From "You Can Make a Mistake and Go On" about Lisa Kudrow

by Gail Buchalter -- Parade Magazine -- May 3, 1998 -- Pg. 7

excerpt

   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 ever 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 is 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 Goundlings,  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 bleaker 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 normal relationships,  there are definitely shades of gray."

   "I thought everyone talked to themselves with a tremendous 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 8-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 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.

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