Liz Sheridan Returns

Jerry Seinfeld
Phones ‘Home’ — at Last

It took nearly a year, but Jerry Seinfeld finally called up his “mom” – if only to let her down. Liz Sheridan, who played Helen Seinfeld on Seinfeld, recounts how the funnyman phoned her out of the blue the week of June 1 while in L.A. with Larry David shooting Curb Your Enthusiasm with fellow show-about-nothing alumni Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards.

“I was in my car driving and he just said, ‘Hi, I heard you wanted to get in touch with me?’ Liz, 80, tells World Talk Live! host Brett Cohen. “He said, ‘We’re working on the same set where we did Seinfeld, and it’s nice to be here.’ I asked him if he was a good father. He said, ‘I try.’”

“[Then] I asked him if he would possibly be interested in the movie that I’m writing about the book that I wrote, Dizzy & Jimmy.” (That 2000 memoir recounts the actress’ brief engagement to James Dean during the early ‘50s.) “And he said, ‘It sounds terribly interesting’… like a project he would love to do, but he’s so caught up in busy, busy, busy,” she adds.

In July 2008, when Brett asked Liz, “If you had the ability to have dinner tonight with anyone in history, who would it be and why?” she replied, “Jerry Seinfeld. Why? I’d ask him to help me raise the money for my movie. [But] he’s got so many ‘people’ in front of him, you can't get to him. And I don't have his phone number.”