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George Louis Costanza (born April 1959) is a fictional character on the US television sitcom Seinfeld (1989–1998), played by Jason Alexander.

George was Jerry Seinfeld's neurotic best friend. He sometimes lived with his parents, Estelle and Frank Costanza, a bitter couple who were as neurotic as their son. As a teenager, he was tormented by his gym teacher, who intentionally mispronounced George's last name as "Can't Stand Ya." George and Jerry attended Kennedy High together, setting the dynamic for their later relationship. George claims that he and Jerry met in gym class when George, climbing rope, fell on Jerry.

George has numerous psychological problems, including: narcissism, habitual lying, low self-esteem, sudden fits of anger, impulsive acts of ill-considered generosity, cheapness, selfishness, and sometimes living in a fantasy world. Like Kramer, he would often concoct elaborate plots to weasel out of relational, financial, or legal obligations, always with unexpected and negative consequences. George's lying, however, is often seen as a gift in the eyes of himself and his friends. It is noted in some episodes that he can even beat a lie-detector test and quotes to Jerry, "It's not a lie, if you believe it."

The character of George is based on the alter ego of the show's co-creator, Larry David. In the first couple of seasons, George was restrained by the standards of his later actions. But as the series went on, his schemes and personality became more outlandish. Alexander related in an interview that, early in the creation of the show, he once expressed having problems acting out a scene in the script, because he felt no one would ever behave in "such a way". David replied to him that the exact situation had actually happened to him, and he had reacted in exactly "that way". Alexander said that this was a breakthrough for him in portraying the character, giving him valuable insight into both David and George.

Life

During the series, George had a number of recurring fears and obsessions, including baseball, pretending to be financially successful, contracting lupus, and trying to seduce Marisa Tomei behind his fiancée’s back.

George's professional life was unstable. He was unable to remain in any job for any great length of time before making an embarrassing blunder and getting fired. Over the course of the series, he worked for the New York Yankees (probably his longest running job), an industrial smoothing company, and countless other places. He was fired from his job at Pendant Publishing for having sex with the cleaning woman on his desk (he professes he's always been attracted to cleaning women). His original job when the series started was as a real estate agent; he ended up quitting and then slipped his boss a mickey. His dream job was an architect, a job he would often pretend to have. In one episode, Jerry told a girl George wanted to impress that George was a marine biologist. The plan backfired when George was called upon to save a beached whale with a golf ball in its blowhole; he saved the whale, but the woman rejected him when he confessed that he was not, in fact, a marine biologist.

George briefly gained experience as a sitcom writer as he helped Jerry to write the pilot for the fictitious show Jerry. While pitching the concept of a "show about nothing" to NBC executives, George claimed to have written an off-off-Broadway play entitled La Cocina, about a Mexican chef named Pepe. In La Cocina, George claimed Pepe mimed the preparation of tamales, and it was the mime aspect that made the play so funny.

George was engaged to Susan Biddle Ross, a wealthy executive at NBC who approved Jerry and George's show-within-the-show sitcom pilot. George and Susan dated on and off for a year, during which time the commitment-phobic George was constantly trying to find ways to end their relationship without actually having to initiate the breakup with her. He proposed to her in a short-lived bout of midlife crisis, after he and Jerry had made a "pact" to move forward with their lives. When Jerry broke up with his girlfriend and declared the deal over, George panicked and again tried repeatedly to weasel out of his engagement. He got his wish days before the wedding, when he indirectly killed her by selecting the cheapest envelopes for their wedding invitations, not knowing they contained toxic glue. Susan's parents, never knowing the specifics behind her poisoning but suspecting George was somehow involved, never forgave him for this, and they appointed him to the Board of Directors of the Susan Biddle Ross Foundation to keep him trapped in their influences.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for George Costanza ]

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