The voice of Lois in “Family Guy”, actress Alex Borstein, copes with the dream on screen

LOS ANGELES, California – She has appeared in numerous film and television productions since the 1990s, but most people don’t recognize Alex Borstein until she opens her mouth.

The 40-year-old actress is the nasal voice of the long-suffering Lois Griffin, the wife of her hapless husband Peter Griffin in the Fox animated series “Family Guy.”

But soon Borstein’s face might also look familiar.

Although the actress starred in Fox’s sketch comedy series “MADtv” for five seasons, she only now seems ready for her big break. Borstein plays one of the three main roles alongside Laurie Metcalf and Niecy Nash in HBO’s Americanization of the critically acclaimed British comedy “Getting On.”

Like the original, the HBO version, which premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. EST, finds laughs in a most unexpected place: a hospital’s neglected, women-only geriatric ward.

It’s not giving anything away to give away the crucial moment in the pilot episode, when the nurses played by Borstein and Nash desperately try to understand a woman’s cries for help. The problem is that she’s screaming in a foreign language. It takes the orderlies two desperate and hilarious minutes to understand what’s being said, but an interpreter’s translation is worth the wait:

“I can’t stand this. I wish I were dead. Please kill me.”

The patient could very well relate to the hilarious yet heartbreaking “MASH”-like setting and characters of the hospital wing.

“There are really funny things happening,” Borstein commented in a recent interview. “(But) we’re not laughing at anyone. It feels like a really honest look into that world.”

In fact, “Getting On” is also a serious matter, even for the often funny trio of main actors.

“Laurie, Niecy and I are actresses of a certain age,” Borstein said, “and most places don’t want to see that anymore. I just find it amazing that HBO says, ‘No, I think people do.'”

Borstein brought her two-month-old daughter (with her husband, actor Jackson Douglas) to the set during filming of the pilot episode and apparently left work that day with an inkling of what “Getting On” was about.

“I had to clean her bottom and take care of her,” Borstein said of her newborn. “And you can’t help but notice: We’re the same when we come in and we go out.”