Lisa Valerie Kudrow (/ˈkuːdroʊ/KOO-droh; born July 30, 1963) is an American actress. She rose to international fame for her role as Phoebe Buffay in the American television sitcom Friends, which aired from 1994 to 2004. The series earned her Primetime Emmy, Screen Actors Guild, Satellite, American Comedy and TV Guide awards. Phoebe has since been named one of the greatest television characters of all time and is considered to be Kudrow's breakout role, spawning her successful film career.
Lisa Valerie Kudrow[1] was born in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles on July 30, 1963,[2] the daughter of Nedra, a travel agent, and Lee Kudrow, a doctor who specialized in treating headaches.[2] She has an older sister, Helene, and two brothers, David and Derrick.[3] She was raised in a middle-class Jewish family and had a Bat Mitzvah.[4][5] She is of Belarusian, German, Hungarian, and Polish Jewish descent.[citation needed] Some of her Belarusian ancestors were from Ilya.[6] Almost all Jews in Ilya were murdered during the Holocaust, including Kudrow's paternal great-grandmother. Her paternal grandmother later left Belarus for Brooklyn, where her father grew up.[7]
Kudrow attended Portola Middle School in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles.[8] She graduated from Taft High School in the Woodland Hills neighborhood, which was attended at the same time by rapper Eazy-E and actress Robin Wright. She received her BA in biology from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, intending to become an expert on headaches like her father.[9] While breaking into acting, she worked for her father for eight years and earned a research credit on his study on the comparative likelihood of left-handed individuals developing cluster headaches.[10]
Career
1989–1994: Pre-Friends
At the urging of comedian Jon Lovitz, who was a childhood friend of her brother,[4] Kudrow began her comedic career as a member of The Groundlings, an improv and sketch comedy school in Los Angeles. She has credited Cynthia Szigeti, her improv teacher at The Groundlings, for changing her perspective on acting, calling her "the best thing that happened, on so many levels".[11][12] Briefly, Kudrow joined with Conan O'Brien and director Tim Hillman in the short-lived improv troupe Unexpected Company.[13] She was also the only regular female member of the Transformers Comedy Troupe.[14] She played a role in an episode of the NBC sitcom Cheers. She tried out for Saturday Night Live in 1990, but the show chose Julia Sweeney instead.[15] She had a recurring role as Kathy Fleisher in three episodes of season one of the Bob Newhart sitcom Bob (CBS, 1992–1993), a role she played after taking part in the series finale of Newhart's previous series Newhart.[16] Prior to Friends, she appeared in at least two network-produced pilots: NBC's Just Temporary (also known as Temporarily Yours) in 1989, playing Nicole; and CBS' Close Encounters (also known as Matchmaker) in 1990, playing a Valley girl.[17]
Kudrow was cast as Roz Doyle in Frasier, but the role was re-cast with Peri Gilpin during the taping of the pilot episode. In 2000, Kudrow explained that when rehearsals started, "I knew it wasn't working. I could feel it all slipping away, and I was panicking, which only made things worse."[4] Her first recurring television role was Ursula Buffay, the eccentric waitress on the NBC sitcom Mad About You.
1994–2004: Friends and worldwide recognition
Kudrow, the oldest actor of the main cast, reprised the character of Ursula on the NBC sitcom Friends, in which she co-starred as massage therapistPhoebe Buffay, Ursula's twin sister.[18] Praised for her performance, Kudrow was the first Friends cast member to win an Emmy Award with her 1998 honor as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her starring role as Phoebe on Friends (NBC, 1994–2004).[19] Kudrow received critical acclaim for playing Phoebe. According to the Guinness Book of World Records (2005), Kudrow and co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox became the highest paid TV actresses of all time, earning $1 million per episode for the ninth and tenth seasons of Friends.[20] Phoebe has since been named one of the greatest television characters of all time. Phoebe is considered to be Kudrow's breakout role, credited with making her the show's second-most famous cast member, after Jennifer Aniston, and for spawning her successful film career. She played Phoebe until the show ended in 2004. The program was a massive hit and Kudrow, along with her co-stars, gained worldwide recognition. Her character, Phoebe, was especially popular. Entertainment Weekly voted Phoebe on Friends as Kudrow's best performance.[21]
Following Friends, Kudrow starred as protagonist Valerie Cherish on the single-season HBO series The Comeback (premiered June 5, 2005), about a has-been sitcom star trying for a comeback. She also served as co-creator, writer, and executive producer. Nine years after the original season, HBO revived the series in 2014 for an abbreviated second season. Kudrow received two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on The Comeback.[23] Her production company is 'Is or Isn't Entertainment'.[24] Kudrow serves as the executive producer for the U.S. version of the British television series Who Do You Think You Are?, in which celebrities trace their family trees. The subjects of the first series included Kudrow herself, in which it was discovered her great-grandmother was murdered in the Holocaust.[25][26]
Kudrow co-created an improvised comedy webseries, Web Therapy on Lstudio.com. The improv series, which launched online in 2008, has earned several Webby nominations and one Outstanding Comedic Performance Webby for Kudrow, who plays therapist Fiona Wallice. She offers her patients three-minute sessions over iChat.[23] In July 2011, a reformatted, half-hour version of the show premiered on Showtime,[27][28] before being cancelled in 2015 after four seasons.[29] Kudrow has guest starred on multiple television series such as Cougar Town, BoJack Horseman, Angie Tribeca, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Scandal.[30]
Kudrow married French advertising executive Michel Stern on May 27, 1995. The couple reside in Beverly Hills, California, and have a son named Julian who was born on May 7, 1998.[34][35] Kudrow's pregnancy was written into the fourth season of Friends, with her character having triplets as a surrogate mother for her half-brother and his wife.[36] In addition to her Beverly Hills home, Kudrow maintained a penthouse in Park City, Utah, which she sold in April 2017.[37] She revealed in 2019 that she had experienced body dysmorphic disorder while working on Friends.[38]
^Susman, Gary (October 23, 2002). "Here's what the cast of Friends were up to this week". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on October 19, 2013. Retrieved October 25, 2019. In the November issue of Allure magazine, Kudrow reveals a secret she's kept for 23 years: When she was 16, she had a nose job. 'I had a hook nose, and now it's certainly smaller,' she says. 'But I'm not even sure I love how that turned out. I think plastic surgery looks weird – like plastic surgery.'
^Justine Elias. "Lisa Kudrow: No Problem Playing Two Roles." Indiana (PA) Gazette, August 21, 1982, p. TV 7.
^Shales, Tom; James Andrew Miller (November 16, 2008). Live From New York (First eBook ed.). New York: Little, Brown. pp. 273, 386. ISBN978-0316045827.