SANTA MONICA, Calif. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is starring in a new CBS comedy called "The New Adventures of Old Christine," sat before a roomful of television critics at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena in January. Confronted with questions about whether she was a victim of the " 'Seinfeld' Curse" which refers to the lack of success she, Michael Richards and Jason Alexander have had since "Seinfeld" ended its ratings-topping, award-winning 10-year run in 1998 she wittily deflected them.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is hoping for sitcom life after "Seinfeld."
About a week later, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus, 45, took her place on a different kind of center stage, this time in a classroom at her younger son's exclusive private school. As part of Parent Share Day, she delivered a 45-minute summary of her life story to a group of third graders. Suddenly, pressure.
"It went really well, but I was drenched in sweat," said Ms. Louis-Dreyfus, who is married to the television producer Brad Hall, and has two sons, Henry, 13, and Charlie, 8. "I don't know why, but it was very meaningful to me. I felt like a lot was on the line."
It was real-life modern-day parenting moments like these an otherwise capable adult undone by the desire not to embarrass her child in front of his peers that Ms. Louis-Dreyfus said first attracted her to "The New Adventures of Old Christine." In it, she plays a divorced working single mother who is trying to balance rearing an 8-year-old son (Trevor Gagnon), dating and maintaining a good relationship with her ex-husband (Clark Gregg).
Day in and out, Christine struggles to remain plucky in the face of unexpected humiliations: withstanding the withering lack of interest of a cashier at a day spa, or learning that her former spouse is involved with a woman who could be viewed as a newer model of herself a pretty, relentlessly upbeat younger pixie also named Christine (Emily Rutherfurd).
The role capitalizes on the strengths familiar to any fan of Ms. Louis-Dreyfus's "Seinfeld" character, Elaine Benes: the way she can get a laugh just by the sturdily determined way she carries her petite 5-foot-2 frame or how she gives extra spin to a line of dialogue by emphasizing the last word of a sentence. But when Kari Lizer ("Will and Grace"), the creator and executive producer of "The New Adventures of Old Christine" who based the show on her own experiences, met with the actress to discuss the project, she was interested in emotions that Ms. Louis-Dreyfus's scrappy Elaine never inspired in an audience.
"There were all these sorts of questions like, 'Is there a soft side?' " Ms. Lizer said in a telephone interview. "Christine is different from Elaine, a little more vulnerable."
Ms. Lizer acknowledged Ms. Louis-Dreyfus had brought her own set of pressing concerns to their getting-to-know-you coffee date. Ms. Louis-Dreyfus's previous series, "Watching Ellie," created by Mr. Hall, began in 2002, never caught on and sputtered to an end in 2003. "She's a big TV star and her next move is critical," Ms. Lizer said. "I knew she was going to be very, very careful about who she hooked up with."
Ms. Lizer said she and Ms. Louis-Dreyfus had instantly clicked: "It was like a great blind date. She thought I was funny. I thought she was funny. "
Now that Ms. Lizer has gotten to know Ms. Louis-Dreyfus better, she is even more specific. "She's not soft funny; she's dirty and so fearless about making fun of herself it's staggering," said Ms. Lizer, adding that she and the staff writers tried to test Ms. Louis-Dreyfus's limits. "We'd try to come up with things she wouldn't say," Ms. Lizer said. "I'd be like, 'No way Julia is going to say that.' But she'll say anything."
Combine Ms. Louis-Dreyfus's screwball streak and her cultured background and she starts to sound a little bit like Katharine Hepburn's outlandish society girl in George Cukor's "Holiday." The daughter of the French billionaire businessman Gιrard Louis-Dreyfus, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus lived one weekend a month at her father and stepmother's residence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The rest of the time her home base was in Washington with her mother and stepfather, a Project HOPE doctor who would occasionally uproot the family to treat the impoverished in places such as Sri Lanka, Colombia and Tunisia.
Ms. Louis-Dreyfus was a 21-year-old theater major at Northwestern University when she was group-cast for "Saturday Night Live" along with her three co-stars including Mr. Hall, who was her boyfriend after they were spotted in a Chicago-based improvisational troupe, the Practical Theater Company. There was no audition, only orders to report to New York within days.