NEW YORK (AP) — Estelle Harris, who made her way into TV history as George Costanza's little-known mother on "Seinfeld" and voiced Mrs. Potato Head in the "Toy Story" franchise, has died. She was 93 years old.
As middle-class matron Estelle Costanza, Harris put a memorable stamp on her recurring role in the 1990s sitcom. With her loud voice and humorously domineering attitude, she was the epitome of maternal resentment.
Trade humiliation and absurdity with her on-screen husband, played by Jerry Stiller, Harris helps create a parental pairing that will leave even a psychotherapist helpless to do anything but hope they move to Florida. Will go - as his son, played by Jason Alexander, inexplicably encouraged him to do it.
Harris' agent Michael Eisenstadt confirmed the actor's death Saturday evening in Palm Desert, California.
Harris often said that audiences from all backgrounds told her that she was just like their own mother.
"She's the mom everyone loves, even when she has a pain in her neck," she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1998.
The career-defining role came decades later on stage and screen. Born on April 22, 1928, in New York City, Harris grew up in the city and later in the Pittsburgh suburb of Tarentum, Pennsylvania, where her father owned a candy store. She began to harness her comedic talents in high school productions, where she realized she could "frenzy audiences," as she told People magazine in 1995.
After nine seasons of "Seinfeld" ended in 1998, Harris continued to appear on stage and screen. 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 and Cody", among other roles.
She stopped doing show business when she married in the early 1950s, but resumed acting in amateur groups, dinner theater and commercials as her three kids got older ("I've got to wear diapers and bottles and blankets). -Blah baby talk had to get out," she told People). Eventually, she went on to make guest appearances 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."
Their "Seinfeld" debut took place in one of the show's best-known episodes: the Emmy Award-winning 1992 "The Contest", in which the four central characters challenge each other to create what they describe only as "that" artistically. refrain from doing.
Harris would appear in dozens more episodes of "Show About Nothing." She sat down on snubbed paella, raved about George's hunky-punky in the parents' bed and the screen stretched for husband Frank's silly holiday, Festivus.
"Estelle is a born artist," Stiller told The Record of Bergen County, N.J. in 1998. told. "I just do what I've got, and it goes back to me the same way."
Nevertheless, Harris took a sympathetic tone to his character, often stating that Estelle expressed dismay at her bumbling partner and planner of a son.
Viewers, she told an interviewer in 1998, "Just look at her as funny, cute and loud-speaker. But that's not how I play her. I play with the sadness beneath her."
His family consists of three children, three grandchildren and one great-grandson.