Seinfeld (TV Program)

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      Estelle Harris, George’s Mother on ‘Seinfeld,’ Dies at 93

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      Employing a high-powered screech, she took maternal exasperation and paranoia to comedic heights as one of the show’s most frequently recurring characters.Estelle Harris, who hyperventilated her way into the hearts of millions of “Seinfeld” fans as George’s mother, Estelle Costanza, died on Saturday in Palm Desert, Calif. She was 93.Her son Glen Harris announced the death in a statement sent by Ms. Harris’s 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 — Ms. Harris embarrassed and harangued her son, one of the show’s four main characters, George Costanza (Jason Alexander), and his father, Frank (Jerry Stiller).During her character’s meltdowns, often in response to slights and offenses to propriety, Ms. Harris deployed a screech that had the urgency of a hyena in its death throes. When she whined about “waiting for hours,” that final word had three, maybe four moan-like syllables. The combination of stiffness and violence in her gesticulations expressed a forbidding level of psychological tension.Ms. Harris knew how to make outrage into a joke.“You don’t play comedy,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1995. “It’s like that Jewish expression ‘crying laughter.’ All through the centuries the Jews had such terrible things happen to them that they had to laugh a little harder.”Her “Seinfeld” debut was one of the series’ most famous episodes: “The Contest.” After George’s mother catches him having a private moment with one of her issues of Glamour magazine, she falls in shock, throws out her back and enters a hospital.“I go out for a quart of milk; I come home and find my son treating his body like it was an amusement park,” Ms. Harris said. “Too bad you can’t do that for a living” — and now, with her voice rising, she used her working-class New Yorker’s accent to milk the script’s sarcasm: “You could sell out Madison Square GAAARDEN. Thousands of people could watch you. You could be a BIIIG STARRR.”That set the template for her subsequent appearances, including on other beloved episodes like “The Fusilli Jerry” (1995) and “The Rye” (1996). She began her scenes in a sane register of a volatile emotion — recrimination, self-pity, bafflement — and by the end of the sequence arrived at an outburst so intense it could only be farcical.Ms. Harris’s success in the role led to other opportunities to play the shrill and unhinged, including in the “Toy Story” movie franchise, for which she provided the voice of Mrs. Potato Head.At the height of the popularity of “Seinfeld,” Ms. Harris found herself with the kind of celebrity that drew looks on the street. Something in the emotionality with which she portrayed Estelle Costanza had prompted fond recognition in a national audience.“Black people, Asians, WASPs, Italians, Jews — they all say, ‘Oh, you’re just like my mom,’” she told The Tribune.Estelle Nussbaum was born on April 22, 1928, in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan, where her Polish-Jewish parents owned a candy store. She grew up largely in Tarentum, Pa., a coal-mining town where her parents moved to help relatives run a general store and to provide Estelle a gentler setting for her childhood.Though she faced antisemitic taunts in her small town, Estelle 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.Ms. Harris in 2010 at the premiere of “Toy Story 3” in Hollywood. She provided the voice of Mrs. Potato Head in the movie.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesShe 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, Ms. Harris was a homemaker.She wound her way through dinner theaters and television commercials, including a 1983 spot for Handi-Wrap: “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that cling: doo-wrap, doo-wrap, doo-wrap,” she sang with schmaltzy enthusiasm.After her big break on “Seinfeld,” Ms. Harris’s other major credits included the movies “Out to Sea” (1997), starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and “My Giant” (1998), with Billy Crystal.Mr. Harris died last year. In addition to her son Glen, Ms. Harris is survived by another son, Eric; a daughter, Taryn; three grandsons; and a great-grandson.In her Tribune profile, Ms. Harris said she had complained to Larry David, the co-creator of “Seinfeld,” about her character’s constant yelling, but experience proved him right: “The more I yell, the more they laugh,” she said.Ms. Harris admitted that her personal life prepared her for the part.“I yell at my husband, but he doesn’t mind,” she said. “He’s grateful for the attention.”Tiffany May More

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      Kathryn Kates, Actress of ‘Seinfeld’ Babka Fame, Dies at 73

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      She had a long screen career but may be best remembered as the counterwoman who tells Jerry and Elaine the bad news that her bakery was out of chocolate babkas.Kathryn Kates, who appeared as a counterwoman in two memorable scenes from “Seinfeld” involving baked goods in short supply — chocolate babkas and marble rye bread — and racked up numerous screen credits over nearly 50 years, died on Jan. 22 at her brother’s home in Lake Worth, Fla. She was 73.The cause was lung cancer, the brother, Josh Kates, said.Ms. Kates, who lived in Manhattan, had roles in dozens of television shows and movies, including the recent series “Shades of Blue” on NBC, “Friends From College” on Netflix and “The Good Fight” on CBS.She appeared in five episodes of “Law and Order” — a fixture on the résumé of most New York working actors — as Judge Marlene Simmons. She also had a recurring role in Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” as the mother of Jason Biggs’s character, Larry Bloom. And she was cast as Angie DeCarlo, an Italian beauty shop owner, in “The Many Saints of Newark” (2021), the prequel movie to “The Sopranos.”But it was in two episodes of “Seinfeld” (1990-1998) that she made an indelible mark.Sporting a yellow apron and a New York attitude, Ms. Kates appeared in Season Five’s “The Dinner Party” as the bakery clerk who announces to Jerry and Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) that the store’s last treasured chocolate babka had been sold just ahead of them. Offered a cinnamon babka instead, Elaine calls it a “lesser” babka, to which Jerry objects, intoning, “Cinnamon takes a back seat to no babka.”The scene includes a memorable coughing fit by Ms. Kates’s character next to a wall of baked goods and her closing lines to a loitering Jerry and Elaine: “Can I get you anything else? How about a nice box of ‘scram’?”The episode also features Jerry’s exaltation of another New York bakery mainstay, the black and white cookie, as something of a model for better race relations. “Look to the cookie!” he declares.In an interview last year with “This Podcast Is Making Me Thirsty,” a podcast about “Seinfeld,” Ms. Kates recalled getting the part for which people would recognize her on Manhattan streets for decades.The whole writing staff, including Mr. Seinfeld and the show’s co-creator, Larry David, watched as she read her lines and delivered her cough in an audition. She had earlier auditioned for other small parts on “Seinfeld,” but the brassy counterwoman was her lucky break.Two seasons later, Ms. Kates, again in her yellow apron, reprised the role in the episode “The Rye.” This time she tells a crestfallen Jerry that the bakery’s last loaf of marble rye has been sold, complicating a plot to restore George into the good graces of his future in-laws.Ms. Kates devoted much of her time to running The Colony Theater in Burbank, Calif., of which she was a founding member. There, she and the actress Barbara Beckley were co-general managers from 1975 to 1981. She appeared in numerous Colony productions.“Kathy was New York through and through,” Ms Beckley said. “She did some wonderful roles with us.” But she added: “She was not a leading lady. She was much more of a young character actress, and not a Hollywood type at all.”Kathryn Jane Kates was born Jan. 29, 1948, in Queens. Her father, Louis Kates, was an electronics engineer. Her mother, Sylvia (Fagan) Kates, was an actress who, under the stage name Madelyn Cates, appeared on television in the hospital drama “St. Elsewhere” and the series “Fame” and played the eccentric concierge confronting Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) in the 1967 film version of “The Producers.”Ms. Kates grew up in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, and graduated from Great Neck North Senior High. She studied acting at New York University.After graduating in 1971, she moved to Los Angeles in 1974 and focused on theater. Her early television credits included appearances on the legal drama “Matlock” in 1991 and other cameo roles in “Rachel Gunn, R.N.” and “Hudson Street.”In 1993, she married Joseph Pershes, an executive at a video distribution company. They divorced in 2006. In addition to her brother, she is survived by a sister, Mallory Kates.When asked in the podcast interview about appearing on “Seinfeld,” Ms. Kates responded that she was always grateful to have work. “I have loved every job I’ve ever had,” she said.And as for her babka preference? She favored chocolate. More