As middle-class mate Estelle Costanza, Harris made an unforgettable mark on her repetitive role in the thrilling 1990s comedy series. With her loud voice and humorous authoritarian attitude, she was an archetype of maternal resentment. By exchanging insults and nonsense with her on-screen husband, played by Jerry Stiller, Harris helped create a parenting couple who would leave even a psychiatrist helpless to do anything but hope to move to Florida – such as their son, played by Jason Alexander. fruitlessly encouraged them to do. Harris’s agent, Michael Eisenstadt, confirmed the actor’s death in Palm Desert, California, on Saturday night.

“She is the mother that everyone loves”

Viewers of all backgrounds said she was just like their mothers, Harris often said. “She is the mother everyone loves, even though it hurts her neck,” she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1998. The crucial role of the career came after decades on stage and on screen. Born on April 22, 1928, in New York, Harris grew up in the city and later in the Trentum suburb of Pittsburgh, Penn, where her father owned a candy store. She began to use her comedic talents in high school productions, where she realized that “she could make the audience hysterical,” she told People magazine in 1995. After the end of Seinfeld’s nine-season series in 1998, Harris continued to appear on stage and on screen. She voiced Ms. Potato Head in the 1999 animated film Toy Story 2 and played the recurring character Muriel in the popular Disney Channel comedy series The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, among other roles. She stopped doing shows when she got married in the early 1950s, but continued to play in amateur bands, nightclubs and commercials as her three children grew up (“I had to get away from diapers and bottles and blah blah babies”). said. People). Eventually, he began appearing in guest appearances on television shows, including the legal comedy Night Court, and in films such as Sergio Leone’s 1984 gang epic Once Upon a Time in America. She made her Seinfeld debut in one of the series’ most famous episodes: the 1992 Emmy Award-winning The Contest, in which the four main characters challenge each other to refrain from doing what is elaborately described as just “it.”

He has appeared in dozens of episodes of Seinfeld

Harris would continue to appear in dozens of episodes of “The Show for Nothing.” He sank over a disgusted paella, screamed for George’s cloak in the crib, and spread the clothesline for Frank’s screen wife’s peculiar celebration, the Festival. “Estelle is a born singer,” Stiller told The Record of Bergen County, NJ, in 1998. “I just go with what I got and she responds the same way.” Harris arrives at Toy Story 3 in Hollywood in 2010. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images)
However, Harris found a nice touch in her character, often saying that Estelle expressed her frustration with her uninterrupted partner and the insidious laziness of one of her sons. The audience, he said in an interview in 1998, “just look at her as if she were funny, cute and loud. But she’s not how I play her. I play her with misery underneath.” She was left with three children, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.