For years, Jennifer Coolidge felt like her life was 'flatlining'. Then she was cast in The White Lotus.

For 30 years, Jennifer Coolidge has been a staple of our screens, with that nasal breathiness and that role as a busty blonde who is a little, er, slow, nailed down to a fine art.

The archetype of Coolidge's characters is personified in some of her best-known roles, as "Stifler's mom" or Paulette from Legally Blonde. She's made a name for herself playing similar - often sexualised but hilarious - characters. And why wouldn't she? She plays it perfectly. So well, Coolidge, her nasally laugh, and the bend-and-snap have cemented themselves as part of pop culture's history.

Watch: The White Lotus trailer. Post continues below video.

Coolidge's career began in the '90s with a series of comedic guest roles on television and in movies. She played Jerry's girlfriend in an episode of Seinfeld and voiced Miss Kremzer in King of the Hill.

In 1999, she got her big break as Jeanine Stifler in American Pie. It started a number of years where Coolidge was everywhere, playing Jeanine throughout the American Pie film series as well as Paulette Bonafonté Parcelle in Legally Blonde and its sequel.

Throughout the 2000s, she held a number of guest roles. She was Hilary Duff's self-absorbed stepmother in 2004's A Cinderella Story, she appeared in the final season of Friends and later played Joey Tribbiani's agent in the short-lived spin-off, Joey.

Each time she played a supporting character, and each time they were similar in tone.

Image: Getty. 

Coolidge feels like she's been passive about her career, which has an always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride feel to it. For example, the role in Joey was a "consolation prize" after another pilot she starred in wasn't picked up.

But she's still insistent that most of her success, and the cult following she's gained, is down to luck.

"I feel like all my best stuff is by accident. It's never anything that I really develop - it's all this accidental stuff," she told AV Club.

"There's a million people that set their minds to something and then they create this amazing thing. I feel like the less I work on something - or if I put too much energy into it - it's just a complete flop. 

"But if I don't give a crap, and I don't put any judgment on or whatever, then it goes over way better. So the moral of the story is don't work very hard."

It's a passiveness that also transcends into her personal life.

Coolidge once famously pretended to be twins so she could date two friends while on holiday, but she told Bustle she could never ask a man out herself. She's also surprised by the perception men have of her.

"Their perception of your life is so much bigger and better than what it really is," she told Vulture. "They somehow project a bunch of s**t onto you, that you're usurping them or you're doing something to them. You're some sort of verb."

Image: Getty. In reality, Coolidge leads a relatively normal life. She's predominantly based in New Orleans where she has been renovating a house, slowly, one room at a time, since Hurricane Katrina. She says it is a money pit.

She's had many iconic roles, but she hasn't commanded the leading actor salaries of her peers.

"So many people are just not making what they should be making. But I do think it is weird when someone just gets some massive amount of money and then other people who are just below them are getting one-hundredth of that," she said in an interview with Vulture. 

"If you're called a character actress, it's just an excuse not to pay you."

But in 2021, Coolidge's career reached all-new heights.

Writer and director Mike White, a close friend of Coolidge's for more than a decade, told Vulture he knew she became frustrated by the "hump-the-furniture parts".

"She can nail that kind of broad comedy, so of course that's what people want her to do. People love her, but she's put in a box," he said.

So White wrote a TV show with Coolidge as his lead. The show was to be a "paranoid road comedy" about an underappreciated actress who gets a call that she's being honoured with lifetime-achievement award from an obscure film festival in Sri Lanka, but begins to spiral when she suspects the award is an elaborate ruse concocted by her ex-boyfriend in an attempt to kill her.

But the network passed on the show, concerned about Coolidge's ability to carry it.

"People were like, 'Jennifer as the linchpin to a show, as your way in...' I could just sense there was some anxiety," White recalled.

"Jennifer makes the comedy about herself. The joke is always on her. It's a disarming way of going through life - a way to put people at ease and try to defuse anything. You make yourself the joke, but what happens is that sometimes people then confuse her with being a joke."

Instead, White wrote the quarantine-friendly show called The White Lotus, filmed entirely at a resort in Hawaii during the pandemic in late 2020. Coolidge was his non-negotiable.

"The same way people feel about her in Legally Blonde is how I feel about her in life. I want to see her win."

Image: HBO/Binge.

Reflecting on his friend, White told Bustle he wrote the show so he would have the opportunity to work with her. Hopefully, in something that would show her full potential.

Coolidge's character in The White Lotus, Tanya McQuoid, became such a phenomenon and fan-favourite that White brought the character back in the second season of the anthology series. 

Throughout that second season, she once again entertained audiences with her one-liners and physical comedy - which kept going right until the end of the finale, when Tanya accidentally died while trying to escape a yacht where she'd shot a group of "high-end gays", as she called them, who were trying to kill her.

In conversation with Ariana Grande for Entertainment Weekly, to mark Coolidge being named as the publication's Entertainer of the Year for 2022, she said she didn't expect her career to have such a recent surge.

She credited Grande casting her in her 'thank u, next' music video as a catalyst for her resurgence. Months later, she was cast as the mother of Cassie (Carey Mulligan) in the Oscar-nominated Promising Young Woman.

"I'm embarrassed because I just didn't have high hopes of things like this, you know what I mean?" she explained, in reference to the Entertainer of the Year title. "My life had been sort of flatlining for quite a while, so this is above and beyond, and it's a thrill."

And this week, Coolidge won her first Golden Globe, thanks to her role in The White Lotus.

"This is such a great night. To be in the company of all of you. There are about five people in this room who kept me going for 20 years with these little jobs," she said in her acceptance speech. "I didn't know anybody, and it was this thing of going nowhere. American Pie, I milked that to the bone."

Then for a lot of her speech, she thanked Mike White significantly for giving her The White Lotus. And there wasn't a dry eye in the building, especially for White who was visibly emotional. 

Jennifer Coolidge delivers an epic #GoldenGlobes acceptance speech that makes #TheWhiteLotus creator Mike White cry. https://t.co/m069JEKekW pic.twitter.com/WBWx9H6BCj

— Variety (@Variety) January 11, 2023

"I had such big dreams and expectations as a younger person, but what happened is that they get sort of fizzled by life, I thought I was going to be Queen of Monaco. Then you get older and realise it's not happening. But Mike White, you have given me hope. You have given me a new beginning. 

"You changed my life in a million different ways, now my neighbours are speaking to me - I was never invited to one party on my hill, and now everyone is inviting me!" she laughed.

The past few years have had a profound impact on Coolidge - and not just due to the accolades, including her much-deserved Emmy award win and Golden Globes win.

"People that I've admired for many, many years - for many decades - have DMed me… people that I just worship," she told Entertainment Weekly. 

"I'm like, 'Oh my God, how could this person possibly know who I am?' So that's kind of cool! And then, creative projects that are all of a sudden showing up - some really fun jobs that are coming in, that's about as good as it gets."

Which means, thankfully, there's plenty more Coolidge goodness to come.

This article was originally published on July 14, 2021 and has since been updated.

Feature Image: Getty.