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“We need more kindness, more compassion, more joy, more laughter. I definitely want to contribute to that.” Ellen DeGeneres is one of the most beloved comedians and television hosts in Hollywood today thanks to her compassion and genuine love of making people laugh. Since launching her career in 1986 on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, DeGeneres ventured into acting with dozens of credits before she was given her own sitcom, Ellen, in the mid-1990s. She came out as a lesbian in 1998 and, despite the controversy that followed, made a huge comeback with her award-winning talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which has been on the air since 2003!

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From Louisiana to Hollywood

Ellen Lee DeGeneres was born on January 26, 1958, in Metairie, Louisiana where, from an early age, she knew she wanted to be famous. “I was going to take chances. I was going to be different,” she said. “I was going to be successful. I was going to have money… I wanted to be special. I wanted people to like me. I wanted to be famous.”

DeGeneres was determined to follow in her older brother’s footsteps since he quickly built his reputation as a talented musician and producer. After her parents divorced in 1973, she lived with her mother and attended Grace King High School before she transferred to and graduated from Atlanta High School. She studied communications at the University of New Orleans for one semester. By then, she knew academia wasn’t for her, so she dropped out and picked up several jobs—waitress, legal clerk, retail associate, house painter, bartender—to pay the bills.

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Everything changed for DeGeneres after college when her girlfriend, Kat, was tragically killed in a car crash after the couple got into a fight. “I left to go stay with friends to try to teach her a lesson,” DeGeneres recalled. “My brother’s band was performing, and she went looking for me.” DeGeneres left the party shortly after and came upon an accident where the car was split in two. It wasn’t until the next morning that she learned it was Kat’s car.

Devastated by the loss, DeGeneres gave up their apartment and settled down in a tiny, flea-infested apartment where she slept on a mattress on the floor and buried herself in her grief. Unable to make sense of why tragedy struck, she wrote “A Phone Call to God” from her place on the floor. “I just wrote exactly what it would be like to try to call God,” she later said. “It just poured out. And then I decided that I’m going to go on Johnny Carson and do this, so I just started finding a place to do comedy.”

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DeGeneres kept her promise and started performing comedy in New Orleans. She was hired as an MC at Clyde’s Comedy Club and wrote more material. As she developed her comedic style, she became a local favorite and was determined to be the first woman Johnny Carson invited over to his couch on The Tonight Show. By the 1980s, DeGeneres took her act on the road and was named “Funniest Person in America” in 1984.

In 1986, DeGeneres saw her dreams come true when she was invited on The Tonight Show. When Carson invited her over to the couch, DeGeneres knew she’d finally made it. “I couldn’t believe it… The fact that he wanted me to sit down and talk to him, it catapulted my career,” she said. “But that’s not why I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it because I knew he would appreciate it…. I knew it was different, and I knew that nobody was doing what I was doing… I wanted people to get me.”

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With Carson’s blessing, fans embraced DeGeneres as she made guest appearances on popular television series like Duet and One Night Stand as well as in films like Coneheads. Her luck drastically improved in 1994 when she was given her first sitcom, Ellen, on ABC. The show ran for four years and proved DeGeneres’ knack for comedy as many likened her to the female version of Jerry Seinfeld. However, that support faltered during the show’s fourth season when DeGeneres came out as a lesbian on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997. As her character on the show also came out, ABC canceled the series.

Rebuilding Her Image

Over the next several years, DeGeneres struggled to find work and lost everything. She was suddenly the punchline of every joke and her personal life was thrust into the spotlight. “I lost everything,” she said. “But I had to look at my part in it and I had to look at and understand other people’s side of it.” Because of the media frenzy that followed, her relationship with actress Anne Heche failed as she struggled to manage her anger and disappointment.

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Amid her brief relationship with actress, director, and photographer Alexandra Hedison, DeGeneres set out to rebuild her career and returned to television in 2003 as the host of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Starting each show by dancing through the audience, DeGeneres rebuilt her reputation as one of the most beloved television hosts in the industry with the series going into syndication and earning four Daytime Emmy Awards and a stunning 11 nominations during its first season. “I learned that not only was I strong enough to make it in the first place, but I was strong enough to come back and make it again. How lucky am I to have learned that?”

DeGeneres’ incredible comeback didn’t stop with her career as she met and fell in love with actress Portia de Rossi in 2004. They dated for four years before they married in August 2008 after the same-sex marriage ban in California was overturned. Still together today, the 61-year-old DeGeneres is truly amazed by her life and career as she spends her days on set with The Ellen DeGeneres Show and her evenings at her Beverly Hills home with Portia and their four dogs and three cats. “I’m truly in an amazing, amazing place in my life,” DeGeneres says. “But I don’t want to say I’m surprised because, at the same time, I created it. I thought it. I wanted this. So, when I look back on it, every single thing I’m doing is what I’ve wanted, and I believe that you get what you want.”