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SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- Here's a glimpse into the glamorous life of a TV star.
Thanks to a freak rainstorm that turned Southern California roads into parking lots, a deeply apologetic Julia Louis-Dreyfus is 20 minutes late. She's nursing a cold that has her blowing her nose every so often. And when she's done here, she's driving back to her eco-friendly house to get dinner on the table, take her son to basketball practice and maybe watch American Idol before hitting the sack by 9 p.m.
"It's very, very exciting. It's just regular-life stuff," says Louis-Dreyfus, 45, her shiny black hair loose around her shoulders and her freckled face makeup-free, except for mascara. She's in a gray coat and sensible lace-up shoes, her only adornment a colorful Miu Miu purse.
It's the kind of day her TV character, newly divorced mom Christine, might have.
Louis-Dreyfus, ingrained in pop culture as abrasive Elaine Benes on the Emmy-winning sitcom Seinfeld, is back -- and this time, it looks like she could be here to stay with her new CBS show, The New Adventures of Old Christine (Mondays, 9:30 pm ET/PT). Louis-Dreyfus plays old Christine, a divorcee juggling men and motherhood. Meanwhile, her ex-husband hooks up with a younger woman also named Christine.
Creator Kari Lizer connected with Louis-Dreyfus over a breakfast meeting. "She has this fantastic marriage and I'm divorced, but in a lot of ways we're in the same place in our lives," Lizer says. "She's the funniest girl you'll ever meet, and surprisingly, the darkest and dirtiest."
Like the perpetually frazzled Christine, Louis-Dreyfus is usually doing a dozen things at once, Lizer says.
"But she laughs at herself," she says. "If Julia has something she needs to say, she'll track you down. I'll be at home trying to do yoga and my home phone will ring, and then my cellphone will ring and then I'll hear a click that I just got a new e-mail. She will hunt you down."
Louis-Dreyfus relates to Christine's "desire to do the right thing, at all costs," she says. "She can't really afford the school, the ex-husband is there, there's the new girlfriend. If it means making an ass of yourself, then so be it. She's humiliated a lot and that appeals to me, because I think that's funny. I prefer to be humiliated on television."
The actress says her new show is particularly dear to her because she has always wanted to play a mom. And the hours leave her plenty of time for sons Henry, 13, and Charles, 8, and husband Brad Hall.
"Everyone on the show is a working mother, for the most part, and wants to get home to their kids. We only shoot two, three days a week," she says.
It's a stark contrast to her last full-time TV effort, the failed 2002 sitcom Watching Ellie, created by Louis-Dreyfus' husband.
The couple "had a lot of fun working together" and would do it again, says Louis-Dreyfus. But "the hours were hard on the family."
She and Hall live near the beach in a "totally green" home and drive hybrid cars.
For fun, Louis-Dreyfus takes her sons surfing, skiing and boogie-boarding, and plays Scrabble with them. If her life sounds ordinary, it's happily so. "It's kind of really fantastic," she says.
At home or on the set, nothing's going to rain on Louis-Dreyfus' parade.
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