‘They worked with weights and put people on diets. Their thing was vegetarianism’
The 55 year-old actress told a Sunday newspaper that in her twenties, she got involved with a ‘very controlling couple’ who put her on a diet ‘nobody can adhere to.’
The couple believed in ‘breatharianism’ – the ability to live without food and water. Followers of the cult believe sunlight can provide all the nourishment the body needs.
The Dangerous Liasons star - who left home and moved to Los Angeles when she was 20 - said the couple were ‘kind of personal trainers.’
‘They were very controlling'
‘They worked with weights and put people on diets. Their thing was vegetarianism,’ she said.
‘They believed that people in their highest state were breatharian,’ she added.
But the cult was not only physically demanding but financially draining too.
‘They were very controlling. I wasn’t living with them but I was there a lot and they were always telling me I needed to come more.
‘I had to pay for all the time I was there, so it was financially very draining,’ she added.
Michelle said she was ‘saved’ when she met her first husband, actor Peter Horton, who had been cast in a film about the Moonies - the name given to followers of Rev Moon Sun-myung’s Unification Church.
She said that while she was helping him with research ‘on this cult’ she realised: ‘I was in one’.
‘We were talking with an ex-Moonie and he was describing the psychological manipulation and I just clicked,’ she said.
Breatharianism has previously been linked with a number of deaths. In 1999, a 49-year-old woman died in the Scottish Highlands after reportedly embarking on a period of fasting in order to achieve ‘divine life force in the form of liquid light.’
Michelle – still a strict vegan - is now married to Ally McBeal screenwriter David E Kelley with whom she has a son, 21 year-old John Henry. The actress also has daughter - Claudia Rose, 20 - who she adopted before she met her husband.