Portia De Rossi wants to become Portia DeGeneres

Two years after she married the comedian and talkshow host Ellen DeGeneres, the Australian actress Portia de Rossi is pushing to take her wife's name - just as a more conventional bride might do. De Rossi has filed a legal request with a Los Angeles court to officially change her name to Portia Lee James DeGeneres.
 
The petition, which De Rossi filed at the LA County Superior Court, comes after the couple celebrated the US federal court ruling which overturned California's ban on same sex marriage. "Equality won," DeGeneres tweeted after the 2008 referendum, known as Proposition 8, was overturned. De Rossi meanwhile described the ruling as "a big step towards equal rights for all".
 
While it is by no means a first for at least one partner in a civil partnership to change their name, DeGeneres and De Rossi must be the most high-profile lesbian couple to do so. As Alexander Cockburn noted on The First Post, gay and lesbian couples are embracing a dying tradition by getting married. Unmarried people make up the majority of households in the US. As for changing one's name after marriage, it is a convention that many heterosexual couples now shun.
 
What also makes De Rossi's move even more intriguing is that she is not a 'nobody' seeking to capitalise on her famous wife's name.

DeGeneres, still hugely popular in the US for her top-rating chat show despite her recent ill-fated turn on American Idol, is admittedly more famous. But De Rossi is also well-known as a film and television actress. The 37-year-old made her name in the 1990s hit legal drama Ally McBeal and more recently has also had roles in the TV sitcoms Arrested Development and Better Off Ted. ·