Lisa Kudrow

She had a biology degree from Vassar and was co-authoring headache research with her father when Jon Lovitz pushed her toward the Groundlings. Her Friends path had a detour: she landed Roz on Frasier, then got fired by director James Burrows during the pilot. When Burrows came on to direct Friends, she had to audition twice while the other five leads only went once. Her recurring role as Ursula on Mad About You put her in front of a writer married to the show's co-creator, who recommended her for Phoebe. She won the Emmy for it in 1998, first of the six cast members to get one.

After Friends wrapped, she reportedly considered quitting acting altogether. Instead she co-created The Comeback, a cringe comedy about a faded sitcom actress that HBO cancelled in 2005 and revived in 2014 to critical acclaim and Emmy nominations. Her Netflix series No Good Deed came out December 2024 to solid reviews, then got cancelled after one season. The pattern is consistent: critics recognize what she's doing before networks commit to it. Phoebe made her famous. The Comeback made her a writer.

Before acting, she co-authored a medical research paper with her father, a headache specialist, on cluster headaches and left-handedness. On the genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are?, she discovered her paternal great-grandmother was murdered in the Holocaust. She's fluent in French, married a French advertising executive in 1995, and her real pregnancy got written into Friends as Phoebe's surrogate triplet storyline. She also improvised most of Web Therapy, a series she created that somehow landed Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as guests.