CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Disguised as a dolphin and forced to make someone lightning quick, ‘The White Lotus’ actress Jennifer Coolidge got a roast Saturday before being honored by Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals as Woman of the Year for 2023.
As the oldest theater organization in the country and one of the oldest in the world, Hasty Pudding Theatricals has presented this award annually since 1951 to women “who have made lasting and impressive contributions to the world of entertainment”.
Coolidge, who enjoyed a career boost following her Emmy-winning role as Tanya McQuoid-Hunt on the acclaimed HBO series The White Lotus, led a parade through the streets of Cambridge on Saturday afternoon. Wearing a leopard print coat and a fluffy pink hat, she waved to the crowd that came out anyway unusually cold temperatures.
Coolidge, who also played Stifler’s feisty mother in the film American Pie and wise manicurist Paulette in the Legally Blonde films, grew up in the Boston area. Her other film credits include roles on Best In Show, A Mighty Wind, and Shotgun Wedding, and she has appeared on several television shows including Seinfeld, 2 Broke Girls, and Nip/Tuck.
“It was a lot of fun. I’m really having a great time,” Coolidge said before receiving her Pudding Pot Award. “I got to meet all these young students who are so much smarter than me.”
Coolidge later became emotional and recalled how much her late father, who went to Harvard, would have loved to witness that moment.
“I was so blown away that this experience was happening. I never saw it coming It blows away every type of movie or TV show I’ve ever done,” she said. “Seriously, my father went here. I wish he was here. His brothers went here and everything, so it’s a big deal.”
Producers toasted Coolidge with several comments about her career, including a point where they wondered if she was only chosen after Reese Witherspoon dropped out. They continued to poke fun at her lack of serious roles, noting how she left Boston for New York, where she made a splash “as an incompetent cocktail waitress.”
“Guests raved about your unpredictable movement patterns and haunting Happy Birthday quote,” joked one of the producers, Sarah Mann. Fellow producer Aidan Golub then commented on her waiting tables with Sandra Bullock, “which was the first and last chance you got to work with an Oscar winner.”
Coolidge then had to judge a contest of four people making impressions of her, choosing a man in a pink dress to speak the words from an iconic scene she did in Legally Blonde. And after noticing how Coolidge recently said her dream role was to play a dolphin, the producers dressed her in a dolphin outfit and asked her to sing dolphin style.
She made a series of dolphin-like squeaks before shooting a water pistol at two people dressed as menacing stingrays – a scene similar to that in the second season of “White Lotus,” where she guns down several people on a boat. “Those rays are trying to murder me,” she said.
Past Woman of the Year award winners include Meryl Streep, Viola Davis and Debbie Reynolds.
On Thursday, award-winning actor and best-selling author Bob Odenkirk was named Man of the Year 2023. Odenkirk, best known as seedy attorney Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, received his Pudding Pot Award at the celebratory roast ahead of a preview of Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ 174th production, COSMIC RELIEF!.
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