Estelle Harris, who was best known for her roles as George Costanza’s short-fused mother on Seinfeld and the voice of Mrs Potato Head in the Toy Story franchise, has died aged 93.
As middle-class matron Estelle Costanza, Harris put a memorable stamp on her recurring role in the hit US sitcom during the 90s. With her high-pitched voice and humorously overbearing attitude, she was an archetype of maternal indignation.
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 would move to Florida – as their son, played by Jason Alexander, fruitlessly encouraged them to do.
After the nine-season run of Seinfeld ended in 1998, Harris continued to appear on stage and screen.
She voiced Mrs Potato Head in the 1999 animated blockbuster Toy Story 2 and played the recurring character Muriel in the popular Disney Channel sitcom The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, among other roles.
Harris’ agent Michael Eisenstadt confirmed the actor’s death in Palm Desert, California, on Saturday evening.
“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 on 22 April 1928, in New York City, Harris grew up in the city and started tapping her comedic talents in high school productions where she realised she “could make the audience get hysterical”, as she told People magazine in 1995.
She had stopped pursuing show business when she married in the early 1950s but resumed acting in amateur groups, dinner theatre and commercials as her three children grew (“I had to get out of diapers and bottles and blah-blah baby talk,” she told People).
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.
“Estelle is a born performer,” Stiller said in 1998. “I just go with what I got, and she goes back at me the same way.”
Viewers “just 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.
