WHY I LOVE... This portrait of my father, by Jennifer Coolidge

W hy I Love TH IS PO RTR A IT O F MY FATH ER

by J E N N I F E R C O O L I D G E

Art has always been incredibly important to my family. My great-grandfather was a painter, and my grandfather was an artist and a sculptor, so I was raised with a deep appreciation for great work. For some reason, I’m most obsessed with old portraits. I have them all over my house. It’s like I was born in the wrong era. But this particular picture of my father, Paul, is my favorite. It was painted in 1923 by a female artist my family knew in Milton, Mass. My father was just 3 years old at the time. It’s funny that he looks like a little cherub because he was actually a troublemaker as a kid. [laughs] But what I love most is that it captures the very beginning of one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met. My father went on to do so much in his life. He grew up during the Great Depression, he served in World War II in the Pacifi c, he manufactured supplies for boats, he became a pianist who played a little grand piano on his sailboat, and in the last 30 years of his life, he was a huge environmentalist. He was charismatic, smart, funny, and extraordinarily kind. He used to joke that the only thing I inherited from him was his absentmindedness. [laughs] I may have gotten his dry sense of humor and his square face too. But he was everything to me. When I was growing up, the painting was hung in our family’s dining room, so I looked at it often, always admiring the beautiful details, like his fl uff y, curly hair and the perfect refl ection of the bowl in the table. You can’t really see what he was eating, but my father had cereal and berries every day for his entire life, so I’m pretty sure I know what was in there. Truthfully, I would do anything to be sitting at that table with him today. He passed away when he was 95, and when my three siblings and I met to decide what we wanted to keep from the house, this painting was my fi rst choice. It means more to me than anything else. I brought it to my home in New Orleans, and it fi ts right in, like it was meant to be up on my wall. Whenever people come over, they ask about it, and I always smile and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s just my dad.”

The 98-year-old painting is displayed in Coolidge’s New Orleans home.

Coolidge stars in HBO’s The White Lotus (out now) and the Netfl ix fi lm Single All the Way (out Dec. 2).