Vera-Ellen

I am watching On the Town tonight with Vera-Ellen and Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, and I'm thinking, boy! she is thin.  Wonder if that's anorexia.  But it was to get worse. "Vera-Ellen has been thought to have suffered from anorexia before much was known about the disease. The transformation in her appearance is particularly stark between her appearances in On The Town (1949) and White Christmas (1954). In the latter movie, her legs appear less than half the size of just 5 years before." (Wikipedia)

One side effect of anorexia is rapid aging. Many people have asked why Vera-Ellen always covers her neck in "White Christmas" - it is assumed that her neck is where she started to visibly age. She also had a daughter, Victoria Ellen Rothschild, who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Understandably, this was a very traumatic event, and helps to understand why she withdrew from public life. She would divorce her second husband, Victor Rothschild a few years later in 1966. He died in 2008 at the age of 85. It should be stated that while Vera-Ellen did definitely age, as she dropped out of sight, she aged with grace. http://greatentertainersarchives.blogspot.com/2012/12/vera-ellen-later-years.html

It's interesting to read the commenters debating whether she was just slim and gorgeous or anorexic.