January 13 is the birthday of the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus (b. 1961).
JLD has been a star now over 40 years, which is particularly painful for me to say because I’m only four years younger than she!
On paper I ought to dislike her. My whole bag is show business as a means of advancement. It used to be truer than it is now but it remains true to a degree: people at the bottom of the ladder of every race, religion, and creed can get ahead in show business. Of course it’s less true today due to nepotism. Over the last few decades we’ve seen a show biz pseudo-aristocracy arise. (I hate it most, I think, as it pertains to screenwriting, because, MAN, is that field not a meritocracy. How often do you find yourself admiring a script when you watch a movie? Maybe one out of 100 times? Most of the time I find myself actively hating the script, but this is a digression). Undeserving nepo-actors are fewer, simply because people notice a bad performance more than they notice a stinko screenplay, and, well, also because it makes genetic sense for talented artists to have talented children. Mamie Gummer? No, I don’t hate Mamie Gummer. Her mother is Meryl Streep, and you see the mother in the child. But it’s still a drag that some talented actor from a poor family didn’t get the same shot at employment in the industry as Gummer, and that’s the point.
What’s this got to do with Julia Louis-Dreyfus? Well, she happens to be from one of the richest families in the world. A quarter century from now, her family’s wealth will be 200 years old. Her great-great grandfather Léopold Louis-Dreyfus (1833-1915) the son of an Alsace farmer, made a fortune trading wheat, and then diversified, thereby founding the juggernaut financial concern still known as the Louis Dreyfus Group. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s father was a billionaire, and she grew up all over the world. Still there are underdog aspects. The family was part of France’s Jewish minority. In fact that very same region of Alsace is where the Marx Brothers forebears came from. France’s notorious Dreyfus Affair revolved around the persecution of one of her relatives. And when the Nazis occupied France, her grandfather was a hero of the Resistance. That’s pretty easy to love.
Still, it’s a head-scratcher. “Beautiful” and “rich” doesn’t typically equal “comedian”. Let alone an appealing, down-to-earth comedian, or at least someone seemingly so. I know actors aren’t the characters they play, but still, you know, the super-wealthy are often mannered in a way that dictates a certain kind of casting. George Plimpton isn’t going to play Archie Bunker or even Richie Cunningham’s father. Julia Louis-Dreyfus seems oddly “normal”, “healthy”, “girl-next-door”? To me, at any rate. I suppose if you grew up on a farm with an outhouse you might find her intolerably posh. My origins were pretty modest, and yet she seems about like most people I know. I mean, yes, she often plays “Karens”, but it never seems like she IS one.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus was only 21 when she was hired for Saturday Night Live, her only experience being a few semesters at Northwestern, followed by a brief stint at Second City. She came on SNL in 1982, and well do I remember her from that time, because, hello, va-va-voom! I was a senior in high school, so she was one of the high points of the show for me at that juncture, less because she was hysterically funny (the show didn’t seem to know what to do her) but because she was H-O-T, hot. I have never forgotten the sketch in which she played Natasha Kinski in an ad parody featuring a snake writhing around her naked body, or her performance as Marie Osmond being dry-humped by her brother Donny (Gary Kroeger). It was a smart calculation on the part of the show’s producers. SNL‘s original hottie Laraine Newman was gone, and Fridays’ Melanie Chartoff had demonstrated the efficacy of including a sex symbol in a comedy ensemble. Still, Louis-Dreyfus was young and inexperienced, and no doubt too classy to play the role of sex object — the upshot being that she ranked far below the likes of Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, et al as one of the show’s top stars. The fact that she was romantically linked with the painfully unfunny Brad Hall, didn’t alter that status. She left SNL in 1985.
Prior to her next high water mark came two forgotten sit-coms. The first was a 1987 pilot for a spin-off of Family Ties called The Art of Being Nick, starring Scott Valentine as the character who had been Mallory’s burnout boyfriend. This show wasn’t picked up, but then she was cast in the ensemble of Day by Day (1988-89), a sit-com by Andy Borowitz and Gary David Goldberg, starring Douglas Sheehan and Linda Kelsey. JLD played, ya know, the neighbor. This one ran for just a season.
Then of course the bonanza of Seinfeld (1989-1998), which is how most people became aware of her. Both she and Michael Richards had been hired through Larry David (he had worked with Louis-Dreyfus at SNL, and Richards on Fridays). She rather unexpectedly blossomed as a comic actress on this show, in some senses establishing what we would think of as her screen persona, which somehow managed to walk a tightrope between charismatic and cutting. More on the show here.
Here followed another forgotten JLD sit-com, Watching Ellie (2002-03), created by her husband Brad Hall and co-starring her half-sister Lauren Bowles. The gimmick on this show was that it was presented in what purported to be real time — 22 minutes, with a clock on view, no less. She played a cabaret singer in this one, and it ran for a season and a half. In the first season it was a one camera sit-com. Much like The Odd Couple and Happy Days, it changed to a conventional live audience 3-camera sit-com in the second season, but the producers threw in the towel after just a few episodes.
Next came the one major success of hers of which I know next to nothing. From 2006 to 2010 she had her own starring sit-com The New Adventures of Old Christine, which ran for five seasons! I’ve never seen an episode, never knew it existed when it was on. She played a divorced mom who owns a gym. She is “Old Christine” because her ex-husband (Clark Gregg) marries a “New Christine” played by Emily Rutherford. Her best friend is Wanda Sykes, her brother is Hamish Linklater. It’s on my to-do list.
By contrast I was and am a huge fan of what I take to be her crowning achievement Veep (2012-2019). I’m pretty sure I have watched the entire run of this show three times. It’s a program on which everyone is foul-mouthed and horrible yet somehow likeable, despite being vain, narcissistic and incompetent. Done in the mock-doc style with copious amounts of improv, and impeccable art direction (the sets feel absolutely like you’re on location in the Vice President’s office suite and other government buildings) the show is an artistic triumph as much as a guffaw-worthy ride. I was surprised it lasted as long as it did, given its variance with reality during the Trump years, but the show found ways to stay relevant. I’m guessing, too, that the character of Selena Meyer brings us closer to the real Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the lifestyle to which she is accustomed, than any of the other roles she’s played. It has the ring of truth.
And look at that! She was on no fewer than seven TV series, putting her in the rare situation of spending almost the entirety of her career as a major star of the small screen. Beyond the shows on which she was a serious regular, she also guest starred on many other programs. I’ll only point out a couple of memorable examples: she played a version of herself on David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm no fewer than eight times; and she played Liz Lemon (a character reportedly partially based on herself) in the famous 2010 live episode of 30 Rock, for the scenes where Tina Fey couldn’t get to the second set fast enough.
Movies, there have been few. She had a small role in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989). She was in two Woody Allen films: Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Deconstructing Harry (1997). Since Veep went off the air however movies seem to be her principal focus. She co-starred with Will Ferrell in Downhill (2020). I thought she was excellent as Jonah Hill’s liberal but insufferable Jewish mom in You People (2021). More recently, she’s been in a bunch of these stupid Marvel movies, because…I guess because everyone’s in them. It’s like the frigging Rhinoceroses in Ionesco. What a waste of…everybody! Come back to us, Julia!