Jennifer Coolidge never expected to get quite so emotional when she accepted her Golden Globe Tuesday night.
“I was surprised at how I spilled my guts!” she told Page Six. “I was standing in front of that crowd and I forgot where I was. I was saying a lot of my feelings. I wasn’t trying to be funny — I was being serious.”
The 61-year-old actress was clearly overwhelmed as she was given a standing ovation while collecting her award for Supporting Actress in a Limited Series/Anthology, for her scene-stealing role as lovelorn billionaire heiress Tanya McQuoid in the HBO hit “The White Lotus.“
In her speech, Coolidge said her young dreams of stardom had been “fizzled” by life, and that she had only been kept going by small jobs over the years from friends including Ryan Murphy (“The Watcher”), Michael Patrick King (“Sex and the City”) and the Weitz Brothers (“American Pie”), alongside “Legally Blonde” co-star Reese Witherspoon.
Her words drew “Lotus” creator and director, and Coolidge’s close friend, Mike White to tears as she previously told how she almost refused to sign up for the show after sinking into a depression during the pandemic.
“I almost turned it down, very stupidly”, she admitted of the show, which also won her an Emmy in 2022.
Although Arianna Grande calls her “My Queen” and “Best In Show” co-star Eugene Levy says she is in her “own comedic universe,” Coolidge told Page Six she doesn’t really hold such high thoughts of herself.
“I’ve been around forever, since I was 30 — that’s a long time,” she said. “But when I go to a party with my other actor friends, I don’t know any of the people. I live a secluded life in New Orleans and I only know the people I meet on the job and my friends from The Groundlings.”
Asked why she doesn’t have as much love for herself as all her fans do, she replied: “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, my dating life, I’ve never found anyone quite right for myself. I haven’t found the love of my life.”
“I think I made some bad decisions. It makes you insecure and you don’t think you’re great,” Coolidge added. “Many people can come up to you at the airport … people come up when they have nothing else to do, they say very nice things to you, and people in Hollywood come up and say ‘You’re great,’ but the only way you know they mean it is if you give you a job.”
When he picked his Globe for best limited series, White, who also wrote the movie “School of Rock”, told the crowd at the Beverly Hilton: “We went out with a show we wanted to do with Jennifer, and everybody passed. I know you all passed, you all passed on this show. So yes, it’s very gratifying to have this moment.”
“Mike was pushing and trying to sell it and no one was buying it,” Coolidge recalled of “White Lotus.”
For the 5-foot-10 blonde, who made her name as the original MILF, Stifler’s Mom, in the “American Pie” franchise, the role of Tanya came as a surprise — even though White kept telling his friend he had written it for her.
Back in 2017, Coolidge said, when she was at “an all-time low”, White took her on safari to Africa and it was a “life-changing experience.”
“Mike said ‘Jennifer, I love you, I’m taking you to Africa,'” she recounted. “I didn’t believe it for one second. It was so generous of him and I really got to know him on that trip, even though I’d known him for many years. You really find out who someone is when you’re smack next together in a tent on the Serengeti. And he’s someone who really gives a damn about this world and how it’s going.”
As for White having written the role Tanya for her, Coolidge said, “It’s the ultimate gift from someone. They’re saying, ‘Not only do I like you, but I think you’re talented.’ That doesn’t happen very often when someone goes and roots for you.”
Coolidge grew up in a working-class family in the tiny town of Norwell, Mass., just outside Boston. Her father, Paul, worked in manufacturing and her mother, Gretchen, was a homemaker who died from pancreatic cancer when Coolidge was in her early 30s, which the actress said was “devastating.”
At 21, she moved to Los Angeles, before enrolling at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. It was the 1980s and, Coolidge has admitted, she did a lot of cocaine, partied hard and was a regular at the Palladium.
She also waitressed alongside Sandra Bullock. Once, Cooldige said, she called in sick, but instead of faking a cold, she gave the excuse that someone had put a cigarette out in her eye.
“I got very few jobs in my 20s and, you know, I did little shows around town at little tiny theaters and stuff. But, yeah, it was a mess. I was sort of, you know, going out every night and drinking and drugging in my 20s. And when I got to be 27, I ended up going into a drug rehab and then after that sort of got my act together,” she told the LA Times last year.
Although Coolidge’s ambition was to be a dramatic actor, a friend in an acting class told her she would be better off at comedy. She went on to land small but memorable guest roles on shows like “Seinfeld” — where she played the masseuse who won’t give massages to boyfriends.
In her Globes speech, Coolidge told White: “You have given me hope. You’ve given me a new beginning … you changed my life in a million different ways. My neighbors are speaking to me and things like that … You make people want to live longer, and I didn’t.”
The audience howled, but Coolidge’s comments were no joke.
Coolidge revealed that White wrote Season 2 of the show around her after she showed him a video of eight handsome men offering Monica Bellucci cigarettes as she sat on a scooter in the 2000 Italian film “Malèna.”
That was what she dreamed of, she told him.
He gave her a “very Italian, very operatic” ending as Tanya came to a watery end.
Told fans of the show are hoping White will find some way to bring Tanya back, Coolidge said: “He’s tough, he’s sticking to his guns.
“There is a line that Tanya says that is something like, ‘Italian women suffer, they cry and then they die,’ and Mike wanted it to be along those lines.”
As an example of just how much Coolidge has yet to believe in her own star power, she claimed to have no clue that “Legally Blonde 3,” currently being written by Mindy Kaling, was moving ahead — or whether she would her manicurist character, Paulette, would return — until the morning after the Globes. The newly minted award winner bumped into someone who confirmed it: “Of course it’s happening, Jennifer!”
