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September 23: George Costanza

lawrencebush
September 22, 2016

Actor Jason Alexander (Jay Scott Greenspan), best known for his role as the self-loathing and conniving George Costanza — who appeared in every episode but one of Seinfeld, 1990-1998 — was born in Newark on this date in 1959. Alexander reputedly beat out Danny DeVito, Steve Buscemi and Nathan Lane to play the Constanza character, who is one of the most Jewish non-Jews in TV history. Alexander is a practicing magician, a stage and voice actor, a great song-and-dance man (he won a 1989 Tony Award for his role in Jerome Robbins’s musical “Broadway”), a winning poker player (on the Bravo network’s Celebrity Poker Showdown he won a $500,000 prize for the United Way of America’s work in post-Katrina New Orleans), and an active participant in the OneVoice Movement, an international organization that seeks to amplify Israeli and Palestinian voices that favor the two-state solution to the Mideast conflict. To see a medley of George Costanza’s greatest lines, look below.

“I would work with any one of them again in a heartbeat because it was joyous and incredibly easy.” --Jason Alexander