Last laugh Hollywood’s for least luvvie actress
Golden Globe winning star of TV’s White Lotus admits she used to eat six pizzas a day and slept with dozens of toyboys
HERS has been a Hollywood success story a mere 61 years in the making. After countless career setbacks, cocaine and alcohol addiction, eating disorders, depression, a lot of plastic surgery and affairs with possibly hundreds of young men — Jennifer Coolidge seems finally to have made it.
Gliding on to the stage at the Golden Globes on Tuesday night, she brought down the house as she picked up her first major award: a Best Supporting Actress gong for her role in The White Lotus, HBO’s masterful black-comedy series about rich hotel guests behaving badly, which has become a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
‘My neighbours are speaking to me!’ she said of her belated career triumph.
A curvaceous counterpoint to slim, ultratoned Hollywood starlets — and ‘a tall, messy, sexy, tough, charmingly crass Boston-native bombshell’ according to one younger ex-boyfriend — Coolidge received a standing ovation.
Many of those watching may not have had the first clue who she was.
But with her inimitable acting style — squinty stares, breathy drawls and glazed sighs — Coolidge has long had a reputation in industry circles for scene-stealing comic cameos.
Yet while hers might have been an unhurried rise to fame, it hasn’t been uneventful. Off screen, she has battled drug abuse, anxiety attacks and binge-eating: in fact, she felt so self-conscious about gaining 3st during the pandemic that she almost turned down the part of neurotic heiress Tanya McQuoid in The White Lotus.
Coolidge has said she was ‘depressed and massively over- eating’ during lockdown, sometimes consuming five or six vegan pizzas a day.
It’s just as well she took the part. For decades her roles had been confined to small supporting acts as friends of main characters or rich, dippy women in films such as Legally Blonde and Best In Show.
By far her most famous part was as bigbreasted ‘Stifler’s Mom’ in the 1990s boorish sex-comedy franchise American Pie.
Aged 38, she played a cougar who has sex with her teenage son’s friend on a billiard table. The role earned her a notoriety that ‘got [her] a lot of sexual action . . . If I hadn’t had that movie . . . well, let’s just say it would’ve been a very dull decade.’
COOLIDGE once calculated that the American Pie role was alone responsible for 200 notches on her bedpost — a figure she has since said she might have exaggerated.
Following her success in The White Lotus, a new generation of young male fans have discovered the spectacularly un-woke American Pie films.
‘There’s always someone who has seen that movie lately,’ she said in a 2020 interview after the first series of The White Lotus. ‘So then you get a whole new group of young guys. I’m single, so I’m really using it to my advantage.’
Even so, she bristles at being labelled a ‘cougar’. ‘It sounds more like someone seeking out young men, and I just like it more when it’s their idea,’ she has said.
In an interview last year, Coolidge told the pop star Ariana Grande about a tryst with a lover who was so young he actually called his mother for advice.
He ‘ was particularly young — legal, of course, it was all very legal’, she hurriedly insisted. But the yawning age gap prompted an ‘awkward’ moment the following morning when Coolidge announced she needed to get a blow dry. Evidently flummoxed as to where to suggest for a woman of Coolidge’s advanced years, he rang his mother to ask.
‘It was very clear we were in bed together,’ she recalled. ‘She gave me a good recommendation at a local mall, so it all worked out.’
She has said: ‘I love being in love with someone. I love having someone to come home to.’ But, she has also admitted: ‘A lot of my life was chasing unattainable men, and it got me nowhere.’
Much of her tumultuous life is reflected in the messy role that has now won her a Golden Globe. White Lotus creator Mike White, a close friend, wrote the part for her and she admits that parts of Tanya’s character are based on her.
Although their backgrounds are entirely different — Coolidge’s father worked in plastics manufacturing rather than being a real- estate tycoon — both women are highly strung.
Tanya, like Jennifer, appears to have a taste for younger men — going to bed with an Italian stallion half her age in series two.
What’s more, while a griefstricken Tanya carries her mother’s ashes around in a box, Coolidge was similarly deeply affected by the passing of her mother. Her death from cancer in 1994 was a loss so devastating Coolidge says she was ‘unable to function normally’ for two years. Her father died in 2015.
Raised in the Boston suburbs, Coolidge worried her parents about her mental state by endlessly staring out of the window. They told her TV would ruin her life and locked it up whenever they went out.
However, when her father saw her acting in a school play, he told her: ‘You’re meant to do this.’ But others disagreed. A friend in the industry told her: ‘I have a good eye for talent. I don’t see you as someone in front of the camera.’
She persevered — with no idea what else to do — and studied acting in New York while working as a cocktail waitress alongside Sandra Bullock.
She also enjoyed a debauched party lifestyle. With little money, Coolidge pretended to be Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter to get into clubs, where she over-indulged on alcohol and cocaine, ‘ ending up too many nights in ER’. After a stint in rehab, by 27 she had overcome her habit.
After countless rejections, she gave up on ‘serious’ acting and joining an improvisation comedy group in Los Angeles.
She was seized by ‘full-on anxiety attacks’ before castings and never got jobs — often, as she later confided, because she declined ‘casting-couch’ offers from sleazy producers and directors.
Aged 32, she made her first TV appearance as Seinfeld’s masseuse girlfriend in a 1993 episode of the comedy series.
After a clutch of cameos, she got her break in American Pie and reprised her role two years later in the sequel.
That year, she also played troubled manicurist Paulette Bonafonte in Legally Blonde.
But then her career stalled. She dabbled in supporting roles and appeared in episodes of Friends, Sex And The City and Frasier.
Cosmetic surgery may not have helped her career: Coolidge admits she’s been under the knife more than a few times.
She’s described ‘ really good surgery’ as a ‘fluke’ and said she’s sometimes seen herself smiling post- surgery and, appalled, felt ‘it’s not even human’. She once complained: ‘I would say 90 per cent of the scripts that show up on my door are women who have had lots of plastic surgery ... I also get offered physically altered women, or a woman with a weight problem. It’s never the lead. It’s always a character part.’
But surely those days are over. Coolidge recently said she’d ‘like to continue playing troubled people’ but, ever eccentric, told also another interviewer she had ‘always wanted to play a dolphin’.
It’s difficult to imagine Hollywood any longer saying no to the irrepressible Jennifer Coolidge — even as a dolphin.