There aren’t as many celebrities looking like they’re going to collapse for lack of electrolytes lately. Nicole Richie came back from the brink with a pregnancy and Angelina Jolie gained enough essential weight for the tabloids to start declaring her pregnant. Cate Blanchett was scary skinny for a while, but that seems to have been in preparation for a role and I swear she’s pregnant now, too. Even crooning drug addict Amy Winehouse no longer looks like a skeleton with a 50s monster movie wig perched on its skull.

Joely Richardson, a 42 year-old British actress currently starring on Nip/Tuck, showed up at an event in London last night looking shockingly gaunt, according to photos published in The Daily Mail. She’s looked too thin in the past, and maybe it’s the dress she’s wearing coupled with the way her hair is pulled back, but she seems to have lost even more weight and her bones are sticking out. She looks like she has a health problem she’s so thin.

The thing is, she looks very ill in the photos from the Daily Mail article taken by agency Retna, where they sound the alarm about her weight. In photos of the same event from an agency we subscribe to, WENN, she looks too thin but not worryingly so. Did they alter the photos or do they just show her thin frame in better detail and harsh light? Her face looks sunken in the photo from the Daily Mail, but her cheeks are fuller and she looks healthy in the photos from WENN, shown here.

Richardson sounds like she has a lot of stress in her life lately. She announced in November of last year that she was leaving the popular FX series to take care of her 15 year-old daughter, Daisy, who suffers from a rare circulatory disorder and needs multiple surgeries.

Instead of leaving the show, though, Richardson took on a slightly less demanding filming schedule and decided to return for the sixth series for 15 out of 22 episodes. She has to film in LA while her daughter stays in Britain for treatment. Richardson divorced Daisy’s father in 2001, and they share custody and are said to get along.

She is said to make $6 million a year for her role as spa owner Julia McNamara on Nip/Tuck.

—Spoiler alert for old episodes—

Richardson’s character has a baby with a deformity in season four of the series, and back when she first quit the series the creator of Nip/Tuck seemed to suggest that it was difficult for her to work through her character’s issues on the show that may have some parallels to her difficult home life:

Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy said: “It was sad, but Joely came before her character. The dynamic of the show changed with the difficulty of what she was going through (personally), plus what she is going through on the show this season playing the mother of a deformed baby. That said, Joely is the best she has ever been.”

[From The Daily Mail]

I hope she’s ok and that she takes care of her health. A lot of moms have problems taking care of themselves and end up giving everything to their families. It must be doubly hard when you have a child with an ongoing illness like that.

Details from Wikipedia and The Daily Mail.

Pictures thanks to WENN.