Estelle Harris, who hollered her way into TV history as George Costanza’s short-fused mother on “Seinfeld” and voiced Mrs. Potato Head in the “Toy Story” franchise, has died. She was 93.
As middle-class matron Estelle Costanza, Harris put an indelible stamp on her recurring role in the smash 1990s sitcom. She was an archetype of maternal indignation with her high-pitched voice and humorously overbearing attitude.
Trading insults and absurdities with her on-screen husband, played by Jerry Stiller, Harris helped create a parental pair that would leave even a psychiatrist helpless to do anything but hope they’d move to Florida. Their son, played by Jason Alexander, fruitlessly encouraged them to do so.
On Saturday evening, Harris’ agent Michael Eisenstadt confirmed the actor’s death in Palm Desert, California.
Harris often said that viewers of all backgrounds would tell her she was just like their own mothers.
“She is the mother that everybody loves, even though she’s a pain in the neck,” she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1998.
Born April 22, 1928, in New York City, Harris grew up in the city and later in the Pittsburgh suburb of Tarentum, Pennsylvania, where her father owned a candy store. She started tapping her comedic talents in high school productions, where the comedian realized she “could make the audience get hysterical,” as she told People magazine in 1995. The career-defining role came after decades on stage and screen.
After the nine-season run of “Seinfeld” ended in 1998, Harris continued to appear on stage and screen. Estelle Harris voiced Mrs. Potato Head in 1999 animated blockbuster “Toy Story 2”. She played Muriel’s recurring character in the popular Disney Channel sitcom “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody,” among other roles.
She had stopped pursuing show business when she married in the early 1950s but resumed acting in amateur groups, dinner theater, and commercials as her three children grew. “I had to get out of diapers and bottles and blah-blah baby talk,” she told People Magazine. Eventually, she began appearing in guest roles on TV shows, including the legal comedy “Night Court” and in films, including director Sergio Leone’s 1984 gangland epic “Once Upon a Time in America.”
Her “Seinfeld” debut came in one of the show’s most celebrated episodes: the Emmy Award-winning 1992 “The Contest,” in which the four central characters challenge each other to refrain from doing what is artfully described only; as “that.”
Harris would appear in dozens more episodes of the “show about nothing.” She seethed over snubbed paella, screeched about George’s hanky-panky in the parental bed, and laid out the spread for screen husband Frank’s idiosyncratic holiday, Festivus.
“Estelle is a born performer,” Stiller told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., in 1998. “I just go with what I got, and she goes back at me the same way.”
Still, Harris saw a sympathetic undertone to her character, often saying Estelle fumed out frustration at her bumbling mate and scheming slacker of a son.
Viewers, she told an interviewer in 1998, “look at her as being funny, cute, and a loudmouth. But it’s not how I play her. I play her with misery underneath.”
She is survived by her three children, three grandsons, and a great-grandson.
Jennifer Peltz, The Associated Press
