Portia de Rossi – who is perhaps best known for playing Lindsay Fünke in Arrested Development – has confirmed her intention to give up acting, insisting she wants to take up something “more challenging and difficult” in the coming years.

The announcement came during an appearance on her wife Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, after DeGeneres welcomed her on by saying: “You aren’t a big fan of doing press shows and talk shows, so thank you for being here. That’s why she actually quit acting. She decided she didn’t want to do anything more with acting and got off Scandal.”

Smiling at DeGeneres’ succinct explanation, de Rossi added: “I was approaching 45 and I was just wondering was there something that I could tackle now that I’ve never done before that would be very challenging and different.

“I kind of knew what acting would look like for me for the next 10, 20 years, so I decided to quit and start a business.”

That business is in fact an art curation and publication company called General Public, which de Rossi plans to pour her full efforts into.

De Rossi’s announcement comes shortly before the much-anticipated release of the fifth season of Arrested Development, which will hit Netflix on 29 May – some five years after the release of season four.

The show follows the antics of the Bluths, one of America’s most dysfunctional families – and, in it, de Rossi stars alongside the likes of Jason Bateman, David Cross, Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Jessica Hale, Alia Shawkat, Tony Hale and Jeffrey Tambor.

It’s natural, then, that the actress has previously credited as being the most “ridiculously fun” place to work.

“It was ridiculously fun,” she told Marie Claire, “and those boys were just, ah I just love them like brothers. They were all so funny and so intelligent and so witty, and everybody on the set just loved what they were doing.”

In the same interview, De Rossi went on to reveal that she learned an important lesson about herself whilst filming the show, saying: “As ridiculous as it sounds, when I did Ally McBeal I thought I had to look good. Then I got to Arrested Development, and I thought, ‘I have to be fun. I have to actually really look at why I got this role’”.

She continued: “What I looked like was so secondary and not important compared to how funny I was or how well I was doing as an actress in that role.

“And that’s a huge thing… what you look like is so unimportant compared to what you think and what you do and who you are.”

Image: Getty