Estelle Harris has died aged 93, it has been announced.
The actress was well known for her range of performances such as Estelle Costanza in Seinfeld and the voice of Mrs Potato Head in the Toy Story franchise.
Harris put a memorable stamp on her recurring role in the smash 1990s sitcom, Seinfeld. With her high-pitched voice and overbearing attitude, she was an archetype of maternal indignation.
Harris’ agent Michael Eisenstadt confirmed the actor’s death in Palm Desert, California, on Saturday evening.
Viewers of all backgrounds would tell her she was just like their own mothers, Harris often said.
“She is the mother that everybody loves, even though she’s a pain in the neck,” she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1998.
She was born April 22, 1928, in New York City and grew up in the city then later in the Pittsburgh suburb of Tarentum, Pennsylvania, where her father owned a candy store.
After the nine-season run of Seinfeld ended in 1998, Harris continued to appear on stage and on screen taking on a variety of roles.
She voiced Mrs Potato Head in Toy Story 2 and played the recurring character Muriel in the popular Disney Channel sitcom The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, among other roles.
Estelle Harris was funny, beautiful, kind & incredibly talented! We made a commercial together once and she told the director “I’m not doing another take until you promise to give Giselle this dress to keep!” ♥️♥️♥️ They gave me the dress. I will cherish knowing Estelle forever. pic.twitter.com/c7rSpqxtCp
— Giselle Eisenberg (@gisellezenberg) April 3, 2022
Her Seinfeld debut came in one of the show’s most celebrated episodes: the Emmy Award-winning 1992 The Contest, in which the four central characters challenge each other to refrain from doing what is artfully described only as “that”.
Harris would go on to appear in dozens more episodes of the “show about nothing”. She seethed over snubbed paella, screeched about George’s hanky-panky in the parental bed and laid out the spread for screen husband Frank’s idiosyncratic holiday, Festivus.
“Estelle is a born performer,” Stiller told The Record of Bergen County, NJ, in 1998. “I just go with what I got, and she goes back at me the same way.”
Viewers, she told an interviewer in 1998, “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.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article