Actor known to millions as George’s mom on ‘Seinfeld’
NEW YORK — Estelle Harris, who hyperventilated her way into the hearts of millions of “Seinfeld” fans as Estelle Costanza, died Saturday in Palm Desert, California. She was 93.
Her son Glen Harris announced the death in a statement sent by Harris’ agent.
In 27 episodes — starting in 1992 during the fourth season of “Seinfeld,” around the time that the show became a pop culture sensation, and continuing until its final episode in 1998 — Estelle Harris embarrassed and harangued her son, one of the show’s four main characters, George Costanza, played by Jason Alexander, and his father, Frank, played by Jerry Stiller.
Trading insults and absurdities with her on-screen husband, Harris helped create a parental pair that would leave even a psychiatrist helpless to do anything but hope they’d move to Florida — as their son, George, fruitlessly encouraged them to do.
During her character’s meltdowns, often in response to slights and offenses to propriety, Harris deployed a screech that had the urgency of a hyena in its death throes. Her comedic style summoned paranoia and outrage in response to transgressions like her son continuing to wear the same button-down shirt five years after he bought it.
Her “Seinfeld” debut came in one of the show’s most celebrated episodes: the Emmy Award-winning 1992 “The Contest,” in which the four central characters challenge each other to refrain from doing what is artfully described only as “that.”
Viewers of all backgrounds would tell her she was just like their own mothers, Harris often said.
“She is the mother that everybody loves, even though she’s a pain in the neck,” she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1998.
“Estelle is a born performer,” Stiller told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., in 1998. “I just go with what I got, and she goes back at me the same way.”
Still, Harris saw a sympathetic undertone to her character, often saying Estelle fumed out frustration at her bumbling mate and scheming slacker of a son.
Viewers, she told an interviewer in 1998, “just look at her as being funny, cute and a loudmouth. But it’s not how I play her. I play her with misery underneath.”
The career-defining role came after decades on stage and screen.
Estelle Nussbaum was born April 22, 1928, in New York City, where her Polish Jewish parents owned a
candy store. She spent much of her childhood in Tarentum, Pa., a coal-mining town. There, she endured antisemitic taunts but found an outlet in stage performances. Her father, who she said “spoke the King’s English,” insisted that she take elocution lessons from a young age.
She moved back to New York in her late teens and later married Sy Harris, a salesman of window treatments. They had three children, and for a while, Estelle Harris was a homemaker.
She wound her way through community theaters and television commercials before her big break on “Seinfeld.” She went on to other prominent roles as a character actor for the shrill and unhinged, including in the “Toy Story” movie franchise, for which she provided the voice of Mrs. Potato Head.
She is survived by her children, three grandsons and a great-grandson.