Jane, Plain

LAST SPRING, A DAFFY AND LOVABLE WORKING WOMAN FROM England and an uptight psychiatrist were attempting to declare their love for each other after seven years of skirting the issue. America was transfixed. Months have gone by, and this fall, a resolution will finally come into focus. What will become of Niles Crane and Daphne Moon? It’s a great romantic- cliffhanger TV moment, and suddenly Daphne has become America’s sweet- heart and she’s not even American.

Jane Leeves can barely contain herself, as if all the excitement of a first love is around every element of her life. She is seven months pregnant, a friendly, saucy, motherly and irreverent woman in the middle of a busy day, stopping in at her office near the Frasier set on the Paramount lot in Los An- geles, paper bags in the way, phones ringing, having a chirpy exchange with her assistant. Her personality and character not to mention her constant focus on family and work detract from the fact that she is also stunningly beautiful woman.

At 39, she is glowingly gorgeous. Jessica Paster the stylist for Peri Gilpin, Minnie Driver, Jewel and Hilary Swank, among others has been Leeves’s private stylist and friend for years, says of her: “We have someone who is fabulous. I mean, the girl is a model. She’s beautiful, a perfect size 6 even now, pregnant. It’s amazing how she looks. Her outward appearance is important and she puts effort into it, but that isn’t what her life is all about.”

Leeves’s office used to belong to Bruce Willis. She is wearing pinstriped trousers, a sleeveless black top with a wide col- lar and black sandals. She is settled into Joan Plowright’s old couch in her comfortable drawing room with a silver tea set on an oak table and Old World furnishings. She and fellow cast member Gilpin have started a production com-pany at Paramount. “Paramount said ‘We’d love it if you had a name that signified that it’s two women, so we called it Bristol Cities, which is Cockney rhyming slang for titties. They don’t know what it means here. They think it’s some very independent film company. It’s a bit of a wink.” Frasier costar David Hyde Pierce says, “She’s very wicked. She seems very innocent, but she has a wicked sense of humor.”

SHE WAS BORN ON APRIL 18, 1961, in London and in East grew up Grinstead, Sussex, the daughter of a contracts engineer and a nurse, along with two sisters and a brother. She was called “Spider” and “Rubber Lips” in school. Her sister Katey, now her manager, remembers: “She’s always been an entertainer and had us all laughing at the dinner table, doing imitations of everyone.”

After her dreams of becoming a ballet dancer were dashed by an ankle injury, she did some modeling and progressed to working with the bawdy late comedian Benny Hill when she was 18, in 1980. It was an auspicious start, about which Hyde Pierce jokes, “Benny Hill was probably her best work, and it’s always tragic when one peaks so early.” By age 21 she had decided Los Angeles was the place for her. She took $1,000 and the phone number of a man she met on a commercial shoot who had told her that his mother would rent her a room. (Twelve years later, after Leeves met her husband, Marshall Coben, she discovered that this one contact she had in Los Angeles had been a childhood friend of his.)

She began by renting one of those rooms. Then she joined an acting class with fellow unknowns Jim Carrey, Brandon Lee, Ellen DeGeneres, Winona Ryder and Molly Ringwald. A couple years of struggling later, she got a part on a sitcom called Throb and then won the small role of Audrey Cohen, Miles Silverberg’s girlfriend on Murphy Brown. This was followed by her stellar turn on the famed “The Contest” episode of Seinfeld, in which she managed to be perfectly demure throughout the course of an episode about masturbation. She won a few bit parts in feature films, including the David Bowie-Catherine Deneuve-Susan Sarandon horror movie The Hunger, a part that ended up on the cutting-room floor. (“Happens to everyone, doesn’t it?” she says with a laugh.) She also had a moment in To Live and Die in L.A. in which “I didn’t have a single line. I was sort of the mute lesbian. But I did get to go off with the girl and the money at the end. Bit ironic, isn’t it?” Just a bit.

“Sometimes it’s too scary to look back on how flimsy it all was,” she continues. “Who was that idiot who put it all on the line? But I had nothing to lose. I thought, I want to be an actress; I’m going to Los Angeles. I mean, what a ridiculous person. I look back on it and I think, Who was that girl, that brave, ambitious girl? The struggle and everything didn’t mean anything because I knew this was what I was meant to do.”
In the end, she found the perfect foil in Daphne Moon on Frasier, creating a whole world of a character: the physical therapist with the heart of gold and the accent that you can’t quite place. Kelsey Grammer recalls of the casting for the show, “The day of casting, I was told ‘We got a girl who’s good for the show,’ and I heard she was British and I said ‘A Brit? God, what are you thinking?’ And then I went down and met her and we read together, and she was really easy on eyes and she had intelligence and wit, which is really pretty good, considering the options that exist out here. So we hired her on the spot.”

Hyde Pierce recalls that “at the first reading of the first script, we were like we’d been together for five years in a nice way. It was pretty perfect from the start.”

Daphne Moon is the sane voice in a show about neurotic psychiatrists- that full, soft, round name for the face of lovely earthiness. Leeves started out as a supporting player, but last season, her natural ebullience and seven years of situations pushed her to the forefront. “It became a show about these two uptight, pompous brothers,” she says, “but it needs the three of us [along with costars Gilpin and John Mahoney] pulling them down all the time and bursting that bubble of pomposity.” The show almost instantly became a primetime hit, and over the past seven years, Daphne has become part of the ensemble in much stronger ways than her role might originally have suggested. “You don’t go far unless you let the cast be its own entity” says Grammer. “Some actors want to be the center of their show, but I’m not that stupid.”

JUST WHEN SHE WAS HITTING her stride professionally, in 1995, Leeves met Coben, then a Paramount executive. How could such a woman have remained single until just five years ago? The source herself seems to know: “I remember dating, and after a couple weeks, I’d be like, “This is never going to be the big thing of my life, so bye-bye.’ I had the best career, the best family, the most amazing friends. I was completely happy, and I didn’t really need anyone, and that’s when I met him.” Coben is now the vice president of Longform, where he develops TV movies, but the pair met at a Christmas party on the Paramount lot. “I thought she was too good for me,” Coben recalls. “I never considered that I had a chance with her. I thought she was the most beautiful and intelligent woman I’d ever stood next to, and I wasn’t nervous, because it never occurred to me to ask her on a date. A colleague dragged me down to the stage and arranged for me to meet her again. I keep hoping I don’t wake up out of the dream.”

They spend their weekends at a rented beach house in the middle of nowhere, where Coben indulges his surfing habit and Leeves gardens. “I’m not one with the water,” she chirps. “Not a water-sporty lot are we English. I tend to sink. I’m better on dry land.” On Sunday evenings they watch The X-Files and The Sopranos. “Two hours of good viewing. I’m such a geek, aren’t I?”

She loves the L.A. Lakers, and everyone, from her stylist to her costars to her husband, swears that she is skillful in the kitchen. Hyde Pierce says, “She is a terrific cook, which is confounding because she is English.” Leeves herself does not feign modesty on the subject. “I must have a Jewish lady living inside me somewhere, ’cause I’m always feeding people,” she says. “My husband always says I’m turning into my mother, ’cause there’s always a mass of food waiting for us when we go [to visit her].”

She has always taken a shine to motherhood, and it’s surprising that it has taken so long for it to happen for her. Katey concurs: “She’s a natural mum.” “I always loved children,” says Leeves. “My brothers and sisters didn’t have that; they were all sort of hohum about them. But I’m passionate about them, and I’m the last in my family to have kids.” She is due in January- “a true millennium baby.” She stopped smoking when she discovered she was pregnant but says “I’m craving a drink. I told husband, ‘You have a bottle of Scotch in that delivery room!’

“It’s like I have a condition, and I can’t believe that there’s something at the end of this, and then you see the sonogram and see the baby, and now I’m feeling her and she’s kicking me, and you can actually see her sometimes. She’s very active.”

The blessed event won’t become part of her Frasier character’s life, however. “They’re going to hide it,” she says. “But I did catch sight of a bit of belly on the monitor yesterday. At the moment, I’ve just run out of my wedding and I’m engaged to Donny and I’m in love with Niles and Niles is married to Mel, who… you know…so it would just be too many layers if I was pregnant as well. Save that for down the road somewhere.”

For now, the newly uncovered romance between Daphne and Niles promises plenty of drama. “We all knew last year it was time there’s a law of diminishing returns on unrequited love,” says Hyde Pierce. “People actually care if Niles and Daphne get together. My recollection is that it was Jane’s idea before we even shot the first episode that Niles had a thing for her, and we hung onto that. It didn’t take very long before we established that Niles had a crush on her. The great thing for me is that I’ve been in love with her for seven years, so there’s no real acting involved. I keep telling her, but she just won’t listen.”

The center of a nationally televised romantic cliffhanger, happily married, expecting her first child – there’s something to the story of Jane Leeves that suggests that even in Los Angeles, nice girls come out all right. Even as she revels in her joy, she looks back on her beginnings in Hollywood and “It felt like I’d found what I was supposed to be doing. I was never completely miserable, because I found my passion in life. And that was worth a bit of suffering. Everything worth having is. ‘Cause it’s sweeter then. If it comes easily, it goes easily and I hope to be around for a long time.”