Born Amanda Lee Rogers in Horsham, Victoria, Australia. she is the daughter of Margaret, a medical receptionist, and Barry Rogers.[3] She was raised in Grovedale, a suburb of Geelong in Victoria, Australia. As a child, she modeled for print and TV commercials. She adopted the name Portia de Rossi at the age of 15, stating in 2005 that she had intended to reinvent herself, using the given name of Portia, a character from William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and an Italian last name.[4]
Her first significant role was playing a young and impressionable model i...