Blonde beauty Lisa Kudrow was born July 30, 1963, in Encino, California, into a Jewish family, consisting of parents Lee and Nedra Kudrow and older siblings Helene Sherman, David Kudrow, and Derrick Kudrow.
After attending school in California and graduating from Vassar College with a degree in Biology, Lisa Kudrow launched her acting career as a member of The Groundlings, a legendary Los Angeles improvisational comedy group that helped launch the careers of such stars as Will Ferrell, Jon Lovitz, Jennifer Coolidge, and Janeane Garofalo.
After trying unsuccessfully to get into television acting, Kudrow tried out for Saturday Night Live in 1990, but lost to Julia Sweeney and was fired during the pilot episode filming of Frasier. Lisa Kudrow finally landed a major television role as the dumb blonde waitress Ursula (who later became Phoebe’s twin sister in Friends) in the show Mad About You, starring Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser. Her role as Ursula garnered her an Emmy Award in 1998 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and in 1994 led to her major and renowned role as Phoebe Buffay on Friends, one of six starring roles, also including Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox Arquette, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer. Lisa Kudrow was actually nominated six times for her work on Friends.
Besides television acting, Lisa Kudrow has also ventured into film acting, starring in such movies as Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion in 1997, with Mira Sorvino; The Opposite of Sex in 1998, with Christina Ricci; Hanging Up in 2000, with Diane Keaton and Meg Ryan; and Analyze This in 1999, with Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal; and its follow-up Analyze That three years later.
After the bittersweet end of Friends in 2004, Lisa Kudrow decided to create, write, and produce a new original television series on HBO. The show was titled The Comeback, and Kudrow played main character Valerie Cherish. However, the series, which premiered in June 2005, only lasted one season.
Lisa Kudrow has been married to her French husband Michel Stern since 1995, and the couple has one son together—Julian Murray, born on May 7, 1998. There was a famous rumor floating around for quite some time that she lost her virginity to Stern on their wedding night—when she was thirty-one—but she has said in interviews it was actually eleven years before that.
Some interesting trivia about Lisa Kudrow is that she is the oldest of all the Friends actors and that she speaks fluent French, which is probably having something to do with having a French husband. She dated late-night talk-show host Conan O Brien in the late 1980s and enjoys playing Tetris.
YUDDY
