Jennifer Coolidge: Flowering in the White Lotus at 61

After playing a teenage boy’s fantasy in American Pie, age 38, the roles dried up. Then Jennifer Coolidge checked into TV’s coolest hotel.

Jennifer Coolidge will be nominated for an Emmy for all this. Picture: HBO/Foxtel

Jennifer Coolidge is 61, an age at which actresses used to be handed a grey wig and cast as Granny. But in the past few weeks, as Tanya in The White Lotus, Coolidge has been spilling out of dresses and hoovering up cocaine in Sicilian villas. “These gays!” she squealed in the best TV line of the year, “They’re trying to murder me!” We also get to see Tanya, the billionaire heiress with more money than brains, have a thrilling encounter with a well-hung Italian stallion at least half her age.

Jennifer Coolidge in the new season of The White Lotus. Picture: Binge/HBO

Coolidge will be nominated for an Emmy for all this. Weird and damaged, the role was the performance of a lifetime for somebody who had given up on the career she deserved before her friend - and The White Lotus creator - Mike White stepped in. Tanya’s character is the only one to appear in both series of the hit drama.

“The saddest thing about life is that you just make decisions about yourself,” Coolidge said recently. “If I’m not getting great roles, I come to the conclusion that people think I’m incapable of them. I’m not going to condemn any job I was given, but I got things that were very simple. Mike was that person you hope exists, who gives you a challenge that makes a difference in your life.”

Before her career renaissance - Jenaissance? - she was best known for playing Stifler’s mom in American Pie in 1999. Yes, the woman who gave us the term Milf (don’t google it at work). Her role was simply to seduce her son’s friends. Finally, at the ancient-for-Hollywood age of 38, Coolidge found fame and, crucially, money after decades of struggle.

Jennifer Coolidge in American Pie. Picture: Alamy

It also gave her a lot of sex. She remains private about her personal life but did once claim that she slept with 200 men because of that role. In a recent interview, the pop star Ariana Grande asked her who the best lover out of that lot was. “The youngest fellow,” Coolidge answered.

On screen she scowls and pouts with off-kilter energy that nobody gets close to mimicking. After American Pie the roles rolled in: the acclaimed mockumentary Best in Show soon followed, as well as Legally Blonde with Reese Witherspoon. It felt like it might finally happen for the actress, the daughter of a Boston plastics manufacturer.

Then things slowed down. Now she was 40, nobody knew what to do with her. In 2016, BuzzFeed ran an article with the headline: “Just want to let you know that the actress who played Stifler’s mom is not dead.”

Jennifer Coolidge and Jon Gries in the White Lotus.

She was so low down the pecking order that when Legally Blonde came to the London stage in 2010 she was asked to audition for Paulette, her film character. “I said, ‘What do you mean, audition? It’s not a straight offer?’” she told Variety magazine. “Look, if I got up on stage and farted, and that’s all I did, it would still be the lady from the movie!”

Then, finally, along came White. HBO wanted a show that could be filmed under pandemic protocols and by placing cast and crew in one hotel it was easier to comply with the restrictions. Coolidge was worried. Over lockdown, she had put on almost three stone. “I thought we were all going to die,” she said. “So I was just eating myself to death. Vegan pizzas, sometimes five or six in a day . . . I just didn’t want to be on camera that fat.”

She even tried to get out of the role - before a friend called her an “idiot”. The show has now lifted her career to where it should have been. “I’d like to continue to play troubled people,” she told Vogue. “I feel I can relate.” Film roles are stacking up, including a new sequel to Legally Blonde. Her fame is now such that she will have equal billing with Witherspoon.

One ex, the comedian Chris Kattan, wrote in his 2019 memoir: “Jennifer was a tall, messy, sexy, tough, charmingly crass Boston-native bombshell.” That fits her on screen too. He was head over heels. And now, at last, so are the rest of us.

The Sunday Times