It’s as if Kathy Najimy were born to play the glamorous, sassy, indomitable Mae West, a role she steps into Thursday when she takes over from Claudia Shear in the Broadway hit “Dirty Blonde.”
“I admire revolutionaries and trailblazers and people who have balls,” Najimy says during a break in preview performances.
“Mae West certainly was brave. I love people who do what they’re not supposed to do and be who they’re not supposed to be. She certainly didn’t have a lot of support in the 1920s for being a loud, talented, funny, sexual woman. We barely get that now.”
The generously proportioned 43-year-old comedienne knows all about that square-peg-in-a-round-hole feeling, having fought to make her way in an industry that favors reed-thin, cookie-cutter blondes.
Just as West took control of her career by writing her own lines, plus those of the fawning men who surrounded her, Najimy has been the designer of her own destiny.
She did so out of necessity.
“I don’t look like how an average girl is supposed to look, so you come up with a different set of tools,” she says. “Most of my life, it didn’t work for me. It’s not like I was embraced by the masses.”
After making a name for herself with the successful off-Broadway act “The Kathy and Mo Show,” Najimy popped up in a number of feature films, most notably as the dimpled Sister Mary Patrick in 1992’s “Sister Act” and its sequel.
When approached for the role of Olive, Kirstie Alley’s right-hand woman on the sitcom “Veronica’s Closet,” Najimy had a typically bold response: She told the producers she would do the part only if Olive was a positive role model, not a victim of her size.
“So they wrote this great character who was real – flawed yet funny, with a great love life,” says Najimy, who boldly bares a breast in “Dirty Blonde.”
“I don’t accept roles that have any size attached to them. I avoid playing women who are unhappy with their bodies or don’t have a love life.”
Najimy is a passionate and outspoken feminist and AIDS and animal-rights activist. But what really makes her blood boil is the incredible shrinking women who people TV shows such as “Ally McBeal” and “Friends.”
“I feel like, even though there are little pockets of hope, it’s worse now than it’s ever been,” she says. “The incredible pressure on these women to be thin is harmful. It’s only a matter of time before we see one of them drop dead.”
The women she does admire are those who have chosen to take the path less traveled, iconoclasts like Madonna, Lily Tomlin, Susan Sarandon, Gloria Steinem, Barbra Streisand and her idol, Bette Midler.
“But here’s the thing,” she adds. “We can identify them as women who have done their own thing and succeeded, but for every one of those there are millions who were oppressed.”
Add to the list of role models Mae West, an actress whose work Najimy was largely unfamiliar with until she was approached with an offer to bring her to life on the stage.
“I’m drawn to people who design their own life,” she says. “In a way it makes sense because it’s what I’ve done.”
Although she’s kept her regular gig as the voice of Peggy Hill on the animated hit “King of the Hill,” Najimy quit “Veronica’s Closet,” which is now off the air, to focus on her feature film career.
That’s going swimmingly, with a cameo in “The Wedding Planner,” out Friday, and a role in the upcoming comedy “Rat Race,” with Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Breckin Meyer.
But right now she’s digging “Dirty Blonde” – and the chance to spend time in her beloved New York with rocker husband Dan Finnerty, who fronts the Dan Band in regular gigs at Fez, and their four-year-old daughter, Samia.
“Obviously, not a day goes by when I don’t think things would be better if I just looked like blah blah blah,” she says. “But most of my consciousness is perfectly happy with who I am and how I look.
“I think it helps that I’ve got great friends and family and a husband who loves me,” she says.
“A little self-esteem goes a long way.”