about myself,” the Cheers actress told the talk show host.
“This is what I said when I did that: no one is allowed to take photographs. And I thought, well, there’s no photographs, so this will be the end. I’ll walk out, I go blah blah blah, and that’s the end of that,” she admitted.
“So stupid!” she exclaimed to King. “All they have to do is take a frame shot…” Alley said, nodding her head in disbelief at herself. “Little did I know that this would be all over YouTube, it’s had millions of hits.”
King interjected: “It had a life of its own…”
“It does!” Alley agreed, exasperated. “It was its own show.”
King then asked the Look Who’s Talking actress whose idea it was to strut down a runway in a bikini.
“Of course it wasn’t Oprah’s idea — she doesn’t have stupid ideas!” Alley said.
“It was my idea. I just thought if I could get myself to come out here in a bikini, then I know that I am liberated. And then I realized, Oh my god! Now I have to live with this, the rest of my life,” she said. “I made some errors in my life.”
Alley was not shy about publicly sharing her weight journey.
During a 2013 appearance on The Wendy Williams ShowAlley said she initially lost weight on Jenny Craig, which she was on from 2004 to 2007, but eventually gained it back. “I just went south,” she told host Wendy Williams at the time, adding that she was down again — this time 50 lbs.
In 2004, when she began losing weight, she said on The Oprah Winfrey Show that the decision to take the first step came after her weight became a topic in the media. “Honestly, I didn’t know how fat I was,” she said.
Set on losing the weight, she signed on as a Jenny Craig spokesperson in 2004, losing 75 lbs. on the program.
One year later, she launched the series Fat Actress. She used her weight as comedic inspiration and went into detail about it in the book How To Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life: Reluctant Confessions of a Big-Butted Starwhich she released that same year.
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When the opportunity came to join Dancing with the Stars“every single person including my agent, manager and friends said don’t do it. They all thought that I’m a hotshot actress who should only act, but I was bored out of my mind,” said Alley, who also solicited advice from DWTS alums Jennifer Grey and Marlee Mattlinwho called the experience “excruciating” and “a killer.” Alley’s response? “Good, I need something killer.”
She joined the show and eventually lost 100 lbs.going on to launch her own weight-loss system.
She told PEOPLE of clearing the 100-lb. weight-loss hurdle. “When I hit that mark, I went, ‘That’s it,’ ” she said. “I have more energy than I’ve ever had in my whole life.”
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When she began to see her weight increase again in 2014, she made a return to Jenny Craig. She stressed that she was focusing on both her physical and mental health, telling PEOPLE“I need to get myself to where I feel cocky again.”
She went into detail about her weight-loss journey in an April 2014 interview with Woman’s Health.
“If someone’s attacking me for my weight, I go flourish and prosper somewhere else in the universe. I’m the master blaster of turning lemons into lemonade,” she said.
