"As I was growing up, I would make rules for myself, and, no matter what happened, I wouldn't deviate from them," said Lisa Kudrow, one of the stars of the NBC comedy series Friends. "I saw things, especially relationships, in terms of black and white, right and wrong."
She had inflexible ideas about actors and acting as well. "I refused to even tempt myself with thoughts of acting. I felt all actors were idiots whose lives didn't work. If I became one, I was afraid people wouldn't take me seriously."
This is the same Lisa Kudrow, of course, who has created some of television's most memorable "dumb blondes." In fact, the 34-year-old actress is so good at making the vacuous funny, that, in 1995, she simultaneously played Phoebe, the new-wave airhead on Friends, and her twin sister Ursula, the out-to-lunch waitress on another NBC series, Mad About You. Last year, Kudrow had her first leading film role, as the ditsy Michele in Romy And Michele's High School Reunion, co-starring Mira Sorvino.
Kudrow arrived for lunch casually dressed in black pants and a blue shirt, facing the L.A. sun without a trace of make-up, but the healthy flush of impending motherhood. She matter-of-factly admitted she's spet most of her life being afraid -- afraid of what others thought, of making a mistake, of losing control. "I was weird, smart, and really rigid," she said. "I needed boundaries. I was afraid I'd go crazy. I don't know why I though that, because I never gave myself any cause." Her slight shrug, wry grin, and tilt of her head were unerringly Phoebe.
"I was born 35," she said. "By high school I was busy lecturing everybody. 'Why are you smoking?' 'Why are you getting in a car with someone who's had two beers?' 'Why are you going to the beach instead of summer school?' I had to learn that there are shades of gray."
Today, Courteney Cox, her co-star on Friends, said she seeks Kudrow's advice for the very reason that she is not judgemental. "Lisa is logical, and when I go to her to discuss a problem, her answers are usually complex," said Cox. "What would take me six hours to think through, she does in minutes. She really listens and understands what I'm saying, but she'll also give me other viewpoints. It's like the way she acts: She sees lots of choices, then does a line in a way I never thought of."
Kudrow grew up with an older sister and brother in Tarzana, a Los Angeles suburb. Her father, Lee, is a retired physician and research scientist in the field of migraine headaches (Kudrow infrequently suffers mild ones), and her mother Nedra, is a travel agent. "I was oddly self-motivated," Kudrow recalled. "I identified with adults. I wanted to please them. I could be around my parents' friends and not be a nuisance."
"I had decided it was fun to do well in school," she added, "and I liked the praise. I don't know how smart I was, but I was really competitive. I was seriously confident, but that got taken care of in junior high school. My friends dropped me. They called me a 'tag-a-long.' They shamed me out of my vocabulary, and I started talking down." As she spoke, her hands swayed like anemones.
Though she'd acted in school and enjoyed acting camp, Kudrow earned her bachelor's degree at Vassar in biology, focusing on the interactions between environment and biology. Still, she said, there was a pull in another direction: "When I'd get home for vacations, I'd get this peculiar feeling that I can do this acting thing."
"My parents would have gladly accepted any choices I made. Remember, I was about 80 by then," she deadpanned. "My parents were a lot younger."
"One time I brought my boyfriend home. He stayed in one room, and I stayed in another. My father noticed that we never held hands or kissed in front of him. He hopefully asked me if I would sneak into his room when he and my mom went to work. I didn't. I know he thought I was weird. I was a virgin until I was 20. I'm not embarrassed about it. It was just another one of those rules I made up for myself."
Kudrow decided to truly pursue acting when Jon Lovitz, her brother's best friend, became a regular on Saturday Night Live. "I realized it's not some mystical thing that happens," she said. "It's like other things you work at, and it works out." She took improv classes, where she met Conan O'Brien, long before he replaced David Letterman on NBC's Late Night.
"Lisa makes the smaller life observations," O'Brien said. "She acknowledges the awkward pauses in life and the awkward pauses in people. Lisa is analytical, but I think her greatest strength is that she's so intuitive.
"She's always supportive," he added. "When I hesitated about replacing David Letterman, Lisa bullied me. She kept telling me I'd regret not pursuing it. That's what a good friend does."
In 1990, Kudrow joined the Groundlings, Lovitz's former improv troupe, performing and eventually teaching there in the evening. Auditions were infrequent. Suddenly, she was 27. "I found my 20s to be very difficult," she said. "You're supposed to be an adult. You have all this information on your side, but you don't have the experience to judge it. I had been crying for at least two weeks, every day, so I started seeing a therapist." Her social life, she added, was even bleeker than her career.
"The fear of being wrong held me back socially," she said. "The most important thing I learned in therapy was you can make a mistake, and the world doesn't come to an end. I wasn't scared of being hurt. I was afraid I'd say 'I love you' and later change my mind. That would mean I made a mistake. I didn't realize that relationships are dynamic. You have to continually assess them. In a normal relationship, there are definately shades of gray."
"I thought everyone talked to themselves with a temendous amount of harshness and called themselves 'losers' and 'stupid.' I had to learn to allow myself to make a mistake without becoming defensive and unforgiving."
Kudrow risked "making a mistake" and began dating O'Brien, putting their eight-year friendship in jeopardy. And she was hired to play the savvy producer Roz on Frasier. She was filming the pilot in 1993 when she got fired. "It just didn't work," she recalled. "I could feel it, but I couldn't change it. What made it really horrible was I knew the show would go. When I was told, I just dealt with it. My instinct is always, 'Don't make the person giving you the bad news feel badly.' I only like to complain if I think I'm going to be funny. I don't whine."
"Conan was very supportive," she added. "We had been dating for a couple of months, and I thought it was going to be something important. But the same week I got fired, he got his [Late Night] show. In that moment, I knew things weren't going to work out. I was going to be needier than he could deal with. He was taking off for New York to replace Letterman. We dealt with that. Then I spent a couple of days crying over everything."
Kudrow fell back on making rules. Every morning she'd take a walk, read the paper, and create a schedule for the rest of the day. It got her through.
In 1994, the same year she won her fole on Friends, Kudrow was reintroduced to Michel Stern, a French-born co-owner of a Los Angeles ad agency, whom she had met years before. "I knew Michel's track record and never thought of him as a great relationship guy," she said. "But it just worked. We gave it everything. I think we were both surprised that, after the first couple of fights, we were so reasonable. I didn't feel like it was a big decision to get married, so I knew it was the right thing."
They were wed in 1995. Their first baby is due at the end of this month. On Friends, Phoebe is also pregnant, although she's carrying her baby for her TV brother and his wife.
This month, Kudrow will appear as the defensive, uptight Lucia in a comedy called The Opposite Of Sex. It's a different type of part for her, she said, but one that actually mirrors who she once was. Ironically, it comes when she's no longer afraid that people won't take her seriously. "People ask if I'm worried that I'll only play Phoebes and Micheles," Kudrow said. "What if that's all that happens? Do I care if people think I'm an idiot? I cared too much about that when I was younger. Now I listen to myself."