It Ain't so easy being little Lisa
By Robert Fidgeon
The Advertiser (The Guide) April 10, 1997

Transcribed by Chris Dent

The View from the balcony of her two-storey home, nestled among the trees high in the Hollywood Hills, is to die for. It is Yeardley Smith's Sanctuary, her small piece of peace away from the madness and artificiality below. She has to work down there. Suffer its frustrations. Up here is home - a jeans-and-a-sloppy-sweater existence in which she chose to rebuild her life after a broken marrige. It is here that she can talk honestly - something of a rare commodity in Hollywood, as honest people are never rewarded, but punished,

"My big problem is people ask me questions and I answer honestly and I've got into trouble for it," Smith Says.

She Laughs in that familiar little-girl laugh that, for three years, endeared her to millions as the tiny, sardonic secretary Louise Fitzer in TV's Herman's Head ('91-'94) and remains a staple of Lisa Simpson's catroon character voice.

And that is a big part of Smith's problem. She's not a little girl anymore. She's 32, tiny, but looks barely 20. Hollywood doesn't quite know how to pigeonhole her.

She auditioned for 30 projects last year and got just two - a substantial role in the Jack Nicholson/Helen Hunt movie "Old Friends", due for release late this year, and a scene in Arnold Schwarzenneger's "Jingle All the Way", in which she got to belt hell out of Arnie with her handbag.

Her Arnie-bashing finished up on the cutting-room floor.

"To have the privilege of finishing up on the cutting-room floor, I did three auditions and beat a dozen other actors," she says.

Smith started acting professionally at 17. Come June, she'll have been securing regular work in the business for 15 years. But for all the frustrations, she believes she's extremely lucky. "A lot of my friends in the business are reaching their 30s and haven't been as successful and are dropping out," she says. "The don't want to be 45 and still banging on doors and wondering if they're going to make next month's rent."

"The tragic thing is you see people clinging on to the hope of getting that break."

"But, my God, the're so hungry for new blood here. I read for a pilot last week. There was a girl there reading for the same part. She was 22, with her skirt up to her crotch, and they (the producers) spent 20 minutes with her."

"I went in and they gave me a minute and said `Oh yes, Yeardley, we know you'. So I went home and later got the word they considered me too old. I thought `How can I be too old? I'm only 32'. But Hollywood's obsessed with the pursuit of someone who's fresh and young and sexy and hot."

While much of the business depresses her, it's her life and she's working. If she could change anything, it would be to think up some new rejection lines. Smith reckons she has heard them all - you're too old, not pretty enough, too short, not old enough. Every polite and not-so-polite way of being told "No". Until last week, that is.

"I auditioned for a job six weeks ago. I was perfect for the part, they said. They asked, specifically, for me," Smith recalls.