Jennifer Coolidge reveals ‘terrible mistake’ she made early on in her career

Jennifer Coolidge has “made a lot of mistakes” in life.

The 61-year-old actress shot to fame when she was cast as Stifler’s Mom in the 1999 coming-of-age comedy ‘American Pie’ before going on to star opposite Reese Witherspoon in ‘Legally Blonde’ and alongside Hilary Duff in ‘A Cinderella Story’ but started to “pursue guys” rather than drive her career forward at that time.

She told Variety: “Now that I’m old enough to really look back at my life and certainly my mistakes, I see a lot of those. But I never had any strategy. I just went job to job. I have to say I made the terrible mistake of not riding the wave that I had early on. It was sort of in the ’90s when I had ‘Legally Blonde’, “Best in Show’ and American Pie’. And then a few years later, there was ‘A Cinderella Story’ and stuff like that. But there was a moment. I started pursuing guys. I wasn’t paying attention. I just thought I had my whole life.”

The ‘2 Broke Girls’ actress suffered something of a dip in the years that followed her 2000s comedies but enjoyed an Emmy Award-winning resurgence when she was cast as socialite Tanya McQuoid in HBO series ‘The White Lotus’ and reflected that her “fatal flaw” was that she “didn’t have a plan” in place for her career that she often questions now.

She added: ” never said, ;I want to do … ” I did get some jobs, but I didn’t have a plan. And I think that was a fatal flaw of mine, because it took so long to get anything going later. I look back and I go, “What was I thinking?” And then I bought a house in New Orleans, and I was consumed with fixing that up.