5 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ME
THE STAR OPENS UP ABOUT LOVE, LAUGHS & TONY THE TIGER
HEARING IS BELIEVING As a child, Jane found out she was deaf in her right ear, purely by happenstance. “My brother was switching ears with his transistor radio, and I said, ‘You can’t do that. You can only hear out of one ear.’ And he was like, ‘No, I hear out of both!’”
SOME JOBS ARE GREEE-AT Christopher Guest gave Jane her breakthrough role in 2000’s Best in Show — after directing her in a Frosted Flakes commercial! “About six months later, I was at a restaurant, and Chris walked in and we kind of locked eyes, and he said, ‘Oh, hi, good to see you. I’m working on a movie. Why don’t you come by my office today?’ It was kind of a happy accident.”
SHE’S HER OWN WORST ENEMY Jane’s won Emmys for Glee and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but admits what holds her back is “my own doubting mind .... I can’t say that being a woman has been an obstacle, being gay has been an obstacle, being 6 feet tall has been an obstacle, or being deaf in my right ear has been an obstacle.”
DRINKING WAS NO JOKE She has fought alcoholism twice in her life. “The first time you [have a drink], it’s like: ‘Ah, I found it. I feel happy in my body, this feeling of bliss. No one can say anything to me that would make me upset or feel badly about myself right now’ .... You end up chasing [that feeling]. And then if you’re not, what are you doing? Who are you? You have to really face this emptiness.”
WAITING IS WORTH IT “Finding love in my 50s has been a blessing," said Jane, 61, about her girlfriend, Jennifer Cheyne. “[We] were partners for a couple of years in the early 2000s. We broke up and then reconnected a decade later and just fell back together so easily and lovingly. We’re very different people now — we don’t have the same insecurities we used to.”