Julia Louis-Dreyfus: She Who Gives 'Seinfeld' Estrogen (original) (raw)

By ELIZABETH KOLBERT

OUNT KISCO, N.Y. -- Strangers stop her on the street, wanting to know how she does her hair. They sidle up to her in restaurants or scurry over when she is filling her car with gasoline.

"Elaine!" they say. "Is that you, Elaine?"

For a television star whose job it is to appear every week in millions of living rooms, this kind of confusion is probably an inevitable occupational hazard. There are always some addled viewers who can't quite keep straight the difference between lifelike comedy and everyday life. But for a star of "Seinfeld," a show that features a stand-up comic named Jerry Seinfeld playing a stand-up comic named Jerry Seinfeld who is writing a television show called "Jerry" about a stand-up comic, such confusion isn't just incidental. It is essential.

Credit:Joey Delvalle/NBC
Julia Louis Dreyfus

On this particular afternoon, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays "Seinfeld's" perpetually single Elaine, is visiting her father in northern Westchester. (Her parents divorced when she was 1, and, growing up, she split her time between this house and her mother's in Washington.) Dressed in black jeans, a light blue oxford shirt and cowboy boots, she is sitting on the living room couch, her legs tucked under her.

Petite, her famously voluminous hair in a tangle of bobby pins, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus (pronounced LOO-ee-DRY-fuss) has a vaguely distracted yet eager-to-please manner. With one ear, she listens for her 10 1/2-month-old son, Henry Hall, who is out for a walk with her husband, the actor and producer Brad Hall.

There is often an awkward moment when fans catch sight of Ms. Louis-Dreyfus with Henry. It is, she reports, as if they had just realized that she lives on, even after 10 P.M. on Thursdays. "When I'm out with my son," she said, "they remark, 'Oh, my God, I had no idea.' "

Ms. Louis-Dreyfus, who is 32, was visibly pregnant with Henry through much of last year's season. This explains why she spent so many episodes carrying large objects and wearing loose dresses. "I shot like this a lot," she said, clutching a pillow from the couch in front of her. Henry's arrival was timed to coincide with the end of shooting last spring.

Although "Seinfeld" is in its third season on NBC, it is only recently that the show has become a genuine megahit and Ms. Louis-Dreyfus a genuine television star. This is a development that she describes, as if genuinely trying to convey the weirdness of it all, as at once gratifying and disconcerting.

"Sometimes it's really fun, I have to tell you something, that's the truth," she said. "You know, you wave, 'Oh, hello, hello,' and everybody's waving and they're so excited to see you and it's fun. Then there are moments when it's a little difficult. Sometimes people come up to me and they want to talk about the show, and I respect that. But sometimes I can't talk about the show, because I've got a kid with a dirty diaper, but I don't want to seem rude. And those kinds of moments I'm still working on negotiating."

On the strength of her television success, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus has received her first major film role, in "North," directed by Rob Reiner, which she describes as an adult fairy tale. (It is the film, parts of which are being shot in New Jersey, as well as visits with her mother and father, that brought her from Los Angeles.) Still, it is for "Seinfeld" and its wildly mundane brand of humor that she reserves most of her enthusiasm. She talks about the show not just as a step but in some ways as an arrival.

"It's probably the best job I'll ever have," she said. "It's maybe the best job there is."

"There's a certain sensibility that we all have about what's funny and we all share it," she went on. "You know that doesn't happen a lot. In fact, I'll go so far as to say this is the last time it will happen."

The members of the cast go out to dinner together in Los Angeles each week on Tuesdays, after an episode has been shot. Often during filming, the cast is laughing so hard the scenes have to be reshot, she said, and afterward, "we remind each other about lines, howling, howling."

"To tell you the truth, I think we find our show funnier than anybody else who watches."

In the course of an afternoon spent with Ms. Louis-Dreyfus at her father's house, which is best described as a suburban estate, with pool, orchard, barn, caretaker's quarters and big clapboard main residence on a hill behind a huge gate, nothing much happens that is in any obvious way reminiscent of "Seinfeld," in its distinctly Upper West Side milieu.

Still, even when Henry returns from his walk, and Ms. Louis-Dreyfus is feeding him mashed peas from a jar, it is easy to find oneself looking around for Kramer to burst through the kitchen door. This is because despite the superficial differences -- the baby, the husband, the successful career -- in many respects, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus is Elaine.

Three years ago, when Mr. Seinfeld was writing the first episodes of the show with his friend Larry David, who is now the executive director of the series as well as the model for the maddeningly neurotic George, no part for a woman was planned. But the two of them determined that the series, in Mr. Seinfeld's words, "lacked estrogen" and decided to add a female role. Mr. David, who had worked with Ms. Louis-Dreyfus when she was a cast member of "Saturday Night Live," asked her to audition for the part.

"We had a very vague idea of Elaine," Mr. Seinfeld said. "But once Julia walked in, we knew who Elaine was. We created her together."

Although Ms. Louis-Dreyfus has spent virtually all of her career in comedy, first as part of a comic theater group in Chicago, then at "Saturday Night Live" and now in "Seinfeld," without a script she does not sound much like an off-duty comedian. She has never been able to write her own material, she says, and does not consider herself a particularly funny person. This is a common condition for women, she says, which can be traced to the way they are brought up.

"I may be way off and Margaret Mead will correct me if I am, but I think men who are funny are encouraged to be funny," she said. "And I think women who are funny -- it's not that they're discouraged from it, but it's not considered in a social sense feminine."

Elaine, too, has a good sense of humor and a great laugh but is not herself a comic force. Like the young heroine in commedia dell'arte, she is several shades more conventional than the zanies with whom she shares the stage. In fact, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus says, she really shouldn't be hanging out with the likes of Jerry and George and Kramer in the first place.

"What is she doing with these guys?" she said. "It's nuts. She should get on with it."

Unfortunately, though, for Elaine, the fictional Jerry Seinfeld's former girlfriend, serious romance is out of the question.

"No," Ms. Louis-Dreyfus said, shaking her sadly, "that wouldn't be funny."

Even when she is not playing Elaine, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus speaks in a convincing, but it turns out misleading, New York accent. She grew up with her mother, stepfather and two half-sisters in Washington. But she remained close to her father and visited him and his wife and their two daughters during vacations and over the summer.

On this day, her father, William Louis-Dreyfus, a businessman-lawyer, is working at home so he can spend time with his daughter and her family. Like a considerate parent, he graciously absented himself while his daughter entertained an interviewer.

Ms. Louis-Dreyfus says she knew even as a girl that she wanted to be a performer but is grateful that her parents did not allow her to pursue the life of a child actress. Similarly, she will not be taking Henry to any auditions. "There's a lot to be said for having an adult, or a semi-adult, mind," she said.

It was while she was a student at Northwestern University that Ms. Louis-Dreyfus's acting career suddenly took off.

The summer between her junior and senior year she was appearing in a revue in Chicago with some friends, including her future husband, Mr. Hall, when the producers of "Saturday Night Live" showed up and offered them all jobs.

After three years on "Saturday Night Live," Ms. Louis-Dreyfus and Mr. Hall moved to Los Angeles, where they got married and where they now live in a four-bedroom house in the hills above Westwood. She went on to appear in the NBC sitcom "Day by Day;" he became a producer of "Brooklyn Bridge," the critically acclaimed series on CBS that was recently canceled. Neither wife nor husband spends much time in front of the television set.

"I don't have the time to watch television," Ms. Louis-Dreyfus said, "and I don't really like television, so I don't really watch it."

At a time when many Hollywood stars are considering political careers and playing up their ties to the White House, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus, by contrast, does not consider her views on national policy to be particularly important. And she is glad, she said, to be working with actors who do not mistake acting for action.

"What's remarkable about Jerry is that he takes his work very seriously, yet at the same time he realizes what it is," she said. "We are not solving the economy and we are not curing cancer. We are just trying to make a good joke.

"Period. End of story."