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Ellen DeGeneres' "career pause" will begin with a luxury African vacation.

The final episode of 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show' will air later this week, and Ellen and her wife Portia de Rossi are now planning to head overseas with some of their close friends, as she embarks on the next chapter of her career.

A source told The Sun newspaper: "Right after the show finale airs she, Portia and her closest friends, including her brother, Vance DeGeneres and his wife, are heading to Rwanda for the opening of her gorilla campus."

Ellen - who began hosting the talk show in 2003 - is set to open the Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund.

Gorilla conservation is passion project for the TV star, and for the time being, she doesn't have any "definite" career plans in place.

The insider added: "She’s going to take some much-needed time off and just take a pause."

In April, Ellen took to Twitter to confirm she'd already filmed her last-ever episode of her long-running talk show.

The host - who married Portia in 2008 - wrote on the micro-blogging platform at the time: "Today we taped the final episode of The Ellen Show which airs on May 26th.

"When we started this show in 2003, the iPhone didn’t exist. Social Media didn’t exist. Gay marriage wasn’t legal. We watched the world change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

"But whatever was happening, my goal was always for the show to be a place where we could all come together and laugh for an hour. Being invited into your lives has been the greatest privilege of my life and has brought me incredible joy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."