Analyze This!
First there’s the accent. Even before you get a glance at the long legs and luscious lips of Jane Leeves, all it takes is a few choice words from the bubbly British actress, delivered in that classic cockney accent, and you begin to understand why timid psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane has been lusting after her on Frasier all
these years. It would be enough to make any mortal man renounce his Hippocratic oath for a quick romp on the couch.
Leeves demurely shrugs off the attribute that’s earned her status as the thinking man’s
sex object. “Accents are strange,” she says, “because on the whole I think I’m usually seen as quite quaint and funny. If I had a French accent, on the other hand, everyone would think I was incredibly sexy and probably very good in bed.”
Is she telling us that the breathless abandon we Yanks have always heard in the voices of women like Elizabeth Hurley, Posh Spice, and, um, Queen Elizabeth is just an act? “Well, you sometimes hear that English women are uptight,” Leeves coyly answers, “but you only have to look at British TV to see it’s so much more gritty and sexual than in the United States. In my opinion, English girls are real goers.”
If Leeves ever possessed an uptight side of her own, she had to give it up quickly for her first gig as a player in the final season of the naughty Brit skit program The Benny Hill Show (after an ankle injury forced her to abandon her dream of becoming a ballerina). Though she says she can’t remember the famously bawdy comedian ever pinching her bum, the program still gave her ample opportunity to put her assets on display. “I’d be the maid who’d come in holding the tea tray with her skirt because she couldn’t find the oven
mitts,” she laughs. “Just typical Benny Hill stuff.”
Leeves also had a brush with another British comedy institution, appearing as an angelic show girl in Monty
Python’s The Meaning of Life. “There’s a big closeup of me coming down the stairs in the ‘Christmas in heaven’ scene,” she recalls. (That breeze you’re feeling is thousands of Monty Python fans simultaneously reaching for the remote control. But don’t get too excited, boys-those seemingly divine revelations were prosthetic fakes.) Though you’d expect that the Python troupe members spent their time chasing after the chorus girls, Leeves claims it was usually the other way around, particularly in the case of the film’s
rotund co-star and director, Terry Jones. “All the girls fancied him,” she explains. “There’s something so comfortable and manly about him, which is strange because he’s usually the one dressed up as a woman.”
Having exhausted both options for a comedic actress in England, Leeves soon decided that she might be able to make an even bigger splash in the United States. “I actually sold all my belongings, or gave them away, so I left England with nothing but a suitcase,” she remembers. Her first day inHollywood she enrolled in an acting school, where she crossed paths with future stars like Winona Ryder and Adam Sandler. But Leeves developed a special bond with class clown and fabled ass ventriloquist Jim Carrey: “I used to watch Jim do his comedy act in clubs and tell him, ‘This isn’t going to get you anywhere. The stuff you’re really good at is that lovely Jimmy Stewart-type stuff.’ Thank God he never listened to me.”
Leeves describes her own sense of humor as “silly, sophisticated, saucy-it can be all that. Anything that’ll make me laugh.” And she’s proven more adept at managing her own career. Following bit parts on such American TV institutions as Blossom and My Two Dads, she caught viewers’ eyes and ears in a classic episode of Seinfeld, playing a virgin who bolts after hearing about Jerry’s masturbation-
abstention contest straight into the arms of John F. Kennedy, Jr. Only a few years later, she was earning Emmy
and Golden Globe award nominations for her Frasier role as Daphne Moon, the somewhat ditzy physical therapist of the Crane brothers’ cantankerous father.
While she clearly enjoys her character’s ability to play off the unrequited passions of poor, pathetic Niles, Leeves says that in a pinch she’d probably go for him: “He’s very intelligent and funny, and that would definitely knock me off balance. That said, I guess I wouldn’t mind Frasier either.” Not that she’d have any trouble accommodating a little brotherly love from both of the good doctors. “I’m double-jointed in a lot of places,” she explains. “I can practically twist myself into knots.”