Marie Osmond’s Collapse Blamed On Allergy To Air

Now that her Dancing With The Stars collapse has made her the world's most famous fainter since the invention of the myotonic goat, Marie Osmond must now deal with all the new-found popularity that goes with it.

You know the sort of thing - Marie Osmond will be invited to open department stores so long as she promises to collapse right before she cuts the ribbon, or star in TV adverts for fruit-based preserves that ask her to slump to the floor midway through. And Marie Osmond is going to find that hard, because fainting isn't just something she can do on demand - she's saying that she only fainted this week on Dancing With The Stars because she's allergic to the studio's bad air quality. Presumably that means Dancing With The Stars head judge Len Goodman can expect a lawsuit soon, because he looks like the kind of man whose breath is made up of equal parts stale coffee, Bonjella and Werthers Originals, and that has to be a contributing factor somewhere down the line.

Marie Osmond has had what could be politely called an eventful life. Never a full member of The Osmonds, Marie Osmond nevertheless went on to become a mildly successful country singer, creator of creepy porcelain dolls, the woman who turned down the role of Sandy in Grease because she thought the movie was borderline pornographic and a depressive, allegedly suicidal recently-divorced mother of eight with a brother who owns a devil-eyed teddy bear with the voice of a million dispossessed children. But forget that because, on the day she dies, all of Marie Osmond's obituaries will refer to her as the dancey fall-down lady and nothing more.

The moment when Marie Osmond collapsed on Dancing With The Stars this week has already gone down as one of the best-ever televised faints by a middle-aged dancing Mormon of all time, from the moment Marie's face went bright red and her eyes rolled up into the back of her head like a zombie to Len Goodman's solemnly satisfied "this is what must be" nod immediately afterwards. But the question of why Marie Osmond collapsed on Dancing With The Stars had still gone unanswered. Was it, as Marie's brother Donny Osmond claimed, all down to the stress of her divorce? Was it a simple case of dancing so hard that all the oxygen in her body went to her feet and her fingers instead of her brain? Or was Marie Osmond's faint a hit at a deeper underlying problem? None of these, as it turns out - Marie Osmond says she only fainted because of all that pesky air floating around all the time. The New York Post reports:

"It's nuts," Osmond told Entertainment Tonight. "I feel bad that it happened!" Osmond said that she doesn't know why she passed out, but thinks it might have something to do with her allergies or the air quality inside the "DWTS" studio. "Right at the beginning, I started getting lightheaded. The only thing I can think of is I have allergies, the air quality is terrible, and I couldn't get my breath."

Marie Osmond shouldn't feel too bad about collapsing, though - she's easily one of the worst Dancing With The Stars contestants, and there's a good chance she'd have been eliminated from the show if it wasn't for the faint. Maybe, in fact, this is something that Marie Osmond should take to heart and learn from by placing all sorts of dust-filled socks over the Dancing With The Stars' studio's air conditioning units whenever she hasn't had the chance to learn her routine properly.  

Anyway, all this publicity for Dancing With The Stars has meant that its UK-based sister show Strictly Come Dancing has a lot to live up to this week. All's not lost, though - perhaps that smug boy from EastEnders can have a seizure halfway through his American Smooth and wrestle the public eye back to this side of the Atlantic. Well, we can hope.

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Marie Blames Faint On Allergies - New York Post