To a certain TV viewing generation, she was the mother of us all

Estelle Harris, 1928-2022

The show was called Seinfeld, but Jerry Seinfeld, the co-creator, star, and lead character of the classic sitcom, was never the main attraction. No one was. Jerry was at the center, but filling out its comic universe was an assortment of what might be called recognizable oddballs: Elaine, George, Kramer, Newman, Puddy, and the rest.

One of the most reliably relatable comic types on Seinfeld was Estelle Costanza, immortally incarnated by Estelle Harris — besides Jerry, the sitcom’s other great namesake. Mrs. Costanza was the short-statured, brightvoiced, helplessly badgering mother to George (Jason Alexander) and wife to Frank (Jerry Stiller). But, to invoke the title of Gertrude Stein’s opera about Susan B. Anthony, she was really the mother of us all.

“I’m the universal mother,” Harris, who died on April 2 at age 93, said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1995. “Black people, Asians, WASPs, Italians, Jews — they all say, ‘Oh, you’re just like my mom.’ That makes me feel good.”

And it made the viewing public feel good to know that mothers who harp, nag, and express indignation to their children long into adulthood were not unique to their own lives. Equally reassuring was the fact that few mothers in real life were likely to be as excessive in reminding their offspring of their limitations as Estelle, who, upon being told by George’s fiancee that she loves her son very much, asks: “You do? Really? May I ask why?”

On the show, Estelle is at once full of doubts about her son — “You know how to write?” she asks after George tells her that he’s been hired to write a show.

“Since when do you know how to write? I never saw you write anything” — and utterly sure of herself, as when she insists that she boasted of the beauty of her son’s hands from babyhood:

Estelle: I always talked about your hands, how they’re so soft and milky white.

Frank: No, you never said “milky white.”

Estelle: I said “milky white!”

This exchange took place in the famous episode in which George persuades himself that he has the makings of a hand model, and although the writing itself is funny, it’s Harris’s insistent manner and, by the time of the last line, volcanic delivery that sells it.

Born in 1928 in Hell’s Kitchen to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Poland, Estelle Nussbaum spent much of her youth in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, where her father, a candy store proprietor in Manhattan, had relocated to help oversee a family general store. There, she experienced antisemitism. “I felt out of place in Tarentum,” Harris told the Chicago Tribune, but the move was not without compensations: Enrolled in elocution lessons, Estelle got her first taste of performing for a crowd. “In high school, I was in every single play,” she said.

When Estelle returned to New York, though, it wasn’t a case of hail the conquering heroine: A union with a salesman named Sy Harris produced three children but scant acting assignments. For many years, she trudged along in dinner theater, though television viewers who later embraced her on Seinfeld are likely to have encountered her in countless commercials. In 1986, Harris turned up in a commercial for S.O.S. Soap Pads. Singing the praises of the cleaning pads to her deceased mother, she insists that S.O.S. is better than Brillo — one more thing her mother was wrong about, she says, including her husband.

Bit by bit, Harris crossed over onto the shows that ran in between the commercials: She was a regular on Night Court and logged appearances in the movie Once Upon a Time in America

and the sitcom Married ... with Children before being tapped for Seinfeld, a move applauded by her TV son. “She looks a lot like my actual mother,” Alexander said in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “My mother is a little, short, squat, round lady with red hair.”

When the curtain closed on Seinfeld,

the cast dispersed, but Estelle Harris never had to worry about returning to dinner theater or commercials. She provided the voice of Mrs. Potato Head in multiple Toy Story feature films, shorts, and even a video game, and she played a plethora of mothers, grandmothers, and aunts in film and TV. With her painfully accurate representation of a mother each of us can relate to, Estelle Harris took over popular culture for a while. And our lives were funnier for it. ★