Jennifer Coolidge goes solo in DC
Jennifer Coolidge is best-known for two distinct movie roles : as the uber-cougar Stifler’s Mom in American Pie (a role that she repeated in the sequel) and as the put-upon beautician Paulette in Legally Blonde (a role she also repeated in the sequel.) And between these films she had a celebrated feature role in Christopher Guest’s mockumentary where she played an ultra-femme gold-digging blonde with an ancient, wealthy husband and a girlfriend (played by Glee’s Jane Lynch) on the side.
These parts couldn’t be farther apart, but point to what may be the key to her success as a comic actor - her ability to transform herself into an array of different physical types while maintaining a satiric edge. She can be sexy, blowsy, frumpy, and downright odd, but invariably funny in her many guises.
Coolidge can play one of the bitchy society dames in a celebrated Broadway revival of The Women one minute, then offer a priceless imitation of Barbra Streisand in the 2006 movie spoof Date Movie the next. Fans of the Friends’ spin-off Joey know her as the oversexed, powerful Hollywood agent Roberta "Bobbie" Morganstern; and she had a memorable turn on Friends during its final season as the boorish woman named Amanda who latches onto Phoebe and Monica to their dismay. She has also turned up on such wide-ranging series as The Closer, According to Jim, Seinfeld, Sex and the City and the short-lived (but very funny) sketch comedy series She TV.
Not Kathy Griffin
This past summer she set out on what looks to be a new phase in her career - stand-up comedy. Well, as she puts it, not quite stand-up in the traditional sense of a barrage of one liners. "Kathy Griffin I’m not," she says. Rather she takes a more personal and anecdotal approach - story-telling drawn from instances in her life. She tried it out in Provincetown last summer to sold-out houses and good word-of-mouth; now she’s bringing to the t in Provincetown last summer. Now she’s bringing to Arlington’s Cinema N’ Drafthouse on Friday, April 23 and Saturday, April 24.
Coolidge currently lives in balmy Los Angeles, where she was reached on a recent morning. EDGE spoke with Coolidge prior to an appearance in Boston recently during a nasty cold snap. She groaned when she heard about the weather.
EDGE: You grew up here - you must be use to the cold?
Jennifer Coolidge: No, no. I don’t have that cold weather gene. I remember being a kid and my parents would drag me up to Vermont for a ski trip and I would be so cold, and then I’d get wet, and colder. The rest of my family would be out on the slopes all day; but not me, so I felt like a loser. They would buy me these all days lift tickets, but I would never use them. Instead I would sit in the lodge and drink hot chocolates. But sometimes I’d feel guilty so I would try to make it seem I just came in from a run so I’d go outside and fall in the snow. But I’ve never been able to deal with the cold. I remember when I was at a bus stop - first or second grade, I remember - I would click the heels together like Dorothy and wish, ’Please get me out of this town.’
Watch this interview with Jennifer Coolidge on the Graham Norton program
