Here are two stories told by an actor; try to guess who it is.

One: She is among a star-studded group at the home of a very famous writer for a play reading. Afterward, the writer unexpectedly suggests the guests help him scatter the ashes of an equally famous comedic actress in his garden. “She left him part of her ashes and he said he had been waiting for the right time to sprinkle them.” Now was that time. “It was an unusual moment. I did a Broadway show with her; her dressing room was right down the hall. It was ... not what I expected when I went.”

Two: She is working with a trainer, running up and down the steps of the Hollywood Bowl. “It’s killing me, and just as I get up to the final step, there is this family, scattering someone’s ashes and — I swear to God this is true — I inhaled a face-full of those ashes. It was terrible. I felt so bad.”

I could mention that the actor in question just received an Emmy nomination for playing a woman obsessed with the need to scatter her mother’s ashes, but I shouldn’t have to. If you think about it, there is really only one person who could — and would — describe not one but two inarguably hilarious encounters with cremated remains. Only one person you could visualize in both of those situations.

It could only ever be Jennifer Coolidge.

Too long “best known” as “Stifler’s Mom, the original MILF” from “American Pie,” or Paulette from “Legally Blonde” (films that came out more than 20 years ago), Coolidge, at 60, is finally having the moment her career, which includes three Christopher Guest movies and a slew of television series including, most recently, “2 Broke Girls,” deserves.

It is, in fact, very difficult to place Coolidge in the Hollywood hierarchy.

Just as Mike White’s scathing HBO resort-satire emerged unexpectedly from the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Coolidge was, from the moment she staggered onscreen as a woman in need of a massage and a place to scatter those ashes, a revelation.

Even by Jennifer Coolidge standards.

My interview with Coolidge begins with a classic comedy setup. We are both sitting in separate parts of a restaurant wondering where the other one is. Only when Coolidge glances at a text message from her publicist is the situation rectified. “I didn’t realize he had put the reservation under his name,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like I’m Lady Gaga.”

As she is speaking, our waiter arrives to ask if we would like a beverage and, seeing Coolidge, his face lights up in that very “oh my God — don’t say anything, act professional but Oh My God” kind of way.

So maybe not Gaga but definitely more Gaga-adjacent than most. I mean, did Lady Gaga ever go viral by simply looking into the camera and saying “hi”? Has Ariana Grande ever done her impersonation of Lady Gaga on “Jimmy Kimmel”?

Say her name and pretty much everyone yelps, “I love her.” But this Emmy nomination — for supporting actress in “The White Lotus” — is her first, which seems both impossible and totally on brand.

She is often classified as a “character actor,” a term that can have a lot of subtext in the entertainment business but almost always means “rarely if ever the lead.” But Coolidge’s cultural footprint is larger than that, rivaling many performers who are considered leads.

The moment Coolidge shows up in any scene, you know she will be walking off with it, like a rich woman with a small dog. A role she could very well be playing.

Tall, blonde, curvaceous, she is able to channel a sweet and slightly daffy sexuality through an octave-fluid voice that deeply understands the power of the half-whisper. Coolidge is the master of the blink, the pause, the stare and the lurch; she is one of a small set of actors who can perform miracles with her back to the camera.

If stardom is about talent, recognition and audience devotion, Coolidge is a very big star. But she is just now starting to believe it. Maybe. Kind of. Almost.

“It is so weird,” she says. “Even though I’ve had a lot of training, I never walk off thinking, ‘Wow, I nailed that.’ I’m always insecure. I didn’t think (the “White Lotus” performance) was going that well. I mean, I had a great time, it was very cool to be locked up in Hawaii instead of self-destructing somewhere else, but I had no idea. We had no idea.”

The nomination puts Coolidge smack in the middle of her very first awards season (honestly, it is hard to fathom that this is her first) even as her post-”White Lotus” career has sent her all around the globe on a string of projects.

Including the series’ second season, in which she is the only original main cast member.

She has just returned from that shoot, which was in Italy, though she’s not sure she can say any more except the new cast, which includes Aubrey Plaza, Michael Imperioli, Tom Hollander and F. Murray Abraham, is “very cool because Mike is as brilliant at casting as he is at writing.”

Also, she managed to snag a really good room in the nameless second-season hotel (rumor has it as the Four Seasons San Domenic Palace) because “I was the last one to arrive and this room had just opened up. It was pretty amazing. There were definitely ghosts.”

Still, having a publicist attempt to assure her anonymity is all very strange and new.

As she has said in earlier interviews, Coolidge had been initially reluctant to take the part White offered her; after months in lockdown at her New Orleans home, she didn’t feel up to it.

But it was more existential than that; while she considers herself a successful actor, she still had that star problem.

White had, in fact, just pitched HBO a show revolving around Coolidge as a flailing actor, which the network turned down. So when he asked her to be in “White Lotus,” she was a bit confused.

“Mike called and said, ‘Remember when I told you I wanted to write something about rich people on vacation? Well, I wrote it and HBO wants it.’ And I was like, ‘Huh?’ I mean, we had pitched something ... and they didn’t want anything to do with it. I thought they would want someone else, a bigger name.”

But White had tailored the role to Coolidge, and Coolidge could see that as soon as she read the script. “If you call me and say, ‘We’re looking for a kind of 1940s dame who can ricochet dialogue around the room,’ I’m probably not your girl. I am a slow performer. But I knew Tanya.”

An early scene, in which Tanya freaks out believing she has lost the bag holding her mother’s ashes, only to have a staff member find it in the pile of luggage right behind her, “was probably the easiest scene I have ever played. I am always losing things. When I go to events, I don’t even want the jewelry anymore because I get so stressed. ‘Where is that box of expensive jewels that don’t belong to me?’ I’d rather not wear them.”

More important, Coolidge related very strongly to Tanya’s loss.

“I lost my mother almost 30 years ago and I am still grieving. I was there when she passed — and it isn’t like it is in the movies. All I had to do was think about it and it was right there, very easy to pull up again. The sadness and the guilt — you think you have so much time and then you don’t.”

The success of “The White Lotus,” and then her Emmy nomination, has juiced her career to a point that is, to her, still a bit baffling. She rattles off the list of projects she has done since the first season of “The White Lotus,” which includes Ryan Murphy’s “The Watcher.” “I have been going from one airport to another,” she says. “And I am not used to doing all this press, all these events. But I am seizing everything I can because I don’t know what will happen next.”