All of us choose our identities to some degree. Those who choose to be blondes side with the forces of light, identifying themselves with such attractive qualities as youth, purity and sex. In the case of actresses, blondness may turn out to be a vocation, 'You're just treated differently,' explains Lisa Kudrow, who plays the role of Phoebe in Friends, America's most popular television comedy. 'You're just lighter. It literaly lightens you up.' If you want to lighten up, you probably don't feel too light to begin with. You probably feel you need lightening up. And despite her evident blondeness, and her sunny Californian manner and her giggles, Lisa Kudrow does seem a rather serious person.
'I did it one summer,' she recalls of her blondification, 'I'd just been fired from Frasier - I was supposed to be in that pilot [Playing Ros]. I was a little devastated, but I started exercising, taking care of myself, walking outside, and my hair got lighter, and I gradually went blonde. I liked it.' More fun? 'Yeah. Had more fun. But I still sometimes, when I'm talking to someone, my image of myself in my head is this dark-haired person.'
Lisa Kudrow and Iare brunching in Beverly Hills, sitting outside at the Polo Lounge, and she's smoking cigarettes, which is fairly remarkable for a young mother in California (she and her husband, a Frenchman, had their first child, a boy, about a year ago - an event accommodated in Friends by the birth of Phoebe's triplets): 'You can't smoke in a bar here. You can't smoke indoors anywhere here!' Her face, which is attractively avian, is without make-up, and she's dressed casually in black and red. She's here to promote her new film - Analyze This, a Mafia comedy starring Robert De Niro, but first we talk about Phoebe, and the blondeness thing.
Phoebe Buffay is the ditsiest blonde to be seen on television since Goldie Hawn in the Sixties. Aromatherapist, masseuse and folk singer, she's a commited New Ager beset by doomed optimism, caring, credulous and weird. 'I went down to the Park,' she tells her friend Joey in a recent episode, 'and I let a bee sting me.' 'What?' says Joey. 'It helped the bee look tough infront of his bee friends.' Joey breaks it to her quite gently, but with an edge. 'You know,' he explains, 'the bee probably died when he stung you.' Phoebe is devastated: 'Dammit!' That's Phoebe. And that's Friends. The show is just as contrived as, say, I Love Lucy, and just as arch and whimsical and sentimental-cynical, but every line tells - '12, 13 writers,' notes Kudrow, 'and they all sit around till dawn' - and its six actors play the gang of Greenwich Village twentysomethings with such verve and sympathy that the viewer - kind of cares about their lives.
Phoebe is not the first blonde Lisa Kudrow has played who is, without wishing to sound blondist, dumb. In fact, she's played pretty much the same character before. In Mad About You, a sitcom that didn't make it to Britain, she was a waitress called Ursula, whom she characterises as 'definitely an idiot. She's a joke. And I did that before Phoebe, before Friends came along. And when Friends got put on the air it was gonna be on right after Mad About You, and they had to explain why you're gonna see the same person, same character, back to back.' So the network rose to the challenge and made Phoebe and Ursula twins, with the characters guesting across the two shows. Phoebe is more developed than Ursula, and has darker aspects (the suicides of her mother and her first room-mate; her failed marriage to a gay ice-dancer called Duncan), but they're basically the same. 'I mostly have played dumb characters up until recently, and it's kind of a nice way to be. There's something easy about that kind of life.' As with the blondeness, so with the stipidity, There's a yearning at work here: lighten me up, make it easy. Like Anita Loos before her, Lisa Kudrow seems to be an intelligent brunette who wants to play the dumb blond.
Kudrow, 36, is a Valley Girl, born and raised in the San Fernando Valley in a suburb called Tarzana, which was developed on land bought by Edgar Rice Burroughs with the proceeds of Tarzan. The Kudrows are originally from 'the Poland-Russia area', and two generations ago many of them died in Nazi concentration camps.
Lisa's father is an eminent doctor, now retired; her elder brother is a neurologist, her elder sister an artist, and both live in Los Angeles. Did she have a happy childhood? 'Very. Yeah. Extremely.' White picket fences? 'Yeah.' Bicycles? 'Yeah.'
Valley Girl jokes in California are very much like Essex Girl jokes in England: Valley girls are stupid, Valley girls are easy. But Lisa Kudrow took a degree in biology at Vassar and, she says, remained a virgin until her marriage five years ago. Did she take an early interest in acting? 'Yeah. Grammar school, and junior high, but not high school and not college - at all, nothing. I was interested in becoming the adult that I saw myself becoming, which was not an actor, nothing silly. I wanted something respectable, to be the kind of woman who would attract a certain kind of man that I could respect. That was my thinking. It had to do with the kind of couple I would be a part of.' And where did these quaint ideas come from? 'Old movies.' So she wasn't smoking dope and listening to Talking Heads like all the other Valley Girls? 'No, not at all. I wasn't a typical teenager at all. Maybe a little. I went through a phase, but it wasn't me, so it didn't last long.' Kudrow's greatest film success so far has been for her performance earlier this year in The Opposite of Sex, as the dark-haired, prune-faced Lucia, who's very anti-sex - 'It's like, "Hi, I'd like to blow my nose in your face." You wouldn't like that, would you?' Is Lucia closer to her own character than all those dumb blondes (she played yet another one in Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion)? 'You're always asked if you have anything in common with the character, and the answer is, yeah, I do. Not as extreme as Lucia... but that uptight feeling I understood. I don't know if you'd characterise me as uptight, but I understood what it is to be so afraid of sex, of your sexuality. But for her [Lucia] it was for one reason, while for me it was just ,"No, I'm saving myself. Because I have to make myself worthy of the kind of man I have in mind." So there's something rigid about that, right? And uptight and serious. But also I guess for a teenager, that's weird?' Maybe for California. 'Right. I had friends, and they didn't think I was weird, they respected it. I wasn't the first person they ran to when they decided to sleep with their boyfriends, or try a drug. But I had a normal level of popularity.'
So she studied hard, and saved herself, and went to Vassar with the idea of becoming a doctor, or doing research in biology - 'I thougth, "I'll do good work, and I'll get published, and my kids'll be real proud of me"' But it was not to be. 'I actually made an effort to reject acting, to shove it out of my body, because I didn't want my kids to have an actress as a mother - to have, like, a silly person.' But she's come to terms with that? 'Yeah. That's who I am, and I'm gonna stop fighting it. After I graduated it really struck me hard, I couldn't fight it any more. I couldn't! So I pursued it, and I got encouragement on the way, and I stuck with it, and then found the right man, got married, and just had to keep, not reinventing myself, just deciding that it doesn't matter what you are if you are a good person.'
There's something rather touching about Lisa Kudrow and her fights with herself. And because she had the strength of character to suppress and actressy tendencies at a crucial stage in her developement she seems to have remained a real person in what is probably the world's phoniest enviroment. She might still be a little conflicted, as they say over here, but she's also quite focused and grounded. She might indulge in a little light psychobabble, and the occasional flight of luvvie-speak, but she really does seem to be a pure soul who happens to have ended up as a millionaire in a nightmarishly venial industry. After movies, or possibly even before them, money is the main topic of conversation in Hollywood, but when the subject is broached Lisa Kudrow displays a commendable embarrassment. Friends is now in its fifth season, and the regular cast gets $100,000 each per episode; there are 24 episodes to a season, so she's paid $2.4 million a year. She's quite rich then. 'Yeah. TV's lucrative.' Set for life? 'Right.' Ho hum. Rude of me to mention it. Long pause, then a slightly fractured rush into the subject: 'If we were smart, we would've maybe gotten a smaller house and put some away, but... It's strange, but um... The truth is, in this business... yeah, it's a lot of money. And it is a lot of money. But the insane world that is television, and the insane amounts of money that television generates, has started a series of articles which say we are grossly underpaid. And comparatively speaking that's true. The Seinfeld cast were getting $600,000 an episode, and it was reported that Jerry Seinfeld was offered $5 million an episode to continue with the show. I mean, we were called greedy bastards when we got this deal, but these other people are getting six times that. So we're not like what they call "jet rich"'.
We leave the subject of money for a while, and talk about smoking, babies, air travel, psychotherapy: 'I believe in it, and I've gone. Cognitive? Where they say, "You don't like that, do this. Change it." You get trapped in your head. And the way you present it to people reinforces the misconception you have about whatever the problem is. And then friends are just supposed to be supportive - they're not therapists. And you don't also believe them.' Then she brings up the money again. 'I get so embarrassed about the money stuff. Because it's an outrageous amount of money, it's more than most people will ever make, and it's hard to come off as anything but greedy. And if you ever feel like you're entitled to it, you know? But it doesn't work to keep excusing yourself.'
We talk some nore about babies, which prompts her personal focus on Analyze This, her new film, because she started shooting when her son was three weeks old. 'I thought I has more time. I thought I had six weeks before I has to start. People tell you things in a certain way. Everyone gets the information wrong! Like, "Wow! They didn't tell you?" And I got a call saying "So you need to be on the plane tomorrow." And I said, "I can't, I can't, no I can't! That's crazy. How ambitious does a person have to be? No."'
Luckily it was only four weeks' work - quite a small role, playing the super-straight fiancee of a New York psychoanalyst (Billy Crystal), who finds himself treating a neurotic Mafia boss (Robert De Niro). These days the Mafia movie - from the operatic sagas of Francis Ford Coppola to the spiritual picaresque of Martin Scorsese - performs the same role in America as the Western used to, exploring moral and political questions in a lawless but honour-obsessed milieu. And whether because the Mafia is in decline, or because the genre is played out, or because Hollywood eats itself, the wise guys have lately become the subject of comedy. 'Yeah,' says Kudrow. 'Mobsters, they're so lovable! They kill people, but that's not all there is to them.' By a mysterious process of synchronicity the premiere ot Analyze This turns out ot be exactly the same as that of the brilliant television series Sopranos, which has (De Niro's performance notwithstanding) rather stolen the film's thunder.
Like Cheers, Friends, as the rubric goes, 'is filmed live before a studio audience' (Jim Burroughs, a co-creator of Cheers, directed the pilot and first 12 episodes of Friends), and when Lisa Kudrow gave in to acting she cut her teeth doing improvised comedy with the Groundlings troupe in West Hollywood. Is she interested in stage-acting - like Nicole Kidman, say, in The Blue Room? 'I'm not interested in being naked on stage for two hours! But the thing to me about that is it's something I'd like to try on a small scale. A 90-seat theatre, or an acting class or something. But to ask people to put up a lot of money for me to do it, ask people to pay to watch me do it? I'd like to make sure I can do it first. Otherwise it's just self-indulgence, I think.' She says she wants to try everything, 'everything but Shakespeare'. What about directing? 'No. Not now. We'll see if I change my mind. That's a huge amount of work. And I'm not one of those people who can do three things at the same time. Plus you have to be kind of nasty?'
So she'll carry on with Friends and what she calls 'a very successful six-way relationship'. For how long? 'The show could definitely sustain some more interesting stories. But I'm not sure that all the conditions would be there for it to be a great show for that many years. It's possible. But if the writing's not as good, I know the writers won't be eager to continue, and if any of the actors don't feel like doing it, the rest of us would also reconsider. It's just so hugely collaborative that it'll take everybody wanting to stay, and the odds of that happening get lower as the years go on.'
In the meantime. Lisa Kudrow enjoys health, wealth, love and family, and the adoration of affluent young people across the planet. She must be happy, fulfilled? 'In my family,' she says slowly, toying with a strand of blonde hair, 'we're not allowed to say that.'
