The unflappable maître d’ at Henry’s on Broadway is for once taken aback: “Susie Essman’s coming here? Omigod, I love her. Where do you want to sit? Choose anywhere.” When Essman enters, all hair and bustle, I watch her exchange pleasantries until, gradually, the waiter’s face falls and he turns away, disappointed. “People come up to me in the street and want me to yell ‘You fat f***’ at them,” she shrugs by way of explanation. “They get upset when I’m not aggressive and nasty.”

Essman plays the foul-mouthed Susie Greene in Larry David’s lo-fi misanthropic sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. Like Seinfeld, David’s debut for NBC, this critically acclaimed HBO show, of entirely improvised dialogue, is about nothing much. David plays himself: a rich, socially inept millionaire former producer making his way in Hollywood. Essman’s Susie is the wife of his manager, Jeff Greene. Her tirades of filth each time her chubby hubby messes up are infamous with the show’s growing audience in America and here on Channel 4.

“The reason the show is so great is that we’d all secretly like to be the characters we play,” Essman explains. “Susie Greene is all black and white – I’d love to be like that. She responds. I’m analytical and doubting and questioning and thinking things over and over. My first big scene, the only direction Larry gave me – no script, mind – was, ‘Rip Jeff a new asshole.’ I thought, okay, I can do that. I do, he pulls me aside and says, ‘You’re not going for it. Make fun of Jeff’s fat.’ I said, ‘He’s my friend, I can’t.’ He said, ‘It’s okay, he knows you’re acting.’ So I did – ‘You fat f***.’ And later, he says to me, a bit taken aback, ‘Wow, you really went for it.’ ” To be fair, he should have known what he was getting. David and Essman were both regulars in New York comedy clubs in the 1980s, working the trenches with the likes of Chris Rock and Jon Stewart. “Larry was the comics’ comic,” Essman explains. “All the other comedians were cracking up at the back, but it was way over the audience’s head.” Twenty years later, David is trying to cast Jeff’s wife, and switches on a televised “roasting” of his former Seinfeld buddy Jerry Stiller. Roasts are a Rat Pack tradition where a member of the entertainers’ bar the Friars Club faces an evening of abuse from his peers. “They used to be closed to women,” Essman explains, “until Phyllis Diller broke in 20 years ago. For Stiller’s roast, Comedy Central didn’t want me there – I wasn’t on demographic. But the Friars fought, Larry saw me and said, ‘Yes. Susie can do it. She’s obnoxious,’ ” she laughs.

It was a timely break. Essman, who won’t give her age, started in stand-up in the early 1980s and hadn’t yet landed the big sitcom deal. Her father, Leonard, a cancer specialist, died in 2001. Her mother, Zora, taught Russian at Sarah Lawrence College. “This is anecdotal, but every comedian I know has a depressed mother,” Essman says. “I think we all just wanted to make our mothers laugh. A mother’s depression weighs heavily on a child – it’s my fault, I have to fix this – but there’s no fixing it, and she’s still depressed at 80.” Gift

Essman always wanted to be a comedy actress. It didn’t occur to her to do stand-up, because female stand-ups at the time were self-deprecating or silly. “They couldn’t justbe out there being female, strong and funny, so my idols were sketch actors like Lily Tomlin,” she explains. A trip to see Richard Pryor in a comedy club changed that. “Some of the stuff was brilliant, some died – and this is going to sound silly – but I realised you didn’t have to make everything up fresh every night. It was an act, and he tried stuff out and wrote it down.”

She still does stand-up, and is coming to the UK for three nights in July, two at the Newbury Comedy Festival and one at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, in London. “I’m looking forward to it, because British audiences are smart,” she says hopefully. “I lived in London, did a semester at university in political science, and I watch British television all the time. You got rid of your religious zealots and sent them to us. Religious zealotry is anticomedy because comedy is subversive, so I think the UK is going to get my act. But it’s also scary. You know, my act isn’t like Susie Greene. It’s definitely adults only, but it’s much more about sex and dating and family. Some people say I’m too Jewish and New York, but I play fine in Iowa if it’s funny.”

She has just finished season six of Curb – “the funniest yet, I promise you” – and is dealing with becoming hot property just as she thought she had missed the money train. “But I get so many terrible scripts,” she wails. “Curb has spoilt me. I read the outlines, and I can’t believe how funny it is. Then I get these other scripts and say, ‘I can’t do this crap.’ Larry David has spoilt me, he’s ruined me, and he tells me all the time, ‘You’re never going to have anything as funny as this for the rest of your life.’ ” And for a second, she looks so much like angry Susie Greene that I’m tempted to call the maître d’ back over. Then her face breaks up and she laughs. “Gee, thanks, Larry.”

Susie Essman plays the Newbury Comedy Festival, July 13 and 14; and the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, W1, July 15

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