· Image Search

In 1989, a sitcom pilot aired on NBC. It starred a little-known standup comic, had no plot to speak of, and didn't have much impact on the ratings. But over the next nine years, it rose up the charts to become the #1 sitcom on TV and the comedy series that, more than any other, defined the '90s. The sitcom was called The Seinfeld Chronicles, later rechristened just Seinfeld. And this is the story of...the woman who played the coffee-shop waitress in the pilot: one Lee Garlington.

Garlington never appeared in another episode of Seinfeld, but if you've ever seen the one episode of The Seinfeld Chronicles, it may have struck you as though she was intended to show up again eventually. In the pilot, Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Elaine does not appear; Garlington, as Claire, has several good lines and behaves as though she knows Jason Alexander's George and Jerry Seinfeld's...uh, Jerry quite well. Perhaps if Louis-Dreyfus had never joined the cast, the character of Claire -- the biggest female role in the episode -- would have continued to grow as the series progressed. But we'll never know.

Fortunately, Lee Garlington didn't have to sit around waiting for a call from Jerry Seinfeld: she's a character actress, and there are characters to play. Garlington has had guest roles on nearly every long-running TV series you can name, and then some. Roseanne, Murphy Brown, Home Improvement? Check, check, check. NYPD Blue, L.A. Law, The Practice? Triple check. She's played everyone from Joey's father's mistress, a pet mortician, in the first season of Friends to Xander's drunken, bitter mother on the most recent season of Buffy.

But wait! There's more! Lee Garlington has shown up in movies, too. Like many female HITG!s, she's played cranky schoolteachers (specifically, a gym teacher in Some Kind of Wonderful) and easily shocked mothers (in American Pie 2 and Lovely & Amazing). But unlike many female HITG!s, she has also played the bartender in a '70s-era lesbian bar (in If These Walls Could Talk 2), and a Russia expert in the CIA -- a hugely pregnant Russia expert, no less (in The Sum of All Fears). Garlington's deadpan neutrality is the perfect blank slate upon which nearly any HITG!-esque character role can be built.

This month, a movie premiered. An actor well known for playing cuddly characters in family-friendly movies makes a major departure, playing an unbalanced, violent man and earning rave reviews. This has been the story of...the woman who plays the coffee-shop waitress: one Lee Garlington.