Lisa's Friends in high places

Which Friend will still have a career a decade after the programme enters the great sitcom graveyard? Lisa Kudrow, of course, though it didn't always appear that way. Courteney Cox was probably the most famous, Jennifer Aniston the most infamously coiffed, and the guys were much of a muchness. But then Kudrow quietly started scooping Emmy nominations - and winning (plus Screen Actors Guild and American Comedy Award gongs) - when no one else in the cast was even nominated. And without fanfare she embarked on a film career, studiously eschewing the showy studio film leads her colleagues, without exception, couldn't resist.

Lisa Kudrow also makes an average film worth seeing. And so it is with Hanging Up, based on Delia Ephron's compelling autobiographical memoir of sisterhood, directed by Diane Keaton and starring Meg Ryan, Kudrow and Keaton. On paper the pedigree suggested a winning formula (all have sisters in real life, all are proven talents and, peculiarly, all are left-handed). On celluloid, Hanging Up isn't all it should be. But Kudrow's wise-ass soap actress steals scenes again and again, with moments like the one where she intones sagely, 'All actors who play heteros on TV are gay'. 'That was my line? Really? Good for me. I remember I was with Meg and Walter [Matthau], and he's like lightning, so just getting a line out, much less one that makes the film, was good.'

When she coos over Ryan, calling her 'just dreamy', Kudrow sounds like a Bridget Jones with a well-worn copy of When Harry Met Sally on the video shelf back home. And therein lies her appeal. Meg Ryan is a movie star and, in her guarded presence, you never forget it. Cox and Aniston, too, exude a certain inaccessibility. But not Kudrow. She's extremely circumspect about her career - and she certainly wavered somewhat after the birth of her son Julian, whose second birthday is this week. Offered a role in Analyze This opposite Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal, Kudrow was flattered but initially passed. It would have meant starting the film only three weeks after giving birth. 'I got talked into it, thank God. But at the time, I felt like a bad person. I thought, "Good God, how much ambition do you have to have?" But I had all these people around me who said, "Oh no, you have to do this." My parents, my husband's parents who had come from France to meet their grandson. So they had the amibition for me. They were like, "You're having this post-partum craziness".' She insists it was hard, though. 'I was talking to Tony Bennett. Tony Bennett! And all I could think was, "This is really cool but I have to get back to the trailer! I have to pump milk!"'

Her casting in Analyze This, playing suffering shrink Billy Crystal's even-more-suffering wife-to-be, means the great God De Niro wanted Lisa Kudrow for his movie. But so un-divaish is Kudrow that when her role was down-sized - 'Yes, a bit' - she didn't even care. She cared more about 'watching Tony Bennett talk with Billy and Robert'. (Bless her. Everyone in Hollywood calls De Niro 'Bob'.) 'I just didn't know what to say to him. I mean, we were introduced, but he seemed pretty nonplussed. I don't think he cared. But then I always assume that no one wants to talk to me.' Clearly, that is not the case.

If Analyze This was a small role, 1996's Mother was tinier. But size doesn't matter in Hollywood (just ask Judi Dench and her Oscar), and Kudrow's hilarious turn as a dinner date of the film's star and writer Albert Brooks had the bigwigs gagging with delight. Next she paired with Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino and the ridiculously brilliant Alan Cumming for Romy And Michele's High School Reunion, which was much better than anyone imagined it could be. And then there was her dowdy, slightly neurotic schoolteacher in The Opposite Of Sex, which looked sure to earn her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod, but didn't. 'I was disappointed for, honest to God, about two minutes.'

All this supporting nonsense is about to come crashing down around Miss Kudrow's ears. Her next role - in Numbers, starring John Travolta and directed by Nora Ephron - is, by all accounts, the female lead. But Kudrow won't have it, in the same way that she says Meg Ryan and Diane Keaton 'won't have fame. I've seen them. I've been in a restaurant with them and no one came over to the table. You know what else I've noticed. That when I'm with anyone else from the show, they get attention, and I don't get as much. There's such a thing as an energy you give off. And I'm nothing like Phoebe. I'm not very inviting. I'm not warm. Oh God, I'm not a good person!'

She thinks the very idea of anyone suggesting she might be a 'carrying' factor for the film ludicrous. More snort-laughing. 'I mean, I could try and carry it but that would be embarrassing. I'd be afraid to say it's a leading role, to be honest. I'm not looking at it that way, whether it's true or not. And I've decided it's not.' It's just another in her series of smart supporting roles 'to extraordinarily big stars'.

The British tabloids recently carried a story that, although not entirely based on fact, exuded a little eau de truth: Kudrow and David Schwimmer were to leave Friends (they surely will - one day). Kudrow is the Friend with most to gain by leaving. She's a happily married mother, her next film will probably make her a proper movie star and she's got more money than she knows what to do with. 'Of course, there was a flurry of misprints. That story was even reported on the ABC news in Los Angeles. No one ever fact checks.' There will never be Friends leaving the show though the stories started, she says, because 'we'd heard a long time ago that they only needed four of us, business-wise. Four of us would satisfy certain agreements the network has with the syndicator, or something like that. And we were like, "Wow! What if they write two people off and it isn't me. Would I want to be on that show?"'

Would anyone want to watch that show? 'No, I don't think so. So we felt it only fair to inform the producers that we all want to do it or none of us does.' The time factor is not one that bothers her unduly. 'It's hard but I think it's worth it. I want to keep all the plates up in the air for as long as I'm allowed to.' Were it only a question of money, she says, 'it wouldn't be that tough to decide. But there are other things and we have to see what we all want and what the show will be like.' What's the prevailing feeling among the group? 'I wouldn't be comfortable saying until we all know what we want to say.' The words sound prickly but the delivery is not. Her reasons to stay? 'It's fun working with these five people. It's really nice to go to work and enjoy everybody that's there. The show's still good which is unheard of in your sixth year. We're not even close to being sick of each other. It's amazing if you think about it. We've been together longer than you're at college.' And how many friends does she have from college? 'See. Not even five.'

Keeping those plates spinning recently meant working on Numbers two days a week and Friends the other three, flying between Los Angeles and locations towards the East Coast. And all with a two-year-old son. Sometimes the Numbers outfit for her 'fun, foul-mouthed, frightening' Lotto woman was so constricting she decided it wasn't worth taking Julian. 'I couldn't even hold him.' But he attended a Friends taping. 'When we had to shoot a scene, my nanny Nina had to take him away and he started crying. I didn't enjoy having that moment with 400 strangers in the audience.'