BORN LAURIE LENNARD IN 1958, Laurie grew up in a middle-class suburb on Long Island and graduated from Ohio University, in Athens, in 1979 with a journalism degree. After stints in advertising and publishing, she landed a job in 1984 as a researcher on NBC's Late Night with David Letterman. Within two years she was booking Dave's special-interest acts. "I lined up the human pretzel and the woman who can make jewelry out of hubcaps," she says.

She met Larry—a struggling comedian at the time—while scouting talent in New York. They got married in 1993 and moved to Los Angeles, where Laurie spent the next ten years managing comedians like Chris Elliot, developing sitcoms, and producing comedy specials for HBO and MTV.

What Laurie calls her "conversion moment" came in 1996, when a couple of friends invited

"I believe in peer pressure," says Laurie, who chases down SUV drivers so she can flip them off from the seat of her Prius.

her to a breakfast with NRDC president John Adams and R.F.K. Jr. "Bobby made the case that the environment is the civil-rights issue of our time," she recalls, "and that the increasingly threatened right to clean air and water is as basic as the right to racial equality and affordable health care. I got up from that breakfast and have never been the same since."

Overnight, she was born again, diving into environmental issues and eventually limiting her production projects to those with a green focus. She hounded her family to take short showers. She started sending weekly environmental-news updates to hundreds of high-powered associates, from Tom Hanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 1999, she joined the NRDC board of trustees and began hosting gala L.A. fundraisers. Overall, Laurie estimates, she's raised more than $10 million for environmental causes.

While Kennedy admiringly calls her "relentless," others say she's over the top. "Laurie can be effective, but also heavy-handed and a browbeater," said one politically active Hollywood insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "She'll go so far as to say that people who drive SUVs are terrorist supporters. That turns people off."

Such criticism doesn't faze Laurie, who indeed produced a set of controversial 2003 television commercials that equated people who buy big SUVS with backers of terrorist training camps. This is a woman who's not afraid to chase down Hummer drivers so she can flip them off from the seat of her Prius. "I believe in peer pressure," she says. "Look what it's done for smoking and fur coats."

Larry, of course, has gotten a few laughs out of Laurie's metamorphosis. "Thirteen years ago I met a materialistic, narcissistic, superficial, bosomy woman from Long Island," he said at an NRDC fundraiser last year. "Then one day I began to sense that something had changed. She started peppering conversations with words like 'ozone layer' and 'toxic runoff'... What was now all too painfully obvious was that I, Larry David, the shallowest man in the world, had married an environmentalist."