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Updates

• 10th of April, 2026: [New] Interview 1993 magazine scanned and transcribed.
• 8th of April, 2026: [Fix] The Lipstick Jungle deleted scene is now viewable worldwide after being moved to a different video host. Minor fixes and changes across the site have also been issued.
• 5th of April, 2026: [Fix] An issue wherein the Medicine Man production notes were not viewable should now be resolved.
• 4th of April, 2026: [Announcement] Site Launch (I shall now sleep for 69 consecutive days to recover, seeya)

Born in Brooklyn in the autumn of 1954...

[source: wsj.com // lorraine bracco]

Lorraine grew up in Long Island with her Sicilian father, English mother and two siblings (Salvatore Jr. and Elizabeth). In true middle child fashion, she was a little aimless, and while grappling with dyslexia, she found herself struggling in her early school years both academically and socially.

“I hated school because I felt really dumb, it was a huge struggle.” — 12th Annual Katz Memorial Lecture, 2014

[source: wsj.com // lorraine bracco]

High school was a much more enjoyable experience for Lorraine because she was able to engage in her creative interests and make meaningful friendships. With the support of her English teacher and her parents she was encouraged to pursue her aspirations. She went to Wilhelmina Models agency in New York where Wilhelmina herself saw a spark in Lorraine and decided to sign her there and then. Lorraine went on to do part-time work in page spreads for magazines such as TEEN before graduating high school and moving to Paris to pursue her burgeoning modeling career more seriously.

[source: on the couch // lorraine bracco]

In her modelling years, she travelled across the world, was featured on multiple magazine covers, and earned the distinction of becoming Jean Paul Gaultier's muse (something I love to bring up). Her striking presence eventually led her to explore acting.

"All the great photographers used to say to me that I should go to Hollywood. I was like, 'Are you crazy?' All through my 20s people were telling me. Even Catherine Deneuve told me one night in Paris. We had friends in common and were having dinner together. She just looked at me and said: 'Oh, you're an actress!'" — The Big Issue, 2015

In the spring of 1979...

Lorraine welcomed her first child, Margaux, and in the same year her debut feature Duos sur canapé was released, in which she played Bubble, an aptly-named "bubbly" girl to whom everyone makes advances that she readily reciprocates. Her performance in Duos sur canapé was followed by performances in Fais gaffe à la gaffe! and Mais qu'est-ce que j'ai fait?.

[source: on the couch // lorraine bracco]

[in her late 20s, surrounded by luxury silks at the hermès factory in france]

During the early 80s, Lorraine dabbled in presenting music programs and starred in documentaries, commercial work, and some bit parts for French television—including a small role in a segment called L'impeccable and an episode of a television show called Commissaire Moulin. Per a recommendation by her friends, she spent a summer working as a DJ for a renowned multilingual radio station called Radio Luxembourg.

In late 1983, Lorraine and her daughter Margaux moved back to New York, where she took up classes at the Acting Studio as recommended by her then partner, Harvey. Inspired by watching him and other actors perform, she studied their techniques for a year before stepping onto the stage herself. During a trip to Naples, she was cast in a minor role in Lina Wertmüller's Camorra, and has said that it was an enlightening experience for her.

In the winter of 1985...

Lorraine and her then partner welcomed her second child, Stella. The following year, Lorraine had the opportunity to audition for David Rabe’s play, Goose and Tomtom. In multiple interviews, Lorraine shared how she felt like she performed terribly in the reading and strongly doubted her chances of being cast in the production. However, Rabe saw something special in her and decided she was right for the part. This marked a pivotal moment in her life that further fuelled her passion for acting.

[source: on the couch // lorraine bracco]

Director Ridley Scott became interested in Lorraine after being introduced to her in 1985 and subsequently cast Lorraine in her very first American feature role in Someone to Watch Over Me as Ellie Keegan—the tomboyish and fierce wife of an unfaithful NYPD detective. Lorraine credits her experience in this role for giving her invaluable insights into the film industry and how it operates.

"But I was such a rookie. If it weren't for Ridley Scott, my film career would have been over, maybe on the very first day of shooting. I learned so much, it was ridiculous. I didn't know so much, it was ridiculous. But he was my champion" — On the Couch, 2006

Her performance as Ellie was received well by critics, and as far as I am aware, it remains one of her favourite roles to date.

[someone to watch over me]

[goodfellas]

Following this, she worked on a handful of other films before landing her iconic role as Karen Hill in Goodfellas (with zero auditions mind you!). Her performance was widely praised by critics and earned Lorraine her very first Academy Award nomination (and first nomination in general), cementing her status as a rising star in Hollywood.

[always her dad's winner!]

After the recognition and praise she received for her performance in Goodfellas aided in establishing her legitimacy as an actor, she developed a penchant for taking career risks, consciously choosing projects that she believed were worthwhile and roles that she thought were more fulfilling or said something integral and meaningful.

Throughout the 90s...

she averaged approximately two films per year, briefly returning to France to film Les menteurs and Cap Danger on location, until 1997 when she was subsequently cast as Dr. Jennifer Melfi in HBO's beloved The Sopranos.The 90s were also a tumultuous time in Lorraine’s personal life. If you would like to read more about her experience with her relationships, her journey with depression, her recovery, her daughter's illness and her long custody battle, please read Lorraine’s autobiography On the Couch in which she intimately and candidly recounts vignettes of her entire life up until the early 00s. It is not my story to tell and I certainly cannot tell it better than she did.

You can officially purchase On the Couch here:

Lorraine attributes therapy, medication, and the people most dear to her as the things that saved her at a low point in her life when she felt like she was drowning in debt both emotionally and financially. The Sopranos came along at a critical time in Lorraine’s life. This role didn't just help Lorraine, it also resonated with a lot of fans (myself included) and Dr. Melfi became a comfort character for many of us.

Melfi also allowed viewers to see Lorraine's full unbridled range as an actor, garnering her considerable admiration from fans and critics alike. Her performance in Employee of the Month (S3E4) is arguably her most career-defining work.

"It was not gratuitous; it was real. So much of the violence we see on the screen especially on television—is airbrushed so that it doesn't appear as gut-wrenchingly awful as it is. I think that's a disservice to society, because violence against another human being is despicable and it should be seen as despicable. You should be revolted." — On the Couch, 2006

This specific episode had a profound impact on victims of sexual assault because it openly depicted the brutal reality of sexual violence and highlighted the widespread injustices that survivors often encounter when navigating the criminal justice system.Additionally, Dr. Melfi had a widespread influence on men by helping normalise and destigmatise the notion of men seeking mental health services, leading to a cultural shift in the ways men navigated their mental health. The rates at which men were attending therapy for their mental health noticeably increased across the country. The enduring impact of Melfi as a character is clear when considering the importance she continues to hold for fans as well as the larger impact she's had on society by helping to ignite critical conversations.

[the sopranos]

Lorraine's performance received widespread critical acclaim, earning her seven major award nominations for her portrayal of Dr. Jennifer Melfi over the course of the show's eight-year run.

In 2002, she made her Broadway debut in The Graduate . . .

stepping into the role of Mrs. Robinson. Despite performing on stage before, this marked a significant milestone in her career since it was her first time headlining in a major production. She has mentioned that initially it was challenging for her to transition from the screen to theatre (Broadway no less!!!!).

[on stage during her curtain call]

It was a formidable undertaking and certainly didn't compare to her short stint in Goose and Tomtom in the small invite-only workshops at the Lincoln Center.

"Opening night isn't easy, and doing the show is a mini-marathon. You run around all over the place, you're changing left and right" — Hampton Sheet, 2003

[w/ co-stars, john lavelle and andrea anders]

With The Sopranos nearing to a close in 2006, Lorraine (always eager to do something fun) soft-launched Bracco Wines and officially launched her collection of wines in 2008. Her passion for wine was effortless, stemming from her years in France where she cultivated a deeper appreciation for it. She loves wine so much that she even named her first daughter Margaux after the Château Margaux! (Note: She no longer sells Bracco Wines, and while I have never personally tried a bottle, her range was reportedly well-received at the time, and considered to be affordable with notable flavour profiles.)

[at the vineyards in italy]

In the summer of 2010...

a new crime drama series called Rizzoli & Isles began airing on TNT. Lorraine played the overbearingly loving matriarch Angela Rizzoli and remained one of the show's central characters until the series concluded in 2016.

[rizzoli & isles]

"I knew about Tess Gerritsen's books; I'd read them and been a fan for a long time, so when it came up, I said, 'Ah, somebody finally got it together.' And I knew Angie was cast; I thought she was a great Jane Rizzoli, and I thought I could be a good mama [laughs]." — Assignment X, 2011

The 2010s were emotionally difficult years for Lorraine, marked by profound loss and grief. Following the heart-breaking passing of both of her parents only a few days apart after battling their respective health issues, she lost her Sopranos scene partner and close friend James Gandolfini just a few years later.

[w/ her dad, mum and sister at the opening night of the graduate]

[messing around w/ james at the emmys in 1999]

These losses became the catalyst for initiating a change in her own life and inspired her to prioritise her health, which led her to try a liver cleanse that she found to be incredibly effective. Feeling significantly healthier and revitalised, she became motivated to extend that knowledge to others and published her second book To the Fullest in the spring of 2015. This book included a comprehensive and structured diet and exercise plan geared specifically for mature women. Her goal was to empower others to lose weight, improve their health, and embrace life to the fullest.

Lorraine has always been an ardent advocate for those in need . . .

as evidenced by her extensive history of activism and charitable work. Her efforts have predominantly centered on women's health and rights, mental health and disabilities, domestic violence prevention, environmental conservation, and foster care—though her compassionate commitment extends well beyond these specific causes as well.

[on a patrol boat with riverkeeper, which she joined in 1993]

With a long-standing passion and interest in real-estate . . .

[source: nypost.com // hgtv]

it made sense for Lorraine to be intrigued by an opportunity to purchase a 200-year-old house in Sambuca di Sicilia, Italy for only €1. Knowing the house would require considerable renovation, she pitched the idea for a renovation show to HGTV and was given the green light for her three-part series My Big Italian Adventure. After a lot of hard work, more money than she expected to spend, and the help of her contractor Piero, friends, and many town residents, she successfully renovated the property and transformed it into a beautiful home. To my knowledge, Lorraine still owns this property and periodically takes trips there with her family.

During the winter of 2020...

Lorraine began filming for an independent movie called Jacir, a poignant story about a Syrian refugee (Jacir) struggling in the American South amidst pervasive poverty and discrimination.In the film (which released in 2022), Lorraine portrayed Meryl, Jacir's curmudgeonly, opioid-addicted and bigoted next-door neighbour. This was a challenging role for her and unlike any she'd played before. Her performance in Jacir was critically acclaimed and earned her the award for Best Actress at the Reel East Texas Film Festival in 2023.

[jacir]

In the spring of 2025...

[nonnas]

Netflix released Nonnas, a commercially successful, heartwarming family comedy in which Lorraine stars as a cranky-but-passionate Sicilian grandmother named Roberta.

"I've never, ever done a comedy before, so this was big for me. I was nervous; I didn't know where to start. (...) It's a character that, never in a million years, I thought I'd play." — AARP, 2025

During a 2006 episode of The View, Lorraine expressed a desire to play a character like Junior Soprano. With notable similarities between the characters of Junior and Roberta, it's safe to say that she did in fact realise that aspiration nearly two decades later.

[the mother, the menacer, and me]

Currently, Lorraine continues to work on interesting projects. Her most recently released project is a charming independent film called The Mother, The Menacer, and Me that was released in December of 2025.

Lorraine is at a point in her life where she's been able to find a balance between taking on new projects, engaging in her hobbies, staying active, and—most importantly—spending ample quality time with her family. Only time will tell what's next for her, but my hope is that she remains fulfilled both professionally and personally, while continuing to be a source of joy and inspiration to many, myself included.

"I love my work, but for me, the true measure of success is my family—my daughters, my grandchildren," — Women's World, 2025

The creation of The Bracchronicles...

was inspired by a multitude of reasons, many of them personal. One of those reasons is that as a former actor myself, I hold a deep admiration for her skill as a performer. Over the years, Lorraine has proven herself to be an actor with a diverse skillset, and on a technical level she is undeniably skilled (something that is especially evident in The Sopranos and Jacir where her personality seems to be the most subdued in my opinion).Not only does she favour improvisation, but she also excels in her use of subtle micro-expressions as much as she does when she lets her emotions release in raw unfiltered kinetic macro-expressions and explosive gestures. This makes her a fantastic and supportive scene partner for acting greats like James Gandolfini, allowing for their scenes to become much deeper than they would've been otherwise, though equally as effective at taking complete masterful control of a scene all by herself. She also knows when to turn up the camp factor for a scene, possessing a sense of humour and fun that makes her both endearing and incredibly enjoyable to watch. She makes me laugh, A LOT.Stylistically, she always brings something fresh and new to each character, pushing for what she believes is best for them. Lorraine continues to display her tenacity and dedication to the craft by giving her all, even when the scenes are difficult and draining or when she's been ill-supported by scripts or directors. She has always added vivacity to every single project of which she's been a part, no matter what obstacles were in her way.

"I just wanted to act really well. My father always told me, if you're going to do something, then make sure you are the best at it. If you're going to be a floor sweeper, be the best floor sweeper. So I just wanted to be the best actress. I didn't care about becoming a movie star."
— Dan's Papers, 2007

There is a profound intimacy and curiosity in everything Lorraine does on screen. She possesses a fragile honesty and innocence that sets her apart from actors who prefer to disappear into their roles through method acting or complete personal detachment. She doesn't lose what makes her uniquely herself. In fact, she pushes against that trope, laying herself bare, all while infusing her characters with pieces of her personality, her lived experiences, and her empathy for others. She has the ability to become chameleon-like, while still maintaining her personhood and individuality.

[one of my favourite quotes with my favourite picture of her, both of which exist in one of my favourite magazines, Details 1987]

The glimpses into her personal life that she's chosen to share have only deepened my appreciation for every era of her work, each for their own unique reasons. My hope is that this site will allow others to witness her evolution not just as a creative professional, but also as an individual whom I very much admire—from the young model boldly taking control of her destiny, to the naive actor and presenter taking on projects solely to support her daughter while living in France, to the established actor with the remarkable career that she has today, and absolutely everything in between. — Elé

Bracco Film Club

❀ The Wizard of Oz (1939) — mentioned by Lorraine on several occasions
❀ Now, Voyager (1942) — Lorraine's answer to "What is your favourite Bette Davis movie?" during a Q&A
❀ The Red Shoes (1948) — mentioned by Lorraine on social media
❀ I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955) — mentioned by Lorraine in George magazine in 2000
❀ The Rose Tattoo (1955) — poster spotted in her Italian home in My Big Italian Adventure
❀ Two Women (1960) — poster spotted in her Italian home in My Big Italian Adventure
❀ 8½ (1963) — poster spotted in her Italian home in My Big Italian Adventure
❀ The Graduate (1967) — mentioned by Lorraine a few times, especially since it's the film adaption of the book that was also adapted into the Broadway play in which she headlined
❀ Raging Bull (1980) — mentioned by Lorraine in several interviews
❀ Diner (1982) — mentioned by Lorraine in US magazine in 1991
❀ Flashdance (1983) — allegedly, Lorraine was considered for the main role of Alex
❀ Falling in Love (1984) — Lorraine mentioned being a gofer for this movie in Interview magazine in 1990
❀ After Hours (1985) — the Scorsese movie that Lorraine didn't get cast in, though her audition helped her get cast as Karen in Goodfellas
❀ 9½ Weeks (1986) — Lorraine mentioned loving this movie in Interview magazine in 1990
❀ Working Girl (1988) — Lorraine auditioned for the role of Tess but didn't get it, and has mentioned this as a huge loss
❀ Look Who's Talking (1989) — movie that Lorraine turned down
❀ My Own Private Idaho (1991) — Lorraine referenced this movie in Interview magazine in 1993
❀ My Cousin Vinny (1992) — Lorraine turned down the role of Mona because she was overworked
❀ Batman Returns (1992) — she was rumoured to be considered for the role of Catwoman
❀ Fearless (1993) — In On the Couch, Lorraine mentioned that she was rejected for this movie because she pushed for the role of Carla, simultaneously turning down the role of Laura
❀ L.A. Confidential (1997) — she allegedly turned down the role of Lynn
❀ Agnes Brown (1999) — she mentioned liking the books on The Rosie O'Donnell Show
❀ The Insider (1999) — she mentioned liking the movie during a Martha Stewart special
❀ Ice Cream in the Cupboard (2019) — she mentioned the book in Long Island Woman magazine in 2009
❀ I'm Your Woman (2020) — she mentioned the movie during a podcast with Steve Schirripa
❀ CODA (2021) — she mentioned the movie on social media
❀ Red, White and Blue (2023) — she mentioned the short film on social media and hosted several screening events

Career

Important Notes:• Until I can acquire the one-link plugin (which would automatically redirect to your region) there will only be links to the cheapest stream or buy options for all major English speaking countries that are available for the moment. If you're having trouble finding something in your specific region, please reach out using the contact form provided.• My scenepacks are available for every single project, but currently I am only handing them out on a request & vetting basis so as to not drive away revenue from Lorraine. Please reach out via my socials (@braccobelle) if you are a clip editor and would like access to a particular scenepack for an LB edit that you're working on.• My goal is accessibility only, so what is available here is subject to change based on the commercial availability of each individual project. Any changes will be made clear in the updates section.• I have upgraded the bandwidth for lost media, but if you're still experiencing streaming issues, please try downloading the files directly.

The Mother, The Menacer, and Me [2025]

as Nancy

Film • Actor

Hopelessly stuck in a dead-end job and forced to move in with his disapproving mother-in-law, Eddie Mathews sets out to make his Hollywood dream come true – urged on by his imaginary villainous companion, who wants to be brought to life. [IMDb]

Nonnas [2025]

as Roberta

Film • actor

After losing his beloved mother, a man risks everything to honor her by opening an Italian restaurant with actual grandmothers as the chefs. [IMDb]

Rich Flu [2024]

as Martha

Film • actor

Explores how far people would go to save themselves when the wealth that made the world go round then becomes its most dangerous commodity after a strange disease threatens to kill anyone with any sort of fortune. [IMDb]

Monster Summer [2024]

as Virginia Halverson

Film • actor

When a mysterious force begins to disrupt their big summer fun, a group of friends team up with a retired police detective to embark on an adventure to save their island. [IMDb]

The Union [2024]

as Lorraine McKenna

Film • actor

Construction worker Mike is thrust into the world of espionage when his high school sweetheart, Roxanne, recruits him for a high-stakes intelligence mission. [IMDb]

Jacir [2022]

as Meryl

Film • actor

A young Syrian refugee faces hard truths chasing the American dream on the streets of Memphis, Tennessee, while living in poverty, dealing with social injustice and witnessing his neighbor's opioid addiction. [IMDb]

Pinocchio [2022]

as Sofia

Film • voice actor

A puppet is brought to life by a fairy, who assigns him to lead a virtuous life in order to become a real boy. [IMDb]

Welcome to Mama's [2022]

as Mama Tucci

Film • actor

After she inherits an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, manager Amy teams up with a blacklisted master chef looking for a second chance. They discover that the most important ingredient for any recipe is always love. [IMDb]

The Birthday Cake [2021]

as Sofia

Film • actor

On the 10th anniversary of his father's death, Giovanni reluctantly accepts the task of bringing a cake to the home of his uncle, a mob boss, for a celebration. Just two hours into the night, Gio's life is forever changed. [IMDb]

My Big Italian Adventure [2020]

as self

Reality TV

Lorraine Bracco buys a fixer upper for one Euro in Sambucca Italy. [IMDb]

A Ring for Christmas [2020]

as Margaret Moore

Film • actor

Spoiled single girl Angie Moore gets cut off 25 days before Christmas. When she discovers the existence of a sizable trust fund that she will inherit once she gets married, Angie decides to find a man to marry - by Christmas. [IMDb]

AJ and the Queen [2020]

as Lorraine Bracco (cameo)

TV (1 episode) • Actor

Ruby Red, a down-on-her-luck drag queen traveling across America, develops an unlikely sidekick named AJ. [IMDb]

Jerk [2019 - 2023]

as Ms. Renkow

TV (12 episodes) • actor

Tim has cerebral palsy, which means that people judge him, and his crumpled tissue of a body. But usually they judge him wrongly. Because what they don't realise is that inside that severely disabled, fragile body is a bit of an asshole. [IMDb]

Master Maggie [2019]

as Master Maggie

short • actor / producer

A celebrity acting coach is interrupted by an unknown actor begging for her help for a TV audition. [IMDb]

The Dead Wives Club [2019]

as self

TV • host

When a wife is murdered, the main suspect is usually her husband. Sometimes the killer turns out to be an intruder, a suspect, a stranger, a secret lover, or even a child. Sometimes we never find the killer. [IMDb]

Summer Camp Island [2018]

as The Werewolf Queen

TV (1 episode) • voice actor

Two best friends go to a magic sleep-away camp where nothing is what it seems. [IMDb]

Blue Bloods [2017 - 2018]

as Mayor Maggie Dutton

TV (5 episodes) • actor

Follows the professional and personal lives of the Reagans, a family of New York Cops, who all work in different positions of law enforcement and work together to solve crimes and protect the city from danger. [IMDb]

Monday Nights at Seven [2016]

as Damian Robertson

Film • actor

A single father struggles unsuccessfully to let go of his past. He meets Isabel, a young woman who also faces the consequences of her own choices. [IMDb]

BoJack Horseman [2016]

as Dr. Janet

TV (2 episodes) • voice actor

BoJack Horseman was the star of the hit television show "Horsin' Around" in the '80s and '90s, but now he's washed up, living in Hollywood, complaining about everything, and wearing colorful sweaters. [IMDb]

Dice [2016]

as Toni

TV (2 episodes) • actor

Hickory, dickory, dock...the Dice Man's back and he's ready to rock. Twenty-five years after taking the entertainment world by storm, Andrew Dice Clay is eager to reclaim his comedy throne. [IMDb]

To the Fullest [2015]

Book • co-author
(w/ Lisa V. Davis)

In To the Fullest, Bracco presents her Clean Up Your Act Program, a comprehensive plan to help women over 40 look and feel younger. [Goodreads]

Dissonance [2014]

as Elise

Short • actor

Dissonance explores the harsh challenges of a young man's stale relationship and stalled career. As everything seems to be going nowhere, he must decide whether he will hold onto love, or face the fear that moving forward may mean letting go. [IMDb]

Mulaney [2014]

as Vaughn

TV (1 episode) • actor

A stand-up comic searching for his big break experiences drastic life changes when a narcissistic comedy legend and game-show host hires him as a writer. [IMDb]

The Bensonhurst Spelling Bee [2012]

as Judge (skit)

Short • actor

The Bensonhurst Spelling Bee is where all the world best spellers come to spell words. [IMDb]

I Married a Mobster [2011]

as self

TV (10 episodes) • narrator / producer

Exploring the lives of women married to mobsters. Chronicles relationships' beginnings, luxurious highs and families' downfalls as spouses were jailed. [IMDb]

Son of Morning [2011]

as Leda Katz

Film • actor

A young copywriter becomes the most famous man on the planet, overnight, when he is mistaken as the next messiah. [IMDb]

Rizzoli & Isles [2010 - 2016]

as Angela Rizzoli

TV (101 episodes) • actor

Boston's assertive detective Jane Rizzoli and steady medical examiner Maura Isles are hailing from very different economic backgrounds, but the strong, competent women effectively work together to solve the city's most puzzling crimes. [IMDb]

Women Without Men [2010]

as Elaine

TV Pilot • actor

A modern-day Golden Girls, shot in the style of Curb Your Enthusiasm. [IMDb]

[note: in my opinion, it’s a crime that this was never picked up.]

Law & Order: Criminal Intent [2010]

as Halfway House Matron

TV (1 episode) • actor

Follows the NYPD's Major Case Squad, a unit that investigates high-profile cases, while also presenting aspects of the crime from the perpetrator's perspective. [IMDb]

Long Island Confidential [2008]

as Norah Larkin

TV Pilot • actor

A drama centered around a female homicide detective who returns to her Long Island roots. [IMDb]

Lipstick Jungle [2008]

as Janice Lasher

TV (2 episodes) • actor

A look at the lives of Nico, Wendy, and Victory -- three of "New York's 50 Most Powerful Women," according to The New York Post. [IMDb]

Snowglobe [2007]

as Rose Moreno

Film • actor

A young woman discovers a Christmas-themed dreamworld inside a magical snowglobe. [IMDb]

On the Couch [2006]

Autobiography • author

A memoir by the actress best known as psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi on The Sopranos describes what she terms her "ugly duckling" youth, highly publicized divorce from Harvey Keitel, bitter custody battle, bankruptcy, and struggles with depression [Goodreads]

My Suicidal Sweetheart [2005]

as Sheila

Film • actor

A suicidal comedy about two young lovers who get married and escape from a mental institution in search of new ways to die...and the white light. [IMDb]

Law & Order: Trial by Jury [2005]

as Karla Grizano

TV (1 episode) • actor

The series showed the workings of the judicial system, beginning with the arraignment, and continuing through the lawyers process of building a case, investigating leads, and preparing witnesses and defendants for trial. [IMDb]

Death of a Dynasty [2003]

as Enchante

Film • actor

Dash is the CEO of Roc-a-Fella records, home to hip-hop's biggest seller: Jay Z. The film tells the story of a beef between Dash and Z over a disconcertingly teenage looking party chick called Picasso. [IMDb]

The Graduate [2002 - 2003]

as Mrs. Robinson

Stage • actor

A satirical comedy following Benjamin Braddock, a disillusioned college graduate who initiates a secret affair with his father's business partner's wife, the older Mrs. Robinson, before falling for her daughter, Elaine [NYT]

Tangled [2001]

as Det. Anne Andersle

Film • actor

Two friends are each dating the same college girl. Who of them puts her in harms way? [IMDb]

Riding in Cars with Boys [2001]

as Mrs. Teresa Donofrio

Film • actor

A single mother, with dreams of becoming a writer, has a son at the age of 15 in 1965, and goes through a failed marriage with the drug-addicted father. [IMDb]

Sex in Our Century [2001]

as self

Documentary • narrator

A four-part series examining sexual science and education in the last half of the 20th century. [IMDb]

[note: as you can see, this guinea pig is very sad not to have seen this in full.]

Custody of the Heart [2000]

as Claire Raphael

Film • actor

A successful businesswoman is suddenly sued for custody of her children by her stay-at-home husband. [IMDb]

Auto Motives [2000]

Short • director

A collection of vignettes, each exploring different characters and their unique interactions with vehicles.

The Sopranos [1999 - 2007]

as Dr. Jennifer Melfi

TV (69 episodes, nice) • actor

New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano deals with personal and professional issues in his home and business life that affect his mental state, leading him to seek professional psychiatric counseling. [IMDb]

Ladies Room [1999]

as Gemma

Film • actor

Women wait in an ethereal room, perhaps dead in a Purgatory. The relationships between pairs of younger and older women take surprising turns as they watch the last few days of their lives on a TV screen. [IMDb]

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 [1998]

as Det. Ray

Film • actor

In New York, armed men hijack a subway car and demand a ransom for the passengers. Even if it's paid, how could they get away? [IMDb]

Silent Cradle [1997]

as Helen Greg

Film • actor

A woman has a miscarriage. After her grief becomes bearable, she attempts to adopt a baby, but discovers evidence that her baby might not have been dead when it was removed from her stomach. If so, who took the baby, why and where? [IMDb]

Cap Danger [1996]

as Kits Maitland

Film • actor

After her daughter is kidnapped by white slave traders, a mother enlists the aid of a world war 2 vet and a boat captain. Together they hunt down the kidnappers. [IMDb]

Les menteurs [1996]

as Hélène Miller

Film • actor

Daisy uses 'All About Eve' tactics to lie her way into the circle of friends of director Zac. But Zac has been missing for months. When he finally resurfaces, he and Daisy start writing a script based on his experiences. But the story keeps changing. [IMDb]

Hackers [1995]

as Margo

Film • actor

Teenage hackers discover a criminal conspiracy with plans to use a computer virus that will capsize five oil tankers. [IMDb]

The Basketball Diaries [1995]

as Jim's mum

Film • actor

A teenager finds his dreams of becoming a basketball star threatened after he free falls into the harrowing world of drug addiction. [IMDb]

Getting Gotti [1994]

as Diane Giacalone

Film • actor

Though she grew up in the same neighborhood with him, the new Assistant U.S. Attorney is determined to prosecute Mafia boss John Gotti. [IMDb]

Being Human [1994]

as Anna

Film • actor

A man's blunders regarding his family are told and retold through different eras in history. [IMDb]

Fertile La Toyah Video Magazine #2 [1994]

as self(?)

Film • interviewee(?)

Prostrate probing interviews! Live action murder! Naked people! Tired death-rockers! And more! Much more!! [IMDb]

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues [1993]

as Delores Del Ruby

Film • actor

A woman with huge thumbs hitchhikes across America, becomes a model, and visits her agent's California ranch for a commercial shoot. She meets cowgirls who take over the ranch and drug whooping cranes, leading to police siege. [IMDb]

Scam [1993]

as Maggie Rohrer

Film • actor

Maggie Rohrer makes a living scamming gullible men in Miami Beach, but she meets her match in Jack Shanks, a man who who turns the tables on her, and drags her into a far more elaborate plot blackmailing a crime lord. [IMDb]

Traces of Red [1992]

as Ellen Schofield

Film • actor

Jack sleeps with a waitress, who's later murdered. Did Jack's usual lover do it? Palm Beach detectives Jack and Steve investigate. Twists follow. [IMDb]

Radio Flyer [1992]

as Mary

Film • actor

A father recounts a dark period of his childhood when he and his little brother lived in the suburbs. [IMDb]

Medicine Man [1992]

as Dr. Rae Crane

Film • actor

squeak In the beautiful and dangerous Amazon rainforest, dissimilar people must make their choices between business, science, and love. [IMDb] squeaksqueaksqueaksqueaksqueak

Switch [1991]

as Sheila Faxton

Film • actor

A sexist womanizer is killed by one of his former lovers and then reincarnated as a woman. [IMDb]

Talent for the Game [1991]

as Bobbie Henderson

Film • actor

Virgil Sweet is on the verge of losing his job as a talent scout with the California Angels when he discovers Sammy Bodeen, a country boy with no pro ball experience, but with a pitching arm no one has seen the like of. [IMDb]

Goodfellas [1990]

as Karen Hill

Film • actor

The story of Henry Hill and his life in the mafia, covering his relationship with his wife Karen and his mob partners Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito. [IMDb]

Sea of Love [1989]

as Denice Gruber

Film • actor (scenes deleted, how dare)

A detective investigating a series of murders becomes involved with a woman who may be the culprit. [IMDb]

In una notte di chiaro di luna [1989]

as Sheila

Film • actor

An American journalist pretends to be infected with A.I.D.S. to investigate the syndrome and provoke a public reaction. [IMDb]

The Dream Team [1989]

as Riley

Film • actor

Four mental patients on a field trip in New York City must save their caring chaperon, who ends up being taken to a hospital in a coma after accidentally witnessing a murder, before the killers can find him and finish the job. [IMDb]

Sing [1989]

as Miss Teresa Lombardo

Film • actor

A teen film about an Italian punk forced to work with an innocent Jewish girl. [IMDb]

Someone to Watch Over Me [1987]

as Ellie Keegan

Film • actor

A married New York cop falls for the socialite murder witness he's been assigned to protect. [IMDb]

The Pick-up Artist [1987]

as Carla

Film • actor

A womanizer meets his match when he falls for a woman in debt to the mafia. [IMDb]

Goose and Tomtom [1986]

as Lulu

Stage • actor

The author of Hurlyburly again explores the struggle between hope and anguish in the human spirit in this story of two small-time jewel thieves united in a strangely unsettling friendship and the constant fight to prove to themselves and others how tough they are. [abebooks]

Crime Story [1986]

as Hostage

TV (1 episode) • actor

The saga of a Chicago police detective's efforts to stop a young hood's ruthless rise in the ranks of organized crime. [IMDb]

Camorra [1985]

(uncredited)

Film • actor

A mysterious serial killer is targeting drug dealers in Napoli, stabbing them in the testicles with a hypodermic needle. [IMDb]

[note: closed captioning translation is available below but it is not accurate.]

Hermès Tour [estimated 1983]

as self

Documentary • journalist

Lorraine put on her journalist suit and was taken on an exclusive tour around the Hermès factory in France, exploring the blend of tradition and innovation in luxury craftsmanship.

Les enfants du rock [1983]

as self

Documentary • presenter

A seminal French television music show (1982–1987) that championed rock, punk, new wave, and alternative music. It featured live performances, interviews, and music videos from iconic artists of the time. [Wikipedia]

L'impeccable [1983]

as Photographer

TV (1 episode) • actor

Possible promotional skit for Les enfants du rock(?)

Fais gaffe à la gaffe ! [1981]

as Margaux

Film • actor

Based on the comic strip about the hopeless but lovable slacker Gaston who drives his colleagues crazy at the office. [IMDb]

[note: closed captioning translation is available below but it is not accurate.]

Commissaire Moulin [1980]

as Jenny

TV (1 episode) • actor

The series follows the adventures of light-hearted Police Commissaire Jean-Paul Moulin and his team as they solve crimes. [Wikipedia]

[note: closed captioning translation is available below but it is not accurate.]

Mais qu'est-ce que j'ai fait ? [1980]

as Barbara

Film • actor

Gaby is happy. After eighteen years of work, he is a flourishing mechanist. But one day, the mechanic of his life is out of order. He discovers that his assistant is in love with his wife. [IMDb]

[note: closed captioning translation is available below but it is not accurate.]

Duos sur canapé [1979]

as Bubble

Film • actor

Bernard, a lawyer, and Jacqueline, a dentist, married for many years, each have their own home office. This becomes problematic when they decide to divorce and neither of them wants to move their practice. [IMDb]

[note: closed captioning translation is available below but it is not accurate.]

Publications

Important Notes:• I have transcribed (and translated where necessary) everything for accessibility purposes. Except for misspellings, the articles are presented as originally published. I have intentionally preserved localisations and inaccuracies as they appear. Please note that I am acting solely as a curator for these articles and am not responsible for any errors or misinformation they may contain.• Furthermore, please note that some publications or specific articles have been partially removed or fully omitted at my discretion for any reason I see fit, and to maintain the integrity and flow of the collection.• If you have any questions about any of the publications listed here, or would like to donate scans, please email me using the contact form provided.

Women's World

Strong and shining at 70
Sopranos and Nonnas actress LORRAINE BRACCO talks silver linings and embracing her true self!"Always Believe in yourself!"
The Sopranos and Goodfellas actress, author and former model Lorraine Bracco wears many hats. But her role of a lifetime—and the toughest to play—was being a single mom to her daughters. Now, Lorraine looks back on her ups and downs for the blessings they've been. Here, she shares how she found peace and joy!

Sitting at her home outside of New York City, Lorraine Bracco is filled with gratitude. "I'm thrilled to be alive!" she shares with Woman's World. "I'm thrilled that I can grow tomatoes, that I can pick up the phone and call my kids and grandkids. . . that we're all healthy and that I can really be me."For the 70-year-old actress and author, that's not something she takes lightly. "I'm an explosive girl, loud, full of life—that's me in a nutshell. And I've been through a lot of things in my life," says Lorraine, who raised two daughters on her own and has learned to see silver linings in the toughest times. "That's really what life is all about. I am a firm believer that everything will always work out in the end."Here, Lorraine shares her secrets to greeting each day with joy, laughter and curiosity.[Don't miss Lorraine's new movie!
In her new movie Nonnas, debuting on Netflix May 9, Lorraine plays Roberta, one of three Italian grandmothers hired to work as chefs in an Italian restaurant. The cozy comedy is based on the true story of Joe Scaravella, the owner of a Staten Island restaurant who, after losing his mother, opens the eatery in her honor and hires local "nonnas" as chefs. Lorraine describes the film as "a warm, lovely, heartfelt look at older women who feel they're not worthy anymore. Of the other actresses who played the chefs, I was the only one who really knew how to cook!" she laughs. "I showed them how to cook garlic and add to the sauce the way my mother used to do it. The film absolutely combines family, friends and the strength of community."]Ride the confidence wave"I love my work, but for me, the true measure of success is my family—my daughters, my grandchildren," Lorraine says with a smile. "As a single mom, I focused on putting a roof over their heads, clothing them, feeding them and educating them. That was a full-time job with a lot of responsibility, but it made me a stronger, more resilient person. We've gone through our ups and downs, but we've always bounced back-the same happens with self-confidence. Over the years, I've lost my confidence, gained it, lost it again. . . it's not a straight line. We have to keep reminding ourselves of the things we are grateful for, and it all balances everything out."

Growing joy"I pick fresh basil, rosemary and thyme from my herb garden every morning. I love cooking with them and also getting my hands a little dirty—it's relaxing in a way," Lorraine shares. "I also grow cucumbers, Japanese eggplant, zucchini and so much more. I have to tell my 6-year-old granddaughter not to pick the green tomatoes and yet, of course, her basket is full of the green ones."[Walk away the aches"I used to practice Shotokan karate years ago, but now I opt for long walks outside," Lorraine says. "I have a step counter on my phone so I can see my steps. At 70, you get to be achy sometimes, but I still want to do things and walking feels great."][Let yourself shine"It's so easy!" Lorraine says of her beauty routine. "I wash my face at night with a Bobbi Brown oil cleanser, brush my teeth with Listerine toothpaste—my favorite drugstore find—put on moisturizer and I'm done." And since the COVID-19 pandemic, Lorraine decided to go au naturel with her hair color, now showcasing her long silver locks. "I love not having to spend hours in the salon!"][Lorraine's keys to happyCherish the little things"There's nothing more pleasurable than making the people I love delicious food!" Lorraine says of one of her favorite pastimes: cooking. "I guess I'm naturally a nurturer, so one of the things that makes me happiest is when someone comes to visit and I can cook them dinner, enjoy their company and they tell me they feel at home here. I am so proud to own my own home, so I always felt that to be a really lovely compliment."Define your own bliss"My mantra is 'Have more fun,'" Lorraine says. "My life is simple: I love waking up in the morning with the sunrise, savoring a good cup of coffee, spending time with my two dogs and I'm addicted to old black-and-white movies. I also love looking at the night-time sky—I have an app to watch the planets and stars—it's great!"] —BONNIE SIEGLER
(photographer: stephanie diani)

AARP

Upfront/WHAT I KNOW NOWLorraine Bracco
The husky-voiced actress riffs on Bette Davis, her first comedic role and missing James GandolfiniEye of beholder
I was voted Ugliest Girl on the school bus in sixth grade. It was painful. I went home sobbing and said to my parents, "I'm never going to school again." My father sat me on his lap, picked up my chin and said, "You're the most beautiful girl in the world to me." It helped ... a little.Go for it
My father always pushed me to try. When I was 19 and wanted to go to Paris and model, my mother was hesitant. But my father was like, "Here's some money! Here's your return ticket!" There's no harm in trying, he taught me. So I didMangia, mangia
My parents married when my father was in England–Mom was English and my father was Italian. My mother was a war bride. She learned how to make meatballs, spaghetti, sauce, from my father's mom and grandmother. Growing up, my siblings and I would chuckle because we never knew: Are we having meatballs or are we having tea? I'm always up for a good meatball.Body aware
There are times when I've put on 15, 20 pounds, and it's my fault because I'm not paying attention or not caring. I think Pilates is great, and I try to walk a lot–l walk, walk, walk.Au naturel
I was never a girl who looked in the mirror. I am what I am, I put a little lipstick on, a little blush, and I'm out the door.Role models
My parents were movie buffs. Judy Garland was big in my house, but my favorite was Bette Davis. I loved how she could transform herself from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. I think being voted Ugliest Girl in sixth grade had a lot to do with why I adored her.Remember friends
Last year was the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos, and people still call out, "Hey, Doc!" when they see me on the street. I love it. It means my role as Dr. Melfi meant something to them. When I think about the show, I don't think about the success–l think about what I lost. I lost Jimmy [Gandolfini]. And for Goodfellas–which was 35 years ago–l lost Ray Liotta. I lost two people whom I worked with, whom I adored, whom I would jump up in the air and hug and kiss whenever I saw them. That's what I think about.

Day in a life
I love being home. I have the dogs. I cook, I garden. I feed the birds. I talk on the phone. I do Wordle. I do The New York Times Spelling Bee. I watch old movies. I love when it's Oscar season and I get all the academy movies. I cook for people. My friends came over last night; I made a nice little dinner.Share success
One of the big things for me in my life, besides having children and grandchildren, is that my parents got to see my success. It warms my heart that I was able to bring them to the Oscars and all the openings of The Sopranos. It was very special for them, and for me.The great beyond
I think there's an afterlife. Once we leave our body, we go on and see our friends and family. I have no problem with that at all.Believe in love
I'm single, and I'm sure someone will arrive. I believe in love. What do I look for in a man? A sense of humor is extremely important. And I like a guy who's sure of himself. I'm sure of myself, so I want him to be rock steady.Mama's lesson
The most important lesson I tried to teach my two daughters is that anything is possible. If I could do what I've done in my life, I told them, you can do anything. You are the only one who can stop yourself.Real-life nonna
Being a grandmother is so much fun, because you relive a part of you that's been dormant for a while. We play, we read, we talk. As long as I can get down on the floor and get back up again, I'm good.Funny bone
Nonnas is a comedy, a true story about this guy who opens a restaurant with a bunch of nonnas. I've never, ever done a comedy before, so this was big for me. I was nervous; I didn't know where to start. The director gave me these ugly glasses, and I said: "I look terrible, what are you doing to me?" He said, "Lorraine, trust me." He was hysterical, laughing behind the camera. Vince Vaughn kept saying, "Lorraine, you're doing great! Just commit! Believe!" It's a character that, never in a million years, I thought I'd play.—NATASHA STOYNOFF
(photographer: stephanie diani)

The Guardian

HONEST PLAYLIST
LORRAINE BRACCO
The Sopranos actor danced to Sinatra as a child and bought the Turtles with her babysitting money.
But which US east coast rocker makes her cry?The first song I remember hearing
Fly Me to the Moon by Frank Sinatra because of my parents. I grew up in Brooklyn and I remember dancing to that in the house.The first song I fell in love with
At Christmas time, we would all gather round and watch The Wizard of Oz. When the witch came on, I would jump into my father or mother's lap. I remember watching Judy Garland sing Over the Rainbow and thinking she was so beautiful. Then being scared to death by the witch was such an array of emotions.The first single I bought
Happy Together by the Turtles. I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11. I went to the record store in Mid Island and bought it with my babysitting money. Who was I babysitting for? Two little brats down the street!The song that makes me cry
I love it when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band sing The River live and they hand it off to all of the band. So Bruce sings it, Stevie Van Zandt sings it and Patti Scialfa sings it. The words are so powerful, they just go through me. It's an emotion that touches my heart. I love Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I've seen them, I don't know how many times through my life.

The song I inexplicably know all the lyrics to I had an older brother who introduced me to Chubby Checker, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison and the Beatles. I was just at that age where their songs were meaningful and simple. I love Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon. There is such a simplicity about it. It's still as important today than when he wrote and believed it.The best song to play at a party
Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars is just so much fun. Talk about getting the party started! It's got a great beat. It makes me want to move. It makes me happy.The last song I streamed
David Chase just sent me a song... Darling Lorraine by the Knockouts, a lovely song from the 50s.
Do I like Woke Up This Morning by Alabama 3, the Sopranos theme? Of course! I love that they went from obscurity to world-renowned.The best song to have sex to
Barry White.The song I tell people I hate, but secretly like
I'm not like that. I'm black and white.—RICH PELLEY
(photographer: mark schafer)

Luxury Living

[source: https://paper.newsday.com]

THERE'S NO LOOKING BACK wistfully at the good ol' days for veteran actor Lorraine Bracco. At 61, Bracco, who starred in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas and the hit HBO series, The Sopranos, is in a good place."I'm in great shape," Bracco says."I've never been happier. I look good."And, she doesn't look her age: everyone tells her so. "I still can turn a head," she says, giggling. But her present state of contentment came after years of gradual decline and inertia that ended with her reawakening, resolve and rejuvenation.Her book, To the Fullest: The Clean Up Your Act Plan to Lose Weight, Rejuvenate, and Be the Best You Can Be, which came out last April, tells how she lost weight and, more importantly, how she learned to take good care of herself.AT A CROSSROADS
Going through menopause in her 50's, Bracco, was overweight and sluggish. "I was very achy," says the Hicksville native. "I was tired. I had no energy to do much. I kind of lost a little joy. I didn't have a bounce in my step."Looking back, she realizes that, at the time, she was taking care of family, focused on her career, and simply avoiding herself. Her parents were smokers, who neither ate right nor exercised, suffered from numerous illnesses, and died within nine days of each other. That served as a wake up call for their daughter. Bracco promised she wasn't going to let herself fall apart like that, and swore, "that I was going to be as healthy and as active as I could, for as long as I could."PUTTING A PLAN INTO ACTION
"We say we're getting older, therefore I'm achy, I'm overweight, I'm tired. It's a perfect excuse," Bracco says. It was time to put away excuses.To jumpstart her plan, Bracco and co-author Lisa Davis created the 14-day Liv4Mor liver cleanse. In 2006, she changed her eating habits and started doing Pilates regularly, though not religiously. "I cut out gluten, a lot of sugar and dairy, and I'm a whole other person." Eventually, she lost 35 pounds."I wanted to be healthy and in being healthy and eating correctly, I lost weight. And I've maintained that weight loss for years."Though she started to feel better almost immediately, it took about a year to take off all the weight. "All of these lose weight quick diets don't work, because you only gain back the weight," Bracco avers. "It's a slow and steady process, if you want to keep it off. Everything else is bullshit, because if it works, we'd all be thin." To succeed, changing your attitude is key. "We don't own anything else but our beings: our spiritual beings, our mental beings, and our physical beings. It's the only thing we have control over. And I wanted to be in control of these things."NO TURNING BACK:
THE FUTURE IS BRIGHTAfter losing weight and feeling great, Bracco says people noticed and wanted to know how she did it, so she decided to share her story with readers. "I think beauty is energy. I don't think it's just a physical beauty ... there's an inner beauty. There's an inner excitement from a woman, which shines, the older we get, the smarter we get, the more independent we are."Still, Bracco's no angel and does fall off the wagon every now and again. "I know the next day, I'm back on track. I know that if I go through two weeks of crazy Christmas, which is really the only time I really lose it, I go back." For women who feel bad about their looks, Bracco advises them to take charge. "You are the owner of yourself. You want to feel better? Forget the looks. Once you feel better, everything falls into place. Once you start to eat well, once you give yourself that kick start, you're not going to want to go back."These days, Bracco, who is single, calls New York home but shoots in Los Angeles, for her star turn in TV's "Rizzoli & Isles," which begins its 7th season on TNT this summer, and she'll co-star in "Dice," on Showtime with Andrew Dice Clay, slated to air some time this year. She has two daughters, Margaux, 36, and Stella, 30, and a granddaughter, Vivienne.In an industry obsessed, with youth and looks, Bracco is having the last laugh. "I'm 61," she says. "They're still knocking on the door. The checks are still cashing. What more can a girl want?"

TIPS FROM
"TO THE FULLEST"
LORRAINE BRACCOON TEMPTATION:
"When I'm tempted to eat candy or a piece of bread, I look at the temptation in front of me and ask, 'What are you going to do for me?' I already know the answer: 'Nothing good.' Stopping to remind myself of that helps to build my resistance to the empty, dead foods I thought I couldn't live without."ON FEELING INVISIBLE AS YOU AGE:
"You have to live in the moment and not measure yourself against an image of yourself that is decades old. Don't take yourself too seriously. Being able to laugh at and even appreciate your supposed 'flaws' will make them easier to live with."ON INDULGENCE:
"The four-bite rule: If you can't resist the temptation of a sinful indulgence, limit what you eat to four bites. You don't have to eat the whole candy bar, bag of chips, or pint of ice cream."ON CHOOSING AN EXERCISE ROUTINE:
"Always choose a form of exercise that resonates with you on a physical, emotional and mental level... Try different exercise programs with an open mind. If you don't connect with a program, just move on to something else—as long as you keep moving."EMBRACING POSITIVITY IN YOUR THIRD ACT:
"Believe that you deserve better whatever your age. You really have to want it and be willing to do whatever you can to get it. You have to keep reaching if you want to stay vibrant and powerful. The challenge and the struggle are what make life interesting."—ARLENE GROSS
(photographer: mark schafer)

The Big Issue

[source: https://x.com/BigIssue]

"I loved working with James Gandolfini. It was so intense. I adored him. I miss him."LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELFI was voted the ugliest girl on the school bus when I was 12. But by 16, the Ugly Duckling was turning into a girl that was not so bad looking. My braces were being taken off and I was growing into this long, lanky body. Boys started to look at me that was a mind-blowing revelation.I had a very overprotective father and an English mother, who was a war bride. The mixture of them was fascinating. They were fun and cool, and my parents loved the movies. My English side comes out when I do my garden. I'm a big gardener, just like my mum was. I went crazy last week—I did my big vegetable garden, flowers and pots.In 1970, New York was the place to be. There was Woodstock—which I was not allowed allowed to to go to and and Greenwich Greenwich Village was hopping. I remember going to Washington Square Park and looking at people's clothes. I guess it was like Carnaby Street for you guys—that whole hippie movement, smelling pot everywhere, listening to people playing music and reciting poetry in the park, buying incense and candles. Flower power! I was totally into it, and I loved my bell-bottom jeans.I was always the odd man out when I was younger. I was wasn't your usual anything. I was a total misfit. I wish somebody had told me this when I was younger: "Trust yourself. Believe in yourself. Because anything can happen". And it did.I went to Paris for a couple of months when I was 20 and stayed for 10 years. I felt very at home there. I used to model, but all the great photographers used to say to me that I should go to Hollywood. I was like, "Are you crazy?" All through my 20s people were telling me. Even Catherine Deneuve told me one night in Paris. We had friends in common and were having dinner together. She just looked at me and said: "Oh, you're an actress!" But I didn't start acting until my 30s.As far back I remember I always wanted to be in a Marty Scorsese movie! I went to see Raging Bull on the Champs-Élysées. I said to myself that if I ever did become an actress, this director would like me. There was the whole New York thing, I'm an Italian American, American, I was a little raw and wild, so I knew he would like me.

I met Marty many times before we made Goodfellas. I auditioned for After Hours, the movie with Griffin Dunne. Scorsese called me up and said: "Listen, I think you are terrific. I am not going to take you for this movie but I know we are going to work together." And a few years later he gave me that great part in Goodfellas. I didn't even have audition. It was an incredibly creative atmosphere on the film. The best of everything—writing, directing, actors, music, set, costumes. Most of my scenes were with Ray Liotta, who I adore. It was thrillingI would tell my younger self to avoid people who want to squash your dreams. Anybody who says "no", tell them to fuck off! Follow what is in your gut. Don't listen if they think you are out of your mind and want you to be a lawyer or doctor. It's ok to say I'm a singer or a writer or an actor. Follow your dream.I still don't pick the right guy. But it has been fun. I'm still none the wiser about love so I couldn't really advise my younger self what to do. C'est la vie. I tell my children if I die tomorrow, I had a great run, I had a great time, I made mistakes, I had successes, I had failures, and I had a great time.My kids kept me on the straight and narrow. I was young when I had Margaux, so that was really good because it meant I couldn't go too overboard on anything. Otherwise I would definitely have bee more crazy. Instead I had to get up and make oatmeal in the morning. I'm grandmother now and I love it.I was always a fan of strong women in great roles. Whether it was Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck or Katharine Hepburn, I watched all the old movies and liked those big strong women. Who doesn't? There are fewer roles for women who are 60 years old and we don't make as much money as the men. But I have been lucky to be able to provide for my children and have a good life. So I can't complain about this industry. I have been steadily employed. And as I say that I am knocking on wood.I believe actors are like athletes and James Gandolfini the greatest. He was like a boxer. Working with him for six seasons of The Sopranos [Bracco played Tony Soprano's psychiatrist, Dr Jennifer Melfi, all those scenes in the office were like a verbal boxing match. It was so intense. I loved working with him—it was fantastic. I adored him. I miss him.I turned 60 last year made myself a big vow to stay healthy. I lost my parents and I watched them decline in their health and it was really tough. I don't want heart disease and emphysema and gout and diabetes. I don't need to live into my 100s but whatever time I have here, I want to live healthily. —ADRIAN LOBB

Vanity Fair

[Full publication (group cast interview) will be in the Sopranos publication section.]

(photographer: annie leibovitz)

Directed By

Dr. Melfi's
Final ChapterLorraine Bracco is one of Hollywood's best actresses of all time. From her role as Karen Hill in Goodfellas to Jim's mother in The Basketball Diaries to Mrs. Teresa Donofrio in Riding in Cars with Boys, Bracco has set the mark for herself and each role she takes on; there is a rawness to the character that only Bracco could pull off. After achieving so much, Bracco somehow continues to keep both feet firmly on the ground. Despite her successful career as an actress, she remains humble, and speaking with her was like talking to an old friend. Putting her ego aside early on is most likely the reason why Bracco can portray her characters so naturally. With great pride, Bracco embraced Dr. Jennifer Melfi on The Sopranos. "I instantly loved her," said Bracco. "She was a very strong character and she was something that Tony Soprano had never come across." "I loved that she was smart. I loved that her relationship with Tony was one that he never had. And neither had she, for that matter." Filled with strong emotions over the end of The Sopranos, Bracco was filming the final episode when we spoke and she said she felt "very sad." However, it wasn't what she said, it was how she sounded. Bracco's tone revealed her deeply felt sorrow.

"We have been together for almost a decade," said Bracco of her fellow cast members. "We've been through a lot of marriages, graduations, babies being born, divorces and all kinds of things together." Although each episode is sometimes accompanied by a different director, Bracco said that her energy between "Jimmy," known to us as James Gandolfini, remains the same. Probing to find out what is in store for Gandolfini's character, I asked if Bracco was happy with the ending."I don't know," sighed Bracco. "It's very sad to me." "So, what happens?" I had to ask. "Nope, I'm not going there," chuckled Bracco. As she spoke, I continued to hear the emotional pull The Sopranos had on her, and it was clear that the entire group had something that is rare they shared a special bond, which can never be broken. Although Bracco said she will definitely continue an ongoing friendship with the cast, it doesn't change the fact that something beautiful is being pulled apart. However, Bracco has a new path in store for her. With exciting projects ahead, change is going to be a positive experience. She will always cherish her experience working on The Sopranos but has high hopes for the future. Still, like all of us who are huge Sopranos' fans, she doesn't want the saga to finally close its doors for good. "I loved working on the show," said Bracco. "I loved the whole thing. It was an unbelievably, fantastic, artistic, creative endeavor." "It's like not wanting to leave the last chapter of a great book."—MEGAN RELLAHAN

Vanity Fair

[Full publication (interview with David Chase) will be in the Sopranos publication section.]

(photographer: annie leibovitz)

Bobbi Brown, Living Beauty

Lorraine Bracco on...
...Beauty Personality. Someone who is comfortable in her own
skin. That's beautiful.
...Aging When I turned fifty, I decided my life motto would be
"more fun!" I have had a much younger boyfriend for the past four years....That helps!
...Looking Good I struggled with adult acne for years. It started
in my mid-twenties. For years, my dermatologist encouraged me to go on Accutane. After more than five years of consistent breakouts, it was obvious that I had a hormonal imbalance that was often triggered by stress. Despite my doctor's encouragement, I waited almost ten years. I had a lot of mixed feelings about going on medication. When I finally went on it, my skin changed completely. I can't tell you what it did for my confidence and overall well-being. My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner. Keep in mind, medication is not right for everyone, but it's important to know your options. For me it was the right choice. Also, a good haircut is a great beauty boost!

New York Times

QUESTIONS FOR LORRAINE BRACCO
The Doctor Is In
Best known for her role as Tony Soprano’s shrink, the actress talks about what’s wrong with the way therapists are portrayed, her new memoir and why no one thinks she’s funny.Q. As the actress who plays Dr. Jennifer Melfi on “The Sopranos,” might you be willing to spill a few details about the plot of the season finale?
Don’t you know better? “The Sopranos” people don’t reveal any of the story plots.Just checking to see if you can keep a secret, which is certainly a professional requirement for any psychiatrist.
I’m an actor. Hello! Hello! I missed out on those 10 years of Yale University.But viewers do project a certain wisdom onto you, and you have even been honored by the American Psychoanalytic Association.
When they called me, my first words were, “What, are they crazy?” They gave me a nice little plaque for portraying a therapist in a fair way.

As opposed to playing a tight-lipped guy in a shadowy room?
Most of the time when you see a film with a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist turns into the psycho killer, the sex fiend. I don’t know how many movies you can think of where the psychiatrist turns crazy.I can’t think of one.
What’s the movie with Michael Caine? “Dressed to Kill.” That is what people remember about therapists.You’ve just published a memoir, “On the Couch.” Why would you write with such bitterness about Harvey Keitel, the father of one of your two daughters, when most any psychiatrist could tell you that children should be spared such details?
I was very truthful. And the truth of the matter is that Harvey let Stella in on all of that information as a very young girl. I did not.But that’s different from branding Keitel before all the world as an enraged and self-pitying drug user. I thought you were tough on him.
I find it stunning that you say I am hard on Harvey. You don’t think Harvey robbed the children and myself of a life?Have you shown the book to your daughters?
Of course.And what did they say?
That’s my mother!And did you show the book to Keitel?
No, I did not. At this point in my life, I am the boss of me.Why, on “The Sopranos,” did you choose to play a psychiatrist of the Jungian school in particular?
It’s what I wanted to be. I like that psychiatry better. I identify with it better.What’s wrong with Freud?
You know, I don’t really know enough about it to discuss it on a bigger level, but I went the Jungian way in the show.When you play a role, aren’t you supposed to do a little research to enrich your understanding of a character?
I think I have done pretty good so far.Indeed. More American men have begun seeking therapy as a direct result of your sensitive portrayal of Dr. Melfi, or so it has been reported.
I pray that is true. I pray.How do you feel about playing a role that requires you to sit down most of the time?
I need a lot of glue. I’m very different from Dr. Melfi. I’m fairly animated, and I always have to calm myself down. Velcro would have been a good thing to put on my costumes and chair.After Dr. Melfi, you are probably best known for playing a mobster’s wife in “Goodfellas.” What sort of roles would you like to play in the future?
I would like to be able to be funny. I am funny. No one else thinks I am funny. But I am funny.Have you ever been cast in a comic role?
No. I am always that serious, troubled, hard-edged wife-lawyer-Indian-chief.Did you actually write your book yourself?
No. I had help.Why didn’t you give the writer credit?
She’s in my acknowledgements. Catherine Whitney is her name. She wrote it. I don’t want to say that I wrote it. I am not a writer. I’m a talker.In that case, perhaps it was narcissistic of you to leave her name off the title page?
O.K., Dr. Melfi. I don’t think I am narcissistic. I think I have low self-esteem. —DEBORAH SOLOMON(photographer: christian oth)

People

Her Secret Struggle
The Sopranos' Lorraine Bracco speaks out for the first time about her battle with depressionIn therapy, "I saw what a good psychiatrist could do," says Bracco (in New York City this month). "On The Sopranos the roles are just reversed."Even now, Lorraine Bracco can't quite put a finger on when her depression began. Somewhere between bursting onto the Hollywood scene with her Oscar-nominated performance in 1990's GoodFellas and landing the role of psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi on The Sopranos in 1997, she says, her life simply fell apart. "Things weren't great," she says. "I was so unhappy. But I always thought I'd get over it. I thought, 'I'm a strong woman, I can do this. But I couldn't. It was like having to fight fires in five different places with one hose. You don't know where to go."Certainly she had her share of stresses: A bitter split from actor Harvey Keitel in 1991 sparked a vicious custody battle for their daughter Stella, now 19, during which charges arose that actor Edward James Olmos, whom she married in 1994, had fondled a 14-year-old babysitter. Then came Stella's diagnosis of systemic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a separation from Olmos and $2 million in legal fees that led to bankruptcy. "But when it comes down to it, it wasn't just one prob-lem," says Bracco, who was also raising daughter Margaux, now 25, from an earlier marriage. "It was just a [bad] decade."In 1997, Bracco, now 50, got help by seeing a psychiatrist and taking an anti-depressant. But, having suffered for a year without treatment, she wishes she had done it sooner. "Out of my own stupidity, I lost a year of my life," she says. To keep others from making the same mistake, Bracco approached the drug manufacturer Pfizer Inc. last year to help create a website aimed at encouraging people suffering from depression to seek help. The site, depressionhelp.com, launches March 15. Recently, Bracco met with PEOPLE correspondent Fannie Weinstein and spoke publicly for the first time about her struggle with depression. "Millions are suffering. I don't want them to be ashamed."

Depression is very insidious, a creepy-crawly thing. From about 1991, everything in my life just seemed to feed it. Stella got sick, and there were weeks of tests: spinal taps, bone marrow, blood tests. I felt helpless. Hopeless. Then, separating from Eddie was a huge decision. I initiated it, but it was heart-breaking—another relationship that didn't work out. Meanwhile the custody battle lasted more than five years. None of us walked away unscathed.Before then, I'd been very successful, gotten great roles. All of a sudden—zippo. I was so bogged down with problems, nobody was going to offer me a starring role in their $75 million movie. And not having money to pay the mortgage is not a fun situation. It was very stressful. I had food on the table and a roof over our heads but all the extras had to be cut out for years. I felt like a loser. My friend John, who's a social worker, said, "Lorraine, I think you should see somebody. I think maybe you need to go on medication." But I wasn't about to "see somebody." Sure, you break your arm, you go to an orthopaedic surgeon. You have cancer, you go to an oncologist. But a shrink? Oh, my God! The stigma! Nobody in my immediate family ever went to a shrink. I was like, "I'll get over it."By 1997, even after Stella was in remission and I'd been offered The Sopranos, things still felt joyless. From walking the dog to watching the girls' favorite TV show with them, I went through everything mindlessly. I can't say I never thought of suicide. But would I have gone from thinking to doing? No. Did I want to jump off the Empire State Building? No. Did I feel every other option was expired? Yes. And it wasn't affecting just me. My daughters were fed, they went to school, but they didn't have the best of me.

I did discuss it with friends—I'm a sharer. But the depression was bigger than that. Friends are great, but they're not doctors, and sometimes you need a little extra help. Here I'd been cast as a psychiatrist on The Sopranos, and I realized it was time to see one.Later that year, I went to see a psychiatrist who confirmed that I was depressed and prescribed an anti-depressant. The night before I saw him, I wrote down a million questions: Am I doing the right thing? Is there something else I'm not owning up to? My gut knew I was on the right track, but now I worried that medication would take away my emotions and make me a zombie. What if I had to stay on it forever? I'm an actor; I need my emotions!The medication isn't a happy pill. It takes five or six weeks to kick in. But week by week things started getting easier. I was able to do a huge spring cleaning. My problems weren't owning me anymore. And, despite my worries, the medication didn't affect my acting abilities. I realized I wasn't going to change, I was just going to be a better me. Everyone could see that I was lighter, that it was easier for me to deal with whatever was coming at me. If anybody asked, I told them I was on medication. I was so happy and so grateful that I didn't care if people knew.After about 18 months, I talked to my doctor and we agreed I could stop taking the antidepressant. I never had an "aha!" moment. I just didn't feel I was drowning in every problem. Last September, Stella left for college. I was so anxious I was thinking, "Something's wrong with me. I think I need to go back on that medication." Once I realized it was separation anxiety, I was able to kick it in a couple of weeks. I was proud of myself.Today, I feel so blessed. I have two great kids. I'm working. I've got a great new guy in my life. Harvey and I are talking. Eddie's kids, my kids, we all speak to each other. But most of all, I'm happy in my own skin. Is it perfect skin? No. But it's mine.(photographer: eric ogden)

Ultimate DVD

Lorraine Bracco Shrink RapUltimate DVD looks inside the head of Dr Jennifer Melfi as we meet The Sopranos actress to talk about the greatest gangster show on DVD...IT'S A strange role reversal: for once Dr. Jennifer Melfi is here to talk, not to listen. Lorraine Bracco, the serene, rock solid therapist of Tony Soprano in The Sopranos. has flown in to discuss her five-year odyssey in David Chase's award-laden and critically adored HBO drama."It took me a few years, but I realized that Dr Melfi is David Chase," she says, tantalizingly. "That was an interesting awareness I had one day and I confronted him on it. I don't think he answered me."Bracco is 50 this year, naturally beautiful, and blessed with a distinctively husky voice that proves immediately endearing. She's been nominated three times for an Emmy for her role as Melfi, and four times for a Golden Globe—the sort of statistics that make one realize that the jury needs to come to its senses soon, and just hand over the gong.Yet it's clear that the actress is not in The Sopranos for the personal kudos: this is one of the best written shows on television, and Bracco has enjoyed bringing life to a character through the 65 episodes that have aired so far (the most recent, fifth season, is expected on DVD in the New Year).It could all have been very different. When Chase first began casting the series, centred on the North Jersey mob boss (James Gandolfini) and his dysfunctional family, he wanted Bracco to play Tony's wife Carmela. For Bracco, the role had similarities to Karen Hill, who she had played in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas."How do you top a movie with Martin Scorsese?" reasons Bracco. "I had got an Oscar nomination, huge recognition at the Golden Globes and huge accolades all over the world."When I met David and read the script of The Sopranos, I really loved the role of Dr Melfi. I felt that it was way different for me: I didn't know where it would go, or how it would go. David and I often talked that we felt it would be the weak link in the series, so to our great surprise it was a really good thing."Dr Melfi is the only levelling force in Tony's brutal, turbulent world. He comes to her as a family man, and a Family man, who is crumbling under the pressure—suffering from panic attacks and blackouts. A visit to a psychiatrist is the last thing a Mafioso would do, and a sign of inherent weakness, but Tony is unable to break with Melfi's influence on his life."Melfi is the moral through-line," defines the actress. "She's the only one that doesn't really cross those moral boundaries. I always wanted to say that the kids were kind of innocent, but I think they're aware of what he does now.
"I made Melfi complicated and one of the big things I made her was lonely. She was smart, she went to one of the great universities in America to become a psychiatrist, where you really have to be on the ball. She's married to her work, and that's unusual you never see women like that. I think people related to that."Early episodes revealed that Tony's feelings for Melfi were becoming more than professional, but Chase has avoided the route of creating a predictable romantic entanglement."Tony has enough lovers in my opinion," insists Bracco, "and if it did turn into anything other than doctor and patient then I'd have no job left! He gets rid of all of his women, he walks all over them, and I think this is the one person in his life who does not allow that to happen.

"There are huge boundaries in this relationship that he would not consider with anyone else. That's why it's a fascinating relationship for him, and even more fascinating for the viewer."["Melfi is the moral through-line. She's the only one that doesn't cross those moral boundaries"]It's a role that Bracco by turns discusses with mischievous humour but regards with complete seriousness.Certainly she is respectful of the profession of psychotherapy, and takes advice wherever necessary. And, in one of those great examples of the lines between art and fact blurring, Bracco was actually called to address an audience of real analysts after completing work on the third season, exploring the creation of the character. "I've been in therapy myself," she admits, "and I've been blessed with David Chase who's been in therapy for a long time, as have our other writers Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess. So we're all psychoanalysis friendly.""For a lot of the big medical words, HBO have been very nice to supply me with a very lovely medical library. I've been kind of educated: I will never talk to Tony without ever understanding what I'm talking about. We don't really have a psychiatrist to advise, but Robin's brother is the head of psychiatry at Dartmouth College. We call him when we need to know about how much medication to administer. So when I overdose him on Lithium, I can thank him for that!"What do medical professionals make of Dr Melfi? "They think it is terrific and portrayed very truthfully," she says, "even though some of them complain that my skirts are a little too short."

Dan's Magazine: HamptonStyle

the doctor is InLorraine Bracco, Emmy-nominated star of The Sopranos, finds her dream home in the HamptonsIF TONY SOPRANO NEEDS TO SEE his shrink any time soon, he'll need to hijack the Jitney. As of this summer, Dr. Jennifer Melfi—a.k.a—Lorraine Bracco has decided to move east and make the Hamptons home. With her fiftieth birthday on the horizon, Bracco is reflecting on where she has been and where she wants to go. As she tells it: "I've made a life decision. Every ten years I kind of evaluate and ask myself 'Where the hell am I. and do I like the path I'm on? Is this a good road and if it is not the perfect road, then I need to change it." True to her words, Bracco has put her house in Rockland County on the market and closes on new Bridgehampton digs this month. She hopes these recent shifts will help her to do more stargazing—and not the kind done in Hollywood.Despite Bracco's immense fame—starting with her performance in Someone to Watch Over Me to her Oscar nomination for Goodfellas—she is not the least bit pretentious.In fact, once you get to know her. it's not surprising that she loves to shop at Kmart in the Bridgehampton Commons (she says people invariably recognize her and are surprised to find her there). Rather, Bracco is genuinely the girl from Long Island she claims to be. "I'm a middle-class girl who has been very, very lucky. Her house, while beautifully landscaped and comfortably appointed, is simple by Hamptons standards. For the interview Bracco wore exercise leotards, a t-shirt and no make up, having just returned from Yoga class. Perhaps the girl who remains today is not so far off from the one born in Brooklyn and raised in Hicksville.A few things immediately become clear when spending rime with Bracco. First, that husky voice and Brooklyn accent are the real deal. Second, her two daughters are her top priority and are clearly her friends. Third, Bracco is not afraid to speak her mind. In fact, she says that her Sopranos character is a "big stretch" because Dr. Melfi is so introverted and is such a lonely woman. At the same time. Bracco identifies with Melfi's more nurturing aspects because she is a caretaker herself a role Bracco clearly relishes when it comes to her children. Stella (her daughter from her marriage to actor Harvey Keitel) is starting college in the fall. Bracco intends to bring her down to the campus in Florida and ask friends to keep an eye on her baby. Her older daughter. Margaux Guerard, works for the cosmetic company Bobbi Brown in global marketing and is considering business school (Bracco encouraged her to explore different options but personally favors Wharton). Even Bracco's decision to make the Hamptons her primary residence was motivated by her desire to spend time with her girls: "The kids are getting older and I want to be near them. I wanted a place the kids would enjoy coming to." Stella concurs: "We have a lot more fun out here than we did in Snedens Landing."While Bracco is taking some time to relax, she's far from retiring. Come The Sopranos. She would love to return to the big screen when the right role comes along, hoping that a director will want a real 50-year-old to play the part of a character that age. When asked why she thinks The Sopranos has such a cult like following, she credits David Chase with the show's success. "The writing is spectacular." she says. Bracco still gets excited by the series and cannot wait to receive and read every script. And the cast and crew are truly a family, with Chase the apparent consigliere (he was the creator, cast the series, and even chooses most of the music). When asked about a possible Sopranos Hamptons episode, she chuckles ironically: "That could be interesting Who could they shake down? NORSIC? Oh boy, there goes my garbage!"Bracco is clearly enjoying her new East End residence. She and Stella confess to having an almost "crack-like addiction to Razzano's homemade mozzarella, laughing in unison when talking about their dairy drug.

LORRAINE BRACCOS STYLE FILE
Restaurants East by Northeast, Alison's, Candy Kitchen | Shops Starbucks, Razzano's, Complements | Charities Denise Rich's GMP Foundation Beaches Sagg Main, Bridgehampton's, Main BeachMore intimately, she loves to spend the warm summer nights barbecuing and hanging out with close friends. As for the beach. Bracco favors Sagg Main but admits to encouraging a good friend recently to buy a house on the beach in Bridgehampton "for the free parking" she jests. While she recognizes that many Hollywood A-listers live out East, she rarely does the party circuit, and certainly does not view the Hamptons as a net-working opportunity. Stella says that she could only drag her mom to the polo marches for a few minutes: with the paparazzı buzzing, she missed most of the action anyway. Bracco will attend the other great Hamptons equine event this summer, the Hampton Classic, when she goes to cheer her daughter on (Stella has been riding for years). Her mother doesn't ride, and says she is even slightly frightened by the sport, joking: "I'm from Brooklyn. I don't really know anything about livestock!"Few may know that the actress began her career as a model in Europe. She lived in Paris from 1974 to 1984 and speaks fluent French. Perhaps her pursuit of modeling was payback to the kids she rode the school bus with who voted her the ugliest girl in the sixth grade. Bracco still remembers the incident, and how she cried to her father that she didn't want to return to school. Her success as a Wilhelmina model proves that the kids on the bus missed what the rest of the world saw. Ironically, it was her fellow models who then encouraged her to be an actress long before she pursued her thespian career. While in France, she enrolled in acting classes, and the bug bit hard.For the actress, the onset of her birthday has clearly put her in a contemplative frame of mind. While she doesn't begrudge anyone who goes under the knife, she says the whole nip and tuck thing is not for her. Yet she clearly identifies with a woman's desire (her "instinct", as she says) to look and feel good about her self—hence, her regular jaunts to Bikram Yoga. Bracco's am at self-improvement is not to please some Hollywood director, though, but rather herself. "I want to be attractive to me. I want to be fulfilled for me. I don't need to compete with the world."The reality is that Bracco has never called California home. By choosing the East Coast, she feels she may have missed some roles, but remains practical about it all. "What roles are meant to be mine will be mine," she says. That philosophy seems to have helped her to succeed. She has worked with the likes of Tom Berenger, Richard Donner (I adored him), Michael Keaton ("One of the funniest people you will ever meet"). Ray Liotta, and Leonardo DiCaprio to name just a few. And being directed by Martin Scorsese in Goodfellas, she says, was an absolute career highlight.Bracco is not immune to disappointment—perhaps that is what makes her so real. Currently single after two prioг marriages, she has tried to impart to her kids that self-reliance is important. "Prince Charming isn't out there," she says. At the same time, she is an optimist with no regrets. With an Emmy-nominated television role under her belt, a recently successful Broadway run as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, an enviable movie career, and two great daughters, life is good. Whether it's Brooklyn. Hicksville, Rockland County, or the Hamptons, there's no question that this lady loves New York. Fuggedaboutit! —MARLA WASSERMAN(photographer by patrick mcmullan)

Télé Poche

Lorraine Bracco
"My daughter's father is French"
Translation:
Between "Goodfellas" and "The Sopranos," Lorraine Bracco moves in the world of the mafia. She shared her love for France with us.How has Jennifer Melfi, the therapist you play in "The Sopranos," evolved? She's Tony Soprano's fantasy. Melfi is the only person he can't possess!

How did you work on this character?
I underwent analysis. David Chase, the creator of the series, did too. We very quickly grasped what we wanted to do with this woman. Seeing a therapist taught me to listen to others.How to explain the success of The Sopranos?
The quality of the scripts! The casting is important, but the dialogue is paramount.Could you share your life with a mobster?
No. That kind of man doesn't interest me! Mafiosi are thugs. I'm more a peaceful woman.What is your relationship with James Gandolfini?
He's an extraordinary actor, the Muhammad Ali of cinema. We're close. He fascinates me.

Your type of man?
I've had all sorts of men in my life: French, Americans, young, old... I have no complaints. My love life has been very rich. But I don't have any particular criteria.And this return to France?
I haven't been to France for nine years. Yet, I have an affection for this country. The father of my eldest daughter, Margaux, is French. I could live here without any problem.Margaux and Stella acted with you in Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas." Do they plan to continue down this path?
Not at all. I insisted they appear in "Goodfellas." The shoot was demanding, and the only opportunity to see them was on set.What memories do you have of your beginnings in "Commissaire Moulin" and "Duo sur Canapé"?
I only remember Yves Rénier. He was warm to me. As for "Duo sur Canapé," I had to learn my lines phonetically. The others were nice, but I was bored. I was terrible. —STÉPHANIE PIC

The Eye

CARRY ON DOCTOR
Actress Lorraine Bracco on getting inside Tony Soprano's head.The relationship between Dr. Melfi and Tony Soprano has become very interesting. Two people who do nothing but sit in chairs and talk: who would have thought that could have been great television?When we made the pilot I remember saying to Jimmy Gandolfini [who plays Tony] and David Chase [Creator and co-writer of The Sopranos] that either it's a weak link, this whole Melfi-Tony thing, or people will understand that there's this extra layer of the onion that we get to peel off.

My interaction with the rest of the cast is relatively minimal; I basically work only with Jimmy and we're very happy to go into that little cocoon and explore what's going on with him. Tony is used to getting his own way with anybody, anywhere. Women, children; business, personal. If he doesn't get it, he takes it. Melfi knows this, and that creates boundaries, which is fascinating.I've been in therapy so I knew what it was like to have a psychiatrist, and I had the great advantage of having a male one, so I understood how Tony and Melfi's dynamic works. We didn't want to make a mockery of therapy, we didn't want Melfi to become a sexed up psycho killer, join the Mob or any of those things. We really wanted it to be truthful.

Yes, it's heightened reality. I once asked David: "How does Tony pay Melfi?" Four scripts later, he's throwing money at her like she's a whore! I said: "Wait a minute, I didn't mean it that way!" But David said: "Well, that's the way Tony would look at it." We're not here to please all the psychiatrists in America—it's a TV show.An Italian heritage is important, although my mum was an English war bride so I'm probably one of the least Italian-American people on the show. David has cast a lot of people believing that they were Italian, even if they are Jewish! It just makes sense; that's what the show calls for. I was asked not to attend the Columbus Day Parade in New York because the organisers believe the Sopranos featured negative Italian-American stereotypes. It was very short-sighted on their part—I'm sorry they couldn't distinguish myself from my character. But most Italian-Americans understand it's there for entertainment—it's not there to say that if your last name is Bracco, you're part of the Mafia.The fifth season is terrific, Dr. Melfi has a lot more to do. Tony is a single man, which changes the dynamic—he does not come to her for marriage guidance! I'll tell you one thing: when they showed me the first episode at Radio City Music Hall with about 4,000 people, everyone was howling, screaming and yelling. After we finish shooting the sixth season next year, it'll all be over. Then I'm gonna need to see my own psychiatrist again. Maybe I could have a spin-off, have all these famous people come in and talk to Dr. Melfi. Woody Allen—boy, he's got demons—or President Clinton, he might have to come back several times. —ED POTTON

TV Choice

What's up Doc?Tony Soprano originally went to Dr Jennifer Melfi to sort his head out. But then she really began to play on his mind!The dysfunctional mobster, played by James Gandolfini, starts the new series of The Sopranos newly single after splitting up with wife Carmela. He has decided his psychiatrist is his soul mate, and pulls out all the stops to woo her.Lorraine Bracco, who plays the delectable Dr. Melfi, says Tony is fascinated by a powerful woman. "She's as strong as he'll ever be and I think he's attracted to her because she's so much smarter than him," she says."We've been very careful how we show therapy, so I don't think it would be right for them to act on their attraction for each other. I think it would be a kind of deception for the viewers."While Tony spends the first episode relentlessly pursuing the object of his affection, Dr. Melfi is busy sidestepping his pleas for a date and snubbing his romantic gestures. But it's a different story behind closed doors, where she has raunchy dreams about her middle-aged Mafioso client."It's a good thing for people to see this big burly man going for therapy. And I love the idea that she has fantasies about him that she never plays out," says Lorraine.But while Tony and Dr. Melfi wrestle with their feelings for each other, there's more trouble brewing, as some notorious old-time Mob guys are released from jail. Tony can't understand why his newly freed favourite cousin, Tony Blundetto (played by occasional Sopranos guest director Steve Buscemi), wants to go straight when he could re-join the family business.But the New Jersey Mob boss could learn all about life behind bars, as the FBI redouble their efforts to get him. That means extra pressure on Adriana—the fiancée of his wayward nephew Christopher—who's still under pressure to inform on Tony and his cronies to the Feds.Lorraine—the star of feature films such as Goodfellas and Medicine Man—believes The Sopranos rates alongside her big-screen work. "The series is extraordinarily well written, acted and filmed. It's actually better than most movies!" —JENNY EDEN

The Herald

ON THE COUCH WITH LORRAINE BRACCO
There has been a lot written about your character Dr Melfi, the therapist of mobster Tony Soprano. What are your thoughts on her?
"Dr Melfi is fascinating. She is not a typical movie or TV character, and the relationship between her and Tony is fascinating. We never knew it was going to develop like that. We thought the Melfi-Tony thing might be the weak link. We weren't sure about it at all."How much input do you have into the character?
"You know, she is written so well, and David Chase does most of the writing for Melfi. There are sometimes things that I question or ask him about, and ask him to make it deeper, but most of the time she is written very tight."Early in the new series, Tony finally asks Melfi out. Can you tell us about that?
"The whole thing comes to the fore when she is faced with that. She tells him, 'I could never live like that. I could never be like you.' When she stands up for herself, he's totally furious with her. He's a man who was used to getting what he wants, but she stands her ground. I was really proud of her."There is a school of thought that although The Sopranos is ostensibly about this macho world of gangsters, at heart it is about the female characters, and it portrays women's stories in a very complex and real way. What's your take on that?
"Absolutely. You're 100 per cent correct. David Chase has been one of the American authors of our generation, and has put women at the forefront of an incredible drama story. That emphasis is deliberate. David loves women, he sees their faults and their setbacks and all they go through. Women see themselves in Melfi or Carmela or Meadow."

Conversely, the programme has been accused of being misogynistic. That's partly to do with some of the language, partly to do with scenes like Melfi's rape.
"We had a couple of things back to back that were very violent against women. One was Melfi's rape. The other was when Joey Pants kills the young stripper. I thought that was very, very disturbing. But David shows violence for what it is: a despicable act against another human being. He's not slowing it up and putting fabulous music behind it. I think it's quite realistic, and when you show violence for what it is, it's a huge deterrent."How did you find filming the rape scene?
"Very difficult. It was ugly. And I think the crew was very affected by it. The actor that they chose to play the rapist, he's really a New York City fireman, and at one point he stopped and started crying. He said, 'I save people for a living. I would never hurt anybody. So it kind of got to him too."Tony's original issues with his mother Livia bear some relation to issues David Chase had with his own mother. So when you are acting out those scenes of analysis, how aware are you that you are exploring Chase's own psyche? "David is 100 percent aware of what he is doing with that. It's fascinating. For a very long time, David always came to watch the filming of the Tony-Melfi scenes."Why is he so invested in your character?
"It took me a long time to figure out, but then I realised—Jennifer Melfi is David Chase. It's just knowing David and his personality and the way that he deals with everyone. He's an intellectual. He's different. And Melfi's different. Melfi doesn't belong. David's a little misfit like that too. I asked him about it, but he never really answered me, which is why I think I was really right on."I know you've had some therapy yourself. How much of that do you bring to the part?
"A lot. I bring in the relationship that I had with that doctor. It was a positive experience."You've become a bit of a pin-up for psychiatrists, haven't you? "Aren't I lucky? Yes, I think that's because it's been portrayed in a decent, respectful manner."What sort of impact do you think The Sopranos has had on the public view of therapy?
"It has been incredible for therapy. It has taken away a huge stigma of what psychotherapy is all about. It shows that people under a huge amount of strain can go to talk to somebody about it. You're not going because you're losing your mind. From what I understand from the psychoanalytical community, a lot more men are going.The Sopranos was originally only supposed to run for four series and now it's going to be six. It's getting too big to keep in your head all at once, isn't it?
"It's unbelievable. I have to say that I'm a fan of it myself, the show. Sometime around the third series I decided to watch it, nine o'clock, Sunday night, like everybody else. Because there's so much chatter the next day that if you've not seen it you're a loser. I would drive my kids to school and they would be talking about it on the radio and I'd be like 'Omigod! I missed it!' So I've been kind of forced to get into The Sopranos groove."Maybe when The Sopranos finishes you could get a spin-off like Frasier.
"A Melfi spin-off? That could be fun. I'd like to speak to all the heads of the world for an hour on HBO. Have them lie down on the couch." —PETER ROSS & MICHAEL CLIFFORD

Night & Day

What broke the tension was when I was on top of James [Gandolfini] and he said, 'My God, I've been waiting to see those for six years!'

In real life she has a toy-boy lover, while on screen she's the shrink finding love with Tony Soprano. Jenny Eden talks to Lorraine Bracco, TV's sexiest 50-year-old.It's TV's most unlikely will-they-won't-they romance—tough-talking, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later gangster Tony Soprano and his cool, calm and confident psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. For years, Tony has lusted after his designer-suited shrink, but the start of the new series of The Sopranos sees him deciding to date the doctor. And he's not the kind of man to take 'no' for an answer.While he may not be, on paper, the man of Melfi's dreams, he is turning into the subject of her nocturnal fantasies. Which meant that Lorraine Bracco, who plays Melfi, eventually had to conquer her own fears and strip off for a love scene with actor James Gandolfini. The scene is softly lit but, with The Sopranos' usual delight in shocking, it's pretty raunchy.But first Bracco wants to argue over the word 'raunchy'. 'Raunchy? I thought it was very good,' she snaps in her throaty New York accent, on the point of taking offence. After explaining that being raunchy is not necessarily a bad thing, she settles down to talk.'Thank God for James,' she says. 'I was really nervous doing the scene, but he's used to hopping into the sack on the show. What really broke the tension was when I was on top and he said, "Oh my God, I've been waiting to see those for six years!" After that it was fine.'

After starring on Broadway as the seductive Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, Bracco should be blasé about taking her clothes off in public, but she admits that filming the sex scene in The Sopranos was a very different experience.'When I was on stage I had the most gorgeous lighting—my mum and dad would have looked good naked in that light,' she says. 'And it didn't involve touching or kissing. The scene with Jimmy was a little more intimate.'The TV scene was also a big deal for her youngest daughter, 18-year-old Stella (from her marriage to Harvey Keitel), who suddenly realised that all her school friends had seen her mother naked.'Stella doesn't watch The Sopranos, but she hears about it from her friends at school,' says Bracco. 'She said, "What happened last night? Were you really naked?" But she says all her friends think I'm a hot mum."Stella's friends aren't the only ones to think Bracco is hot. Relaxing in a London hotel wearing a fuchsia pink, hooded velour top and trousers, she looks a good ten years younger than she is. Even though she's turning 50 in October, she's inundated with cheesy chat-up lines asking for 'time on her couch' or a 'session with the doctor'. After three failed marriages she is currently dating a 29-year-old called Jason and is being introduced to the intricacies of rap music by her toy-boy lover. 'I haven't got a clue about rappers but I'm learning; but he'd never heard of Johnny Carson,' She says.

'I call 50 the F-word, just for fun,' she says. 'But I'm in a really good place. I have two good kids, a good career, a lovely house, lovely friends and life is good. I am still working, people are still sending scripts. I can't complain.'It's a laid-back approach to life that has come with age. Bracco almost missed her big break because she didn't want to leave her home in Long Island. Despite being voted 'ugliest girl' in the sixth grade by her classmates, she got work with New York modelling agencies when she was still at school. And though her look wasn't quite right for the US, it was perfect for Paris, and her agency advised her to try Europe.It led her into a glittering new world that was completely different to her life growing up with her Italian-American father and her English war-bride mother. She became a Seventies supermodel, shooting adverts, working for Jean-Paul Gaultier and hanging out with Grace Jones. Paris was also the scene of a whirlwind romance and marriage to Frenchman Daniel Guerard, which resulted in the birth of her eldest daughter, Margaux, now 25.But Bracco grew tired of being tied down and they split, leaving her at 25 with a baby and a shortage of jobs to support them. She became a DJ for Radio Luxembourg and started getting small acting roles. Then she met Harvey Keitel and moved back to New York to marry him and have Stella. Their marriage ended in acrimonious divorce. She then had a third marriage to Miami Vice star Edward James Olmos, which also ended in divorce in 2002.But despite the bitterness at the end of their relationship, it was Keitel who helped her find the confidence to take up acting. She got a string of movie roles, then her portrayal as a mobster's wife in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas earned her an Oscar nomination and put her on the Hollywood map. It also helped her get into The Sopranos. The series' creator, David Chase, was a fan of the film and decided he wanted her for his new show. She and Chase both shared experience of therapy and that helped shape the character of Dr. Melfi.Bracco admits that she turned to therapy at one of the lowest points in her life, and that it gave her an extra insight when she was asked to play the psychiatrist in the show.'It meant I could bring a seriousness to the role,' she says. 'James had never experienced therapy so he was clueless. I kind of held his hand through it when we were doing scenes.'I think therapy is a great thing. I got to make peace with my own demons and realise when they start to come up in me. Now I know how to deal with them.' —JENNY EDEN(photographer: firooz zahedi)

Total TV

In her role as Tony Soprano's shrink, Lorraine Bracco has made therapy sexy.
As the series returns, are we about to see Dr. Melfi succumb to the dubious charms of the big man?She drives him crazy
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Lorraine Bracco has got used to men begging her for sessions on the couch since she joined The Sopranos. And she believes that her storyline has enabled more men to ask for help when they need it."What the Tony and Dr Melfi relationship has accomplished, in a funny way, is to take away the stigma of going to see psychiatrists," says the 49-year-old star. "Here's this big, burly man going into therapy because he kept fainting and having these panic attacks. We show that it's okay to ask for help, and I think that's a very positive aspect of the show.It's good to explore the mind—why go through life with the blinds down when you can have colour techno vision? You know how many psychiatrists come up to me and go, 'You're doing a terrific job with Tony'? It's a howl!"The new series, which begins on E4 this week and C4 next week, starts with Dr. Jennifer Melfi at the centre of the storyline. Tony decides that a date with the delicious doc could solve all his problems and starts to pursue her doggedly. She resists his not-so-subtle attempts to woo her, but she does romp with her macho client albeit in a sexy dream sequence.But Lorraine confesses she's keeping her fingers crossed that the romance never happens for real."If she acts out her attraction to Tony, I won't have a job any more and I'll be a very unhappy girl," she remarks. "She's just as strong as him and I think he's attracted to her because she's so much smarter—but I don't think it would be right for her to act on it. I think there's something quite fabulous about someone who has sexual fantasies and doesn't do anything about them."
With her distinctive throaty New York chuckle, Brooklyn-born Lorraine was always destined for a place in Mob dramas. Her big break came as Mafia wife Karen Hill in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, which earned her an Oscar nomination. But she started off as a model, jetting around Europe in the Seventies.After her first daughter was born, she took a job as a DJ on Radio Luxembourg to make ends meet, then returned to New York for acting lessons. "When I was living in Paris, I was clueless," she admits. "I used to hang out with Grace Jones who was modelling as well—she knew what she wanted and fought to make it happen. I was envious because I never had that drive. I think to make it you have to have a fire inside your belly that you can't put out."Today, Lorraine's amazing bone structure is still apparent, even though she's on the verge of her 50th birthday. A mother of two daughters, she looks 10 years younger, even with virtually no make-up. Yoga keeps her trim and, last year, she felt confident enough to strip off every night on stage in The Graduate in New York."I think men and women of 50 have a lot to offer," she says, with a wicked twinkle in her eye. With marriages to Reservoir Dogs actor Harvey Keitel and Miami Vice's Edward James Olmos behind her, Lorraine is now dating a 29-year-old."I'm calling 50 'the F-word'" as a joke, but it doesn't really bother me because I'm in a really good place. I love where I am right now in my life: I have two kids; a good career with a juicy role that's incredibly well written; and good friends. I feel like I'm coming into my own at last."
—JENNY EDEN

Interview

LORRAINE BRACCO BY JAMES GANDOLFINI
THE CULT ACTRESS AND HER DON FACE OFF IN A WAY YOU'VE NEVER SEEN ON TVOh, how the tables have turned. Lorraine Bracco and James Gandolfini usually square off on the set of HBO's smash series The Sopranos, with Bracco's Dr. Melfi giving Gandolfini's godfather the Freudian ride of his life. But with the show on hiatus (it's about to start shooting its fifth and perhaps final season in a few weeks) and Bracco about to wrap her first run on Broadway, playing Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (talk about Freudian!), we asked Gandolfini to pose the questions about the highs and lows of live theater, the wonders of stage lighting, and the possible end of The Sopranos.LORRAINE BRACCO: Hello. [laughs]JAMES GANDOLFINI: That goofy laugh. Hello, Bracco! What's going on?LB: Oh, nothing. Tired.JG: Because of The Graduate?LB: Oy! What was I thinking? I'm an old fucking bag. [both laugh] It's a lot harder than I thought.JG: It's brutal, isn't it?LB: It's hard to keep it alive moment-to-moment, you know? But there's another part of it that I really love, which is that you never know.JG: Well, that's for sure. It's physically demanding, isn't it? Two hours of concentration is a lot different from the two minutes we do [on The Sopranos].LB: Big difference. And I'll tell you, between the kid [John Lavelle, who plays Benjamin], who is 21, and me I'm 48 years old it's a hell of a difference. I mean, I'm not complaining when I'm romping in the bed with him

JG: [laughs] Is he a cute kid?LB: Cute kid.JG: Does he have any back hair?

LB: No.JG: Good. You know, every time I did a play I felt energized at the end of the show. At the end of a day of filming you're sapped of everything, but after a show I always felt alive. I don't know why that is. I think it's the live audience.LB: Right. After a show I can't go to sleep until one or two o'clock in the morning, and as you know I've always been a morning person. So now my whole physical and mental life is different. It's weird. But it's only for a few months—by the time this issue comes out I'll only have a few weeks left.JG: What's it like being naked onstage? Are you used to it at this point?LB: Yes, totally. And you know what? I thought I was going to be a lot more freaked out by it. I think on film I would have been more freaked out, because film is less forgiving.JG: Yeah, that's probably true.LB: But onstage it's lit so beautifully. It would make my mother look good. [both laugh]JG: Tell me more. Were you nervous the first time you did the show?LB: I was jumping out of my skin. It was horrible. I was all over the place, because I'd never been in front of a live audience. That's a whole other element in the play, the audience.JG: Yeah. It changes according to what they're giving you.LB: Absolutely. When they're rolling in the aisles it's a lot of fun, but when they're tired and bored and not into it—which does happen—it makes me sad that they spent all that money, and the energy to even get there.JG: I think it's a collective thing. If one person starts laughing it can change everything.LB: Sometimes there's one person in the audience laughing hysterically, and it's so much fun. You end up playing the entire play to them.JG: Have you ever started laughing and couldn't stop?LB: I've started to laugh, but I was able to stop. I'm proud of myself that I have any control at all. [laughs] There are a couple of times when Benjamin calls me a bitch, and it makes me want to laugh. Or when we're in bed—I'm hysterical under the sheets.JG: Oh, really? When I was in A Streetcar Named Desire [on Broadway in the early '90s], something happened one night during the last scene—you know, when they're carting Blanche off to the insane asylum. I was one of the poker players, and I was sitting at the table, and Lázaro Pérez and I could not stop laughing, man. And, you know, it's a horrible scene. I just put my head in my hands, and I put my face down on the table, trying not to laugh. I was basically crying.LB: Yet you were laughing. I don't think you know this, but that play was the first time I ever saw you. I remember looking up your name—JG:—And saying. "Who's the fat guy going up the stairs?"LB: I said, "I think that's an incredible actor."JG: Well, thank you. That's very nice of you. So, what's a typical day like for you?LB: I sleep till 11, 12, and at five they pick me up. I've been doing yoga every day.JG: You're kidding me. Everybody's doing that now.LB: It's not really my kind of personality, yoga, but we do a half hour and I'm totally relaxed. I've been working out, so I feel big, good, and strong. The only bad thing is that I've been smoking cigarettes.JG: Well, you smoke in the play, don't you?LB: Yeah. So I've limited myself to smoking only in the theater.JG: Have you talked to David [Chase, The Sopranos' creator] at all?LB: I saw him not too long ago. We had dinner.JG: Really? What did he say? Anything?LB: He was good. He seems good.IG: That's it?LB: Yeah. We didn't get into the whole Soprano life.JG: I don't know what's going on. I haven't talked to the man in months.LB: Well, we start shooting March 26. He'd better be writing.JG: So, you also have two movies coming up. Why are you working so much?LB: I did one week on a low-budget movie [Max and Grace, expected later this year] with Natasha Lyonne and David Krumholtz.JG: And Tangled. What's Tangled?LB: Oh, I did that 50 years ago. I don't even remember. What have you been doing?JG: I'm doing this little independent movie [Until the Devil Knows You're Dead], to warm up for our last and final debacle.LB: You think that's it? No Sopranos movie?JG: I don't know. It depends. If David Chase, while he's relaxing in France, spends all his money on cheese, maybe we'll do a movie.LB: Or pâté. You know, last season I didn't do anything [on the show], so I was frustrated. I mean, don't get me wrong: It's nice to get a paycheck. But if you don't really do anything it's not very satisfying.JG: Well, we'll see what happens next year.LB: I have a feeling I'll have my work cut out.JG: Yeah. You've only got one more year to really fucking hammer me. [both laugh] Well, I'm proud of you for doing this play and for everything. So, have you learned anything?LB: I've learned a lot.JG: Not to do a play again?LB: No. I learned that I have the courage to do it. At times I didn't think I was going to make it. I learned that I could endure. —JAMES GANDOLFINI(photographer: len prince)

Newsweek

Meet Mrs. RobinsonLorraine Bracco's the latest 'Soprano' to try BroadwayLOOKING FOR AN EXTRA FIX OF "The Sopranos"? This fall, the cast is all over the New York theater: Edie Falco ("Frankie and Johnny"), Jamie-Lynn Sigler ("Beauty and the Beast"), John Ventimiglia and Dominic Chianese ("The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui"). Next week it's Lorraine Bracco's turn, as she steps into Mrs. Robinson's stilettos in "The Graduate" on Broadway. Bracco talked to NEWSWEEK'S Mare Peyser about her new stage career, her little TV show and what she tells New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg when they do lunch:PEYSER: This is your Broadway debut. Why put yourself out there now?BRACCO: I'm always looking for things to challenge me, and since I sing in Billy Joel's key, my musical career is out. I feel like it's getting a Ph.D. in acting. It's something I've really never done before.It's one thing to challenge yourself. It's another to do a play with a nude scene.
The lighting is the trick in anything, don't you know that?So you don't prepare? No crash diets?
No crash diets. I am what I am. Anyway, the nude scene is quick. I hope people don't blink.You "Sopranos" stars could almost start your own acting troupe.
Isn't that cute? We can only do it until February. That's when we go back to "The Sopranis."

Sopranis? Is that some Italian plural thing?
That's our term of endearment for "Sopranos."Do you all go see each other perform?
I've seen Edie. Thought she was terrific.She's nude too!
Very.I imagine you had an easy time scoring tickets to the Pacino play, "Arturo Ui."
I saw my boys, John Ventimiglia and Dominic Chianese. I actually had two extra tickets that John gave me. I couldn't get rid of them. I called up 25 people I knew. So we gave them to somebody outside.Please don't tell me Uncle Junior is naked.
No, but he's a gorgeous-looking man. Most men should be like Dominic.Really?
Are you kidding? The guy's a lady-killer. He's been married four or five times.Speaking of lady-killers, you're pals with Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
I've known him for a couple of years. We ended up consistently sitting next to each other at dinners. Every time I'd see him he'd say, "Oh, it's you again." That was before he was mayor. When he decided to run, I would say, "What are you going to do about this, and what are you going to do about that?" He would say, "Calm down." I would say, "Look, I'm a concerned citizen and I have opinions," and he was like, "Really. I didn't notice that, Lorraine."You should run for office.
I couldn't. I'm too tired. But I do have strong opinions. I think that's why Mike likes me.Why are you so tired? Your Dr. Melfi doesn't have much to do on "The Sopranos" lately.It's not a big Melfi season. I hear next year they're making it up. I've been warned.Do fans confuse you with her?
Guys come up and say, "I need some help." They're just trying to pick me up.What do you tell them?
I say I'm way too busy. And I tell them to call Dr. Phil.—MARE PEYSER

Marie Claire

PEACE ON EARTH CAMPAIGN
Lorraine Bracco
Actress, The Sopranos
"We need to put every dollar, every ounce of energy, into education. It's the key to finding success, peace, and hope."

Rosie

"All right, I'll use glue.
I'm good at this stuff, but you don't want to believe me."
—Lorraine BraccoRO: Lorraine, on the show you're Tony's therapist, but real life, you're supposed to be crafty. I think I'm craftier than you, though. A lot of people feel that way.Lorraine Bracco: There's no way!RO: I think you better step up to crafting, Miss Bracco. There's some competition.LB: There's no way!RO: When Lorraine sees my new craft room in my house, five minutes from hers...LB: Well, that I'm gonna cry when I see.RO: ...there's going to be intense jealousy and rage.LB: No, no, I'm sure. That I'm sure. But when you see my crafts...RO: ... or your garden. I'll give you the green thumb. I'll give you the garden thing. Craftiness—I tell you, I think I'm gonna kick your butt here.LB: Excuse me!?RO: You know what my latest decoupage thing is?

LB: What?RO: It has layers and layers. It has doughnuts and Koosh balls.LB: All right, I'll use glue. I'm good at stuff like this. You don't want to believe me, but it's true.RO: [singing] "Look at me."LB: Donny Osmond. I have to admit that you are very good at that. You know every song—it's unbelievable.RO: When I saw Rain Man, I thought, "I have that problem." I thought, "Finally I understand what's wrong with me, because it's not normal to be able to know what I know."Photographer: Get closer.RO: There is only so close you can get while decoupaging correctly. Unlike Lorraine, who doesn't really know how to do it.LB: [laughing] Oooohh!RO: [singing] "Come on, Lorraine, oh, I swear..." We're crafty. We're craftier than yoooouuuuu, Martha Stewart.LB: Oh, I saw you on the cover of your magazine with Martha. We look like Charlie's Angels...RO: …with a glue gun.(photographer: robert trachtenberg)

[Full publication (with all the other Sopranos women) will be in the Sopranos publication section.]

Radio Times

Tough times for Sopranos shrink
DRAMA
Lorraine Bracco may have missed out again at the Emmys, but her analyst character has far more serious battles on her hands.If the pundits were to be believed, Lorraine Bracco had the Emmy for best actress in the bag. But it was not to be—for the third successive year, she lost out, this time to Sopranos co-star Edie Falco, who plays Carmela. Was this a case of right show, wrong actress? Judge for yourself as Bracco turns in a performance as therapist Dr. Jennifer Melfi that won plaudits if not awards in a harrowing episode this week on Channel 4.

Be warned: Thursday's episode of the Mob series is strong stuff—"one of the more brutal sequence ever shown on television," according to one US critic. Bracco's character Melfi is the victim of a violent rape and, as regular viewers know, the series does not flinch in its depiction of such scenes."I'm absolutely elated we show violence for what it is," says Bracco. "When someone shoots another person, it's ridiculous not to see how horrible that is. People should absolutely be turned off."Well planned though the scene was, it was so rough that Bracco tore a ligament in her shoulder during filming. "At one point I became really angry. Instead of making believe I was fighting my attacker, I really fought him."

On screen, the attack's repercussions will sound through this series and the next. When the police fail to bring Melfi's attacker to court, she resists temptation to call on Tony Soprano's dark power to gain retribution. It is a pivotal moral dilemma, for Melfi is educated, respectable, professional—everything that Soprano and his clan are not.For New Yorker Bracco, 46, the role is not a million miles from her own background as daughter of British war bride and Italian-American. "Melfi's like the flip side of the other Italian-American women [in the series]," says Bracco. "She's educated and smart and very nurturing and giving."Perhaps she's also contrasting Melfi with her Oscar-nominated role as the wife of a Mafia turncoat in the 1990 film Goodfellas.Personal turmoil prevented her from capitalising on that success as she fought a bitter legal battle with actor Harvey Keitel over their daughter, Stella, now 16. She won, but the cost of the breakup was more than emotional: Bracco was bankrupted in 1999.She pitched to play Melfi after refusing the offer of the part of Carmela. Bracco, though, is chalk to her formaggio. "I'm very spontaneous, very loud, rowdy—and Melfi's not. She's conservative, understated. I have to hold everything back." That may be worth an award in itself. —GEOFF ELLIS

Star

Lorraine Bracco ★ Mama mia!Translation: The daughter of a fishmonger in Fulton Market, New York, Lorraine Bracco already displayed in her teens, the determination, grit, and tenacity that would serve her so well later.
Ridiculed at 13 by her classmates at Long Island High School, who voted her the ugliest girl in the class, she made a bet that she would one day have an international modeling career. At 17, she left New York for Paris, joined the prestigious Wilhelmina agency, and walked in shows for Thierry Mugler, Paco Rabanne, and especially Jean Paul Gaultier.She became a highly sought-after top model, but her fame never extended beyond France. At the same time, her talents as an actress, disc jockey, and radio host at Radio Luxembourg were flourishing She made a tentative film debut in 1979 alongside Marina Vlady and Michel Galabru in Duos sur canapé, then appeared in two other decidedly French comedies, Mais qu'est-ce que j'ai fait au bon Dieu pour avoir une femme qui boit dans les cafés avec les hommes? and Fais gaffe à la gaffe, both filmed in 1980.

In 1982, after spending ten years in France, she returned to New York, studied acting at the Actors Studio and with Uta Hagen, and met actor Harvey Keitel, with whom she quickly became romantically involved. Seven years passed before she returned to the screen. She made a successful comeback playing Tom Berenger's wife in the thriller Someone to Watch Over Me, starring Mimi Rogers. She portrayed a middle-class woman who wasn't easily intimidated. She's essentially the same type of character found in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, her best film to date, in the role of Ray Liotta's wife; she's sharp-tongued, quick-witted, and has a biting retort. Her performance earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1990, which was ultimately won by Whoopi Goldberg for her performance in Ghost.The roles Lorraine played in films between Someone to Watch Over Me and Goodfellas were strictly for financial gain, with the possible exception of her role in Sea of Love (whose real stars were Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin). In supreme humiliation, her performance was cut from the final edit but reinstated for the film's television presentations. In 1992, she held her own against Sean Connery in Medicine Man, but the film, which received poor reviews, was a financial flop.With the role of prosecutor Diane Giacalone, who sends the godfather of godfathers to prison in the television film Getting Gotti (1994), she returned to her persona as a victorious fighter and fiercely indomitable woman. Five years would pass before she portrayed psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi in the series The Sopranos, a role that has brought her considerable fame and popularity today.Against all the characters she has been used for in the past, she demonstrates the breadth of her talent with this role and convinces us that she can play sensitive, intelligent, and fragile women just as well as tenacious, determined, and vindictive professionals.In film, she will soon be seen in Riding in Cars with Boys, where she will play the mother of Drew Barrymore's character.Born on October 2, 1954, Lorraine, a trilingual Italian, is the older sister of actress Elizabeth Bracco (The First Wives Club). She has two daughters, Margaux, born in 1979 (from her marriage to a French hairdresser), and Stella, born in 1987, whose father is Harvey Keitel. Lorraine's custody battle with Keitel over Stella led to her personal bankruptcy on June 11, 1999. She is divorced from actor Edward James Olmos, whom she married in 1993.

Newsweek

[Full publication will be in the Sopranos publication section.]

(photographer: nigel parry)

Rolling Stone

[Full publication will be in the Sopranos publication section.]

(photographer: mark seliger)

George

IF I WERE PRESIDENT
LORRAINE BRACCO
Sopranos shrink and Gore fan Lorraine Bracco takes up residence in the White House, redecorates the halls with Modiglianis, tends to the gardens, and soothes her fragile neuroses with rose-petal baths.WHY SHOULD WE ELECT YOU?
Cop, lawyer, housewife, mob wife, shrink... president should be easy!WHAT WOULD BE YOUR CAMPAIGN SLOGAN?
Tell it like it is.HOW WOULD YOU RAISE MONEY FOR YOUR CAMPAIGN?
I'd have to ask my bankruptcy lawyer.WHICH ACTIVITY WOULD PRESENT THE GREATEST CHALLENGE TO YOUR SPIN DOCTORS?
My ability to tell it like it is.HOW MUCH PERSONAL INFORMATION DO VOTERS HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW ABOUT YOU?
Whatever they want to know, because I am what I am.

WHAT'S THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IN THE WORLD? HOW WOULD YOU FIX IT?
Violence against others. Twenty-five years for murder. No parole.WHOM WOULD YOU APPOINT TO YOUR CABINET?
Shirley MacLaine, Andy Rooney, and my dad, who instilled in me his love of this country.WHO WOULD BE YOUR SPIRITUAL ADVISOR?
Edward James Olmos.WHAT WOULD BE YOUR FIRST ACT AS PRESIDENT?
I would replace all the presidents' portraits with Matisses, Picassos, and Modiglianis.WHAT PERSON, LIVING OR DEAD, WOULD YOU MODEL YOURSELF AFTER AS THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD?
Eleanor Roosevelt.WHAT BOOKS WOULD BE REQUIRED WHITE HOUSE READING?
The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller. The Art of War, by Sun-TzuWHOM WOULD YOU PARDON?
Not Nixon, Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, or Chapman.WHAT WOULD YOU OUTLAW?
Homelessness and hunger.WHAT WOULD YOU VETO EVERY TIME IT HIT YOUR DESK?
Anything pro-NRA, and oral sex in the Oval Office.WHAT WOULD BE YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENTIAL PERK?
No traffic.WHAT THREE OBJECTS MUST YOU HAVE IN THE OVAL OFFICE?
The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and, oh, Good & Plentys.WHO WOULD GET AN INVITATION TO STAY IN THE LINCOLN BEDROOM?
Family and friends only.HOW WOULD YOU UNWIND FROM THE PRESSURES OF THE JOB?
Tend to the Rose Garden, then take a rose-petal bath.NAME THE MOVIE BASED ON YOUR PRESIDENCY.
I'll Cry Tomorrow.(photographer: timothy white)

The Sopranos Family History S2

Selected film credits include:
- The Basketball Diaries
- Medicine Man
- Radio Flyer
- Goodfellas
- Someone to Watch Over Me

Dr. Jennifer Melfi Lorraine BraccoLorraine Bracco grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island. Her father, she explains, was "a bit of a character" and worked in the Fulton Fish Market, where there were (and are) plenty of wiseguys floating around. She became a fashion model after moving to France in 1974. Her most prominent film role to date for which she won an Academy Award nomination, is the role of Karen Hill, wife to notorious wiseguy-turned-rat, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas.

"I've always thought that Dr. Melfi is the moral through-line of The Sopranos. He (Tony) comes to her and he talks about how he's feeling and what his life is, and since she isn't part of that life, she is always that point in his moral never-never land. I've made Melfi very lonely and I want her to stay there until something happens for her or to her... I think today, in film and television, you don't really see that, a fairly good-looking woman who is lonely, and I can tell you, there are millions of women like that out there."(Because of this show), I'm much more aware of being an Italian-American, for the good and the bad of it. I'm surprised at a lot of people's reaction to it, the whole defamation of character thing. I went into a delicatessen the other day and the guy turned around to me and said, 'I hate that show. I liked it until the last show where they killed Pussy,' but now he thinks it's terrible and will never watch it again. I want to go, 'Guys, it's only a @?*&!#* TV show!'"I think (with Tony) it's that whole I'm-not-available thing. I believe it's one of the great reasons it works... one, I am his equal, I'm as powerful as he is, and two, besides the sexuality, he's so attracted to her because she's so much smarter than him, and knowledge is seductive..."

[Full publication will be in the Sopranos publication section.]

Harper's BAZAAR

RANCH DRESSINGFor her new film "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." Lorraine Bracco gets geared up by maverick costume designer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor. By Diana Rico. Photographed by Peter Lindbergh.
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Pasztor, the sultana of surplus, creates exotic costumes out of two-dollar clothes.Don't expect to see cowgirls decked out like Dale Evans-modest knee-brushing fringed leather skirts, starched pearl-buttoned shirts with embroidered yokes in the upcoming Uma Thurman—Lorraine Bracco movie Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. "We think of a certain look when we think of cowgirls. But in every film I do, I try to go against the stereotype," declares costume designer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor, who at 35 is building a solid reputation for herself costuming such quirky, character-driven films as Drugstore Cowboy, The Fisher King, My Own Private Idaho, and American Heart.For Gus Van Sant's screen version of Tom Robbins' novel, the Hungarian-born Pasztor combined rough, functional cowhand clothes worn leather chaps and boots, funky ten—gallon hats—with exotic, sexy, sometimes fragile pieces from thrift shops, vintage stores, and auctions in and around Portland, OR, where the film was shot. "My assistant and I handpicked every item," says the cheerful, chestnut-haired Pasztor, who looks both gangly and stylish wearing cropped burgundy palazzo pants and no makeup save for a slash of scarlet across her lips.Call Pasztor the viscountess of vintage, the sultana of sur-plus. No article of clothing in Cowgirls cost more than $100—"and that's really stretching hard," she says, laughing. "Most were $2. Surplus stores are my favorite. Those clothes are always made for a good reason, and they're really well cut because they have to fit. I use good pieces from surplus stores over and over, for costumes and even for myself."Pasztor's costumes possess a flair and a richness of detail rarely seen outside of historical dramas. She has a keen eye for unusual combinations of textures, colors, styles, and shapes—a talent most obviously displayed in her costumes for Bracco's character, Delores del Ruby, a "big, tough circus mama" who incites a cowgirl revolution on the Rubber Rose Ranch. A pair of old leather spats spread open and laced together became a kinky bustier for Bracco, worn over a long 1930s black velvet coat and topped with a Cossack style hat; a shocking-pink feather-trimmed sweater clashed wonderfully with a velvet skirt the color of poppies; and a brocaded swing jacket with touches of gold lamé spruced up a pair of thick sheepskin chaps. "Lorraine was wonderful," recalls Pasztor. "We had kept some of the most interesting pieces for her. She arrived in the forest where we were shooting outside of Bend, OR, and just started taking off her clothes and trying things on. These really unusual pieces would just melt on her."

Although her costumes are often fanciful, Pasztor's work is solidly grounded in her background in art and theater, which she studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest. While in college she worked professionally as a theatrical costume designer, doing "everything from Shakespeare to modern plays" and finding inspiration in such modernist art movements as the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism, "because they use historical references but in very minimalist, avant-garde forms."She was visiting the United States in 1984 when her tourist visa ran out. Given the choice of returning to Hungary but being forbidden to leave for five years or of staying in the States but not being allowed home for five years, "I called my mother and told her I was staying here. She still hasn't recovered," says Pasztor, who now resides in Los Angeles. A friend landed her an assistant's position on the film Anna, and she earned her first costume designer credit on a cheesy horror film that went straight to video. But by 1989 she was getting modest attention for such films as Bloodhounds of Broadway, in which, on a minuscule budget, she glammed up Madonna and Jennifer Grey in satin and rhinestones, and Drugstore Cowboy, for which she outfitted junkie outlaws Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch in seedy leather and velvet jackets, plaid bell-bottoms, dog collars, and chunky platforms, foreshadowing the current '70s and grunge crazes by several years. Lately she's worked on some commercials for the arty production house Strato Films, including one for Converse sneakers in which the costumes are inspired both by contemporary street wear and Russian Constructivist designs.Having had such an unhappy experience with the big budget studio film Indecent Proposal that she quit partway through ("It was a very difficult film because the studio was a big, bureaucratic organization; they pay you well but they take your blood"), Pasztor now vows that she will eschew major studio films in favor of the sort of interesting independent productions on which she's done her best work. "If something has substance and you're working with good people, it pays off 10 times more in the end."Rodeo queen: Lorraine Bracco, whose feisty performance as tough-talking Mafia wife Karen Hill in Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas" earned her an Oscar nomination and a place among Hollywood's most respected leading ladies, now brings the fictional bullwhip-wielding Delores del Ruby to life in "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." "I'm terrific," say Bracco, 38, in her crackling Long Island accent. "I can whip an ace of hearts out of a snake's mouth." Bracco took to cowgirl life like a horse takes to the trough; she caught the rhythm of the cowgirl blues. "Cowgirls are from the earth," she explains. "They look up in the sky and tell you what time it is. They're in tune with animals, the earth, the weather." Dressed the part by Beatrix Aruna
Pasztor (center, with the actress), Bracco exclaims, "It's great being a cowgirl. I got to do all sorts of things that a New York girl doesn't get to do very often!" —DIANA RICO(photographer: peter lindbergh)

Interview

"The day Delores del Ruby arrived at the Rubber Rose, a snake crawled across the dusty road that led to the ranch, carrying a card under its forked tongue. The card was the queen of spades." —from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins

Lorraine Bracco plays Delores del Ruby, the tough talker who runs the Rubber Rose Ranch
GC: What do you think the movie version of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is telling us?
LORRAINE BRACCO: I see it as a cosmic, spiritual voyage of Americana, in terms of freedom. Uma Thurman's character Sissy Hankshaw, has big thumbs. So, O.K., what's wrong with that? John Hurt's Countess loves drag. That's O.K., too. The movie faces the human dilemma of acceptance, of understanding what's out there.Now, don't expect My Own Private Idaho—this is a completely different movie. Gus is so talented, it's scary. I've been in those Big Hollywood Pictures, the ones budgeted at $50 or $60 million. With Gus, making this film for about $7 million, you feel the excitement and thrill of moviemaking. Making a movie like Cowgirls required special caring and a sharing, and he made us all feel that. —GEORGE CHRISTY

YOU

LORRAINE LIGHTENS UP
She used to be the dark-haired victim but now Ms Bracco’s gone blonde she’s having a lot more fun.Pictures: Newly blonde Lorraine in Traces of Red, left, and, below, with co-star Jim Belushi in one of the film’s steamy scenes.Lorraine Bracco, the hoodlum’s wife in GoodFellas, has finally done it. After years of playing dark-haired victims, the sassy Brooklynite has dyed her hair blonde. It’s a rather brassy bottle-honey colour, but she prefers to be ‘Palm Beach blonde’.
Lorraine’s new look is for Traces of Red, an erotic thriller so steamy that some wags have already dubbed it ‘Murder, Mystery and Suspenders’.
One the set in Florida, Lorraine appears in a thigh-climbing glittering gold mini-dress and this defiantly sexy outfit is one of the reasons her co-star, highly-sexed detective Jim Belushi, gets entwined in the film’s murder investigation.“Yeah, we could call the film Jim Gets Laid,” she chuckles, crossing her long legs.

At 37 years old Bracco is making the most of her first really glamorous role. The three key topics in Traces of Red are sex, womanhood and power. Is she interested in these?“Yes, yes and yes! No, I’m teasing. Sex, yes. Womanhood, I’m just getting into it, I’m just finding myself.” And power? “Not interested – never was, never will be. We Americans are very prudish. Remember, we don’t even sunbathe in the nude here. Close the doors though and then all hell breaks out. Not that I see this film as erotic. I’m a bit wary of using my sexuality in films. I modelled for a while in Paris when I was young, so I didn’t want to touch a role like this until I really felt like a proper actress.”Her best Supporting Actress Oscar for GoodFellas has seen to that, but she still likes a challenge– she snapped up the role of a lesbian in Blake Edward’s Switch. “I had a fabulous bedroom scene with Ellen Barkin but Blake had to edit it out because people started to get uncomfortable. I was a little disappointed because I thought it was very funny.”Now, though, she’s relaxed in Florida’s tropical lushness, not least because she’s rented a beach house with her two daughters, Margaux (the result of a short-lived marriage to a Frenchman) and Stella (from her eight-year marriage to actor Harvey Keitel).But part of Lorraine’s new-found glow can also be attributed to her new paramour, actor Edward James Olmos. Olmos, best known for playing the police boss in Miami Vice, cuts an enigmatic figure on the set in his trademark black polo necks. She says her life has ‘undergone some very good changes’ and their chemistry is ‘just wonderful’.Despite their romance Olmos still lives in Los Angeles while Lorraine and her daughters live in a homely waterfront house in a tranquil spot on the Hudson river, just outside New York. When she’s not working she’s happy taking her kids to catch the school bus every day. But she admits she can get caught up in being a star. “Oh yeah, I’m getting there. I try to be normal and down-to-earth, but I lose it sometimes.”She turns to her make-up artist and asks, “I’m not very vain, am I?” Both laugh. “What am I going to do? Run to the doctor and have collagen because I’m starting to show my age? The only thing I worry about is my chin.”One thing she won’t change is her distinctive Brooklyn twang. “When I first started, everyone said, “You better work on your accent otherwise you’ll go nowhere.” And how boring! I think now we’re more accepting of where people are from. But let’s face it; they’ll never cast me as someone from Idaho.”
—SUE RUSSELL

Elle

The many sides of a big-mouthed girl from the city.LORRAINE BRACCO, LIGHT AND DARKLorraine Bracco and I are hanging out on a big gray couch, feet up, water bottles in hand. Lorraine would have liked to go to the Bronx Zoo, but it’s raining, and she prefers to stay put. “Sorry you weren’t with me this weekend,” she says, “I had to buy a grill.” And with Lorraine Bracco, buying a grill might actually have been fun.Casual in a white V-neck T-shirt, colorful print pants, tan Topsiders, and round wire-rim glasses, Bracco is prone to screaming with laughter and raising her voice to make a point. Oh, and she’s a blond now. The actress concedes that being blond may have its advantages–especially in Hollywood, where she has been pegged as a New York ethnic type. As Karen, the wife of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in GoodFellas, Bracco earned an Oscar nomination. The part was an actor’s dream, an opportunity to exercise great range, as her character goes through the ups and downs of a sometimes rocky 20-year marriage to a real wiseguy. In their marital conflicts (Henry wakes up to find Karen sitting on his chest, holding a gun to his face) as well as their occasional moments of connubial bliss

(Karen drops to her knees and undoes Henry’s fly to thank him for a large wad of shopping money), Bracco carries scene after charged scene.Lorraine Bracco has known what she wanted since the sixth grade, when she was voted ugliest girl on her schoolbus. Some girls might have been devastated, but Bracco gritted her teeth and was determined to become a model. Born in Brooklyn in October 1954, the daughter of a British war bride and a wholesaler at the Fulton Fish Market, she was raised on Long Island, along with her older brother, Sal, and younger sister, Liz.Out of high school, Bracco one day walked into the prestigious Wilhelmina Models agency and struck up a rapport with Wilhelmina herself; soon she was off to Paris to begin a 10-year modeling career. She made her American film debut in Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch Over Me at the age of 33. Her portrayal of Ellie, the working-class wife of a New York detective (Tom Berenger), won her critical raves– and the admiration of quite a few women. Maybe it was the scene where she bloodies her husband’s nose after learning he’s having an affair with a socialite.“As [acting coach] Stella Adler used to say of acting, “It doesn’t matter if it feels good or bad. It only matters if it’s right,” says Bracco emphatically. “Unfortunately, a lot of people are not willing to believe that. They’re so afraid not to be liked or cherished or considered.”
“Let’s put it this way,” she continues. “If I were gonna make choices based on what people thought, I would never have played a lesbian [as she did in Blake Edward’s Switch]. I wanted to play that role because I felt that lesbians have always been mistreated in moviemaking. It’s always the dyke.”Her next role, that of the mother, Mary, in Radio Flyer, is less of a stretch. She has two daughters, Margaux, from her first marriage to a Frenchman, and Stella, from her marriage to actor Harvey Keitel (from whom she is now separated).
Set in 1969, Richard Donner’s Radio Flyer tackles the tough subject of child abuse. Bracco plays a recently remarried mother of two young boys, who has an extremely difficult time confronting her alcoholic husband’s abusive behaviour toward herself and her sons.“In 1969, there were no [child abuse] hotlines.” says Bracco. All the characters you’ve seen me play would just have gone and ripped him a new asshole, and I tell you, Lorraine Bracco would have. But, unfortunately, we have an entire world of women who feel they don’t deserve better treatment, that they’re worthless. They have no self-esteem and feel that this is their bed, now they should lie in it.”Bracco’s rant about the evils of American society is more than just talk; her concerns are reflected in her script choices. In Medicine Man, also out this month, Bracco plays the brassy assistant to a research scientist (Sean Connery) who nicknames her Dr. Bronx. Together, they risk their lives trying to prevent the destruction of the Brazilian rain forest.The director John McTiernan considered Michelle Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep, and Julia Roberts before settling on Bracco as the proper foil for Connery. “Sean’s pretty intimidating,” McTiernan says. “I needed someone who could give him back his own. I needed a big-mouthed girl from the city.”In December Bracco finished filming A Trace of Red, with Jim Belushi and Tony Goldwyn. Burnt out after a hectic 1991, she has been staying close to her family and even brought her daughters with her to Mexico for the shoot of Medicine Man; she plans to keep them nearby in the future.“I think the most important thing for me in my career has been that I have children,” she says. “I might be upset when I don’t get a certain role. I wanted that movie, Working Girl. I went home and I cried when I didn’t get it. I cried over a couple of them. But you know what? I have kids to take care of. I couldn’t sob forever. I still had to make Cream of Wheat the next morning.” —VICTORIA KOHN(photographer: e.j. camp)

Connoisseur

Who'll Stop Lorraine?Ever since she held a gun to Ray Liotta's head in GoodFellas, Lorraine Bracco's career has been on the verge of a breakthrough. Now, with three major upcoming films—including Medicine Man, with Sean Connery, and Richard Donner's Radio Flyer—the Brooklyn-born former Paris model is leaving supporting roles behind to become a star in her own right. BRENDAN LEMON visits the Martin Scorsese protegee at home.
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"STEL-LA! STEL-LA!" BELLOWS THE WOMAN WHO A MOMENT BEFORE HAD BEEN quietly shooting the breeze but is now barreling through her house like a female Stanley Kowalski. It's altogether apt that the woman, actress Lorraine Bracco, stirs such an association. Kowalski's creator, Tennessee Williams, is Bracco's favorite playwright, and the actor who originated the role, Marlon Brando, also studied at Bracco's training ground, the Actors Studio. Even though Brando's Stella happened to be Kim Hunter and Bracco's is her six-year-old daughter, and Stanley's digs were in New Orleans, whereas Bracco's are in arty Palisades, New York, there's a shared ferocity between Bracco and Brando. "She's an animal," says Richard Donner, who directed Radio Flyer, one of the two pictures starring Bracco being released this month. "And she's wonderfully intuitive."Bracco changed her base from downtown Manhattan to her house on the Hudson, near where Bill Murray and Mikhail Baryshnikov maintain residences, two years ago, not long after her eight-year marriage to actor Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets, Bugsy) fell apart. Not yet officially divorced, she's reluctant to talk about him; she speaks vaguely about their growing in different directions, about needing to be loved "for herself." A longtime friend of hers is more blunt: "Basically, she threw him out." Technically, of course, the thirty-seven-year-old actress absented herself by relocating up the Hudson with Stella and her other daughter, twelve-year-old Margaux (the product of Bracco's first marriage, to French actor Daniel Guerard). When you ask people who know the couple why the breakup occurred, you get a lot of speculation: about affairs, for example, particularly one alleged last year by various tabloids between Bracco and Edward James Olmos, her costar in the 1991 pic Talent for the Game. One thing is clear: Keitel and Bracco were a volatile combination. Anyone who dined much during the late eighties in down-town Manhattan restaurants, where the couple sometimes held public Liz-and-Dick spats, could tell you that.Bracco's volatility was in place long before she met her second husband on a Paris sidewalk: she had spent her early years in Brooklyn and Long Island, before going off to Europe for a decade to model. Keitel instilled other things, though. In one sense, the partnership was a variation on Katharine Hepburn's old quip about the Astaire—Rogers chemistry: she gave him sex and he through his association with Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and other New York film-biz insiders—gave her access, if not class. (Bracco had acquired class already, during her cover-girl days.) But access without talent and sweat doesn't take you very far in the Scorsese circle, a hardworking (and formerly rather hard-playing) group known for its devotion not only to film but to the arts in general. Luckily for Bracco, by the time Scorsese was casting his 1990 mob epic GoodFellas, she had already firmly shown that she had the goods. In Ridley Scott's 1987 film Someone to Watch Over Me, for example, she had shone as Ellie Keegan, the not-gonna-take-it wife of a wayward New York cop. So when Scorsese gave her the part of the equally unyielding Karen Hill without an audition—a choice that led to an Oscar nomination and a Los Angeles Film Critics Award as 1990's best supporting actress— it seemed like a case of talent rewarded rather than favors returned.Bracco's ties to Scorsese—or to any New York circle, for that matter—have loosened somewhat, now that she has moved thirty miles north of the scene. She says her closest friends these days are "not really in the business... [they're] nobody famous." Given the healthy state of her career, she hardly has time for celebrity hobnobbing: Radio Flyer, a domestic drama set in the late 1960s, and Medicine Man, an epic thriller that takes place in the Mexican rain forest, are both coming out this month; another thriller, A Trace of Red, is due later in the year. Names of the Streep and Pfeiffer ilk had been bandied about when Medicine Man was being cast, and it's proof of the respect accorded Bracco that she landed the female lead in what will certainly be one of the year's most expensive Hollywood productions (estimates run as high as $60 million). But although the movie inches her up to co-protagonist status, she again reverts to type in the part of Dr. Rae Crain. Director John McTiernan, in fact, makes the role sound like old Bracco: Crain, he says, is "a very urban New York smart mouth." Her nickname is "Dr. Bronx."But Bracco's career no longer seems so dependent on her playing hard-nosed city types. In Radio Flyer, Bracco gets the gum out of her mouth, playing a burned-out divorcée named Mary who remarries and moves her new husband (Adam Baldwin) and two sons (Elijah Wood and Joseph Mazzello) to California. The husband becomes an alcoholic and abuses the kids; eventually, Mary leaves him. "Lorraine's part was a difficult one to bring to life," admits Donner (Lethal Weapon), who took over the project—and recast it—after the screenwriter, David Mickey Evans, was dismissed by Columbia from directorial duties. "Mary can come off self-centred rather than unaware. She's not aware of what to fight back for. She's not a sympathetic character." It's a new tack for Bracco, whose characters have usually been appealing precisely because they fight back—against philandering husbands (The Dream Team), vacillating lovers (Switch), or rebellious students (Sing).

"What serves me as an actress," says Bracco, "is my struggle for independence... I think it's the struggle that's the interesting part of it, and how people deal with things. Are you willing to let go of certain problems? Sometimes you have to let go. You have to say to a lover, a boyfriend, a husband, 'You know what? I'm not good for you, you're not good for me.""Bracco is talking about her work, but Keitel is the obvious subtext. Whatever their personal difficulties, however, his importance to her career cannot be denied. In addition to introducing her to the Scorsese crowd, Keitel brought her to the Actors Studio in New York (though she had already studied in Paris with John Strasberg, scion of the studio's artistic director, Lee Strasberg). Keitel also suggested her for David Rabe's 1986 Lincoln Center Theater Workshop production Goose and Tomtom opposite himself, Madonna, and Sean Penn and changed his share of diapers while Bracco worked after Stella was born. Keitel was a stabilizing presence on the set when the emotionally draining Radio Flyer was being filmed, even as marriages both on-screen and off were unravelling.Most important, perhaps, Keitel encouraged Bracco to think of herself as an actress rather than as a star. This attitude is apparent to everyone who works with her. "Lots of well-known women didn't want the role of Mary," says Donner, "because it's the two kids who have the biggest parts in the movie. Lorraine wasn't like that at all." Adam Baldwin adds, "She comes from New York, which has a greater sense of community in the acting profession than Hollywood does."Bracco and I talked about New York actors and many other matters during our chat that day up the Hudson. Signs of her children were everywhere in the family's comfortable hillside house. We sat on a deck overlooking a river scene that Thomas Cole or Frederick Church might have painted, but Bracco's unwavering green eyes and expletive-heavy table table talk brooked no competition. And there was, of course, that voice, an instrument in which a word like "interesting" is a fully phrased, four-syllable force.Other words have four-letter force: She calls TV watchers "idiots," politicians "schmucks," and studio heads "assholes." She displays more diploma cy when talking about her co-star in Medicine Man, Sean Connery, in many ways her temperamental opposite. Connery, who got his start decades ago in musical comedy in Great Britain, helped her learn the Sinatra standard "That Old Black Magic" for the movie, but there were indications that their relationship was not harmonious in other ways. This is not surprising: the Scottish actor has a reputation for being coolly professional and surpassingly dull on a set, someone never much in the mood for the kind of creative brainstorming that Bracco might have learned at the Actors Studio. When I later heard that he and McTiernan had effectively shut Bracco out of the normal give-and-take that goes on during a shoot, I found nothing startling there, either. Bracco admits that Connery can be a "general," but otherwise she brushes any unflattering talk of him aside. As for McTiernan, a determinedly non-Method director of macho vehicles such as Die Hard, Predator, and The Hunt for Red October, it's significant that his name doesn't come up when I ask Bracco which directors she has done the best work for. (She mentions Scorsese, Scott, Donner, and Robert Young, who made Talent for the Game.)Even if the way she was treated while working on Medicine Man was difficult for her, it's unlikely that she'd dwell on it. The experience in Mexico entailed too many other hardships: tarantulas at the dinner table, enormous bugs, and yes, stomach trouble in short, the kind of annoyances common to almost everyone involved in Hollywood's recent spate of jungle sagas. More than the terrain-related hassles, more even than trying to keep up with her kids (who were with her for the entire three-month shoot), Medicine Man meant gruelling stunt work, the kind of stuff Connery describes as being like "going to the dentist without Novocain."The pharmaceutical analogy is not chosen cavalierly. In the movie, Dr. Crain checks up on Connery—a Scottish scientist—and his drug-related research, and many of their scenes were shot on a platform three hundred feet off the rain forest floor. Fred Waugh, the film's stunt coordinator, says that Bracco did "ninety-nine percent" of her own hazardous scenes. Even though that figure may be inflated, it's clear that in the fearlessness department Sigourney Weaver has nothing on her. As almost everyone who's worked with Bracco will tell you, the actress is very game.The area of Brooklyn in which Bracco was born, Bay Ridge, is a sociological hodgepodge today—a mixture of Greeks, Italians, and Asians. During Bracco's childhood, Norwegians and Armenians commanded the turf. At least, those were the groups that pre-dominated in her grammar school, P.S. 127. As the daughter of an Italian American father and an English mother—a war bride—Bracco was, ethnically, the odd girl out. Her classmates, however, remember her as anything but anomalous. They'll tell you how vivacious and well liked she was. In every way, she was a trouper: in first grade, she broke her arm before a class pageant but went onstage anyway, wearing an incongruously graceful pink tutu and stealing the show.When Bracco was seven, her father, who was a fish wholesaler, moved the family (which also included an older brother, Sal, and a younger sister, Elizabeth) to Westbury, Long Island. There, her popularity plummeted: "I was voted the ugliest girl on the sixth-grade bus," she says. Her sister, who is also an actress and is married to actor Aidan Quinn, confesses, "We were ironing boards." The drop in status left Bracco slightly wary of people. Even today, she claims to be basically a "loner," to which her sister retorts, "She's a loner who's never alone."Bracco's stock soon recovered. She had a smashing sweet-sixteen party and by twelfth grade was going into New York City for modeling jobs. "None of this was a surprise," says Elizabeth, "even though we were hardly from Hollywood High or anything." Looking at photos from the period, however, it's not clear that success before the camera was certain. Bracco has an imperfect, slightly off-kilter nose, and at eighteen she looked a little too gamine; she had yet to grow into the litheness she so often shows on-screen. If the young Bracco was not quite right for New York City, she was perfect for Paris, where the Wilhelmina agency sent her after high school and where she was soon appearing on the covers of various French magazines.In interviews, Bracco dismisses her European modeling career as the most "boring" time in her life, but Paris was in every way her finishing school. On her own, she acquired the education—in history, languages, culture generally—that helps make her a far more interesting interlocutor than most of her more formally educated colleagues. She didn't spend every afternoon at the Louvre, though.The decade that Bracco spent modeling in Paris—the seventies, basically—was full of high life, and the actress sums up the scene with a Voice of My Generation comment: "I watched beautiful faces become hard and ugly." She had the potential to become part of the drug-filled, self-destructive crowd around her. "I would have fallen into it—I would have." And why didn't she? "I had a kid. I had to get up every morning and take care of that kid."Bracco was pregnant with Margaux before she married Daniel Guerard, but in most other respects the union was conventional. Not conventional enough, perhaps, for Bracco's straitlaced parents; too confining, before long, for Bracco. "It was a very unhappy marriage," she says. "I married a Frenchman. I was the Madonna; you know, 'You stay home and I go out. That kind of thing. Until I became hip to that and said, 'Hey, I don't want to live like this. I'm twenty-five years old." About the only thing she retains from the union is the habit of speaking French at home. (She also speaks Italian and some Spanish.)After the divorce, Bracco went through hard times. Fewer modeling jobs were coming her way, and she did what was necessary to support herself and her daughter, among other things, she was a disc jockey for Radio Luxembourg. Bits of film work had already come her way before she met Keitel and moved back to New York City in 1983. Four years later, she landed the part of Ellie Keegan in Someone to Watch Over Me, which is her favorite role to date. The movie's director, Ridley Scott, says Bracco was the only actress to read for the part who didn't play Ellie as a victim. Little did he know that the aggressiveness she she displayed in the audition would spill over into the shoot. On Someone, Bracco established her reputation as an actress who will fight hard, even bitterly, for what she considers to be the integrity of a character. Interestingly, none of her directors—so far—seem to resent this. Robert Young (Rich Kids, Short Eyes), who directed her in the studio-botched Talent for the Game, says that Bracco "questions you, but in a good way. At times, she can be abusive in her honesty. I don't know if I could be married to a woman who's that honest. I think she could devastate you." But Young goes on to express sentiments common to many people who have worked with the actress: "As a person, I love her. She's considerate, ethical, warm."Journalists compare her emotional, gravelly warmth to Debra Winger's. But this comparison has sometimes been invidious. Of her work in Someone, New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote, "Poor Ellie, who looks and sounds like Debra Winger in performance." Bracco was not amused by the remark. "I thought that he was very insulting," she says. "And very stupid. And therefore, from that, and from that one critic alone, I am not interested in what any of them say. He owes me an apology!" Bracco doesn't resent the comparison because of any ill will toward Winger; she confesses that she's always loved her. She especially liked her in Legal Eagles, where in one scene Winger ate ice cream like a slob. "It's a character choice. Not every woman eats like a lady. Terrific!" In a comment that could be applied equally to Bracco herself, the actress says of Winger, "She's alive." But Bracco insists, "I don't look a damn thing like Debra. Debra doesn't look a damn thing like me."Despite such protestations, critics continue to invoke Winger when reviewing Bracco; the normally dyspeptic John Simon once said that the two share a "devious sexiness." Bracco doesn't appreciate that kind of comment, either. "I never heard of anything so stupid," she says. "I have never once, ever, used my sexuality in a role." Why? "Because I hide from that. I hide from that as Lorraine, so therefore I don't really show it to you in my characters. I have a problem with that." This is more than the usual "I can't deal with being the gorgeous sexpot everyone thinks I am" type of Hollywood star remark. She seems genuinely conflicted about her very real corporeal heat, a tension that ironically only increases her appeal and interest. Pressed to comment on the dichotomy, Bracco says she has no easy answers. "I'm learning them myself. But I think there are many actresses who are much more in touch with their sexuality than I've ever been." (The actress she thinks is in touch with her sexuality, Ellen Barkin, is the only co-star with whom Bracco, as a besotted lesbian in Switch, had little chemistry at all.) Bracco's learning process seems recently to have begun: in A Trace of Red, her character has explicit affairs with two men. It's the most sensually available she's been on-screen.Directors don't share Bracco's ideas about her sex appeal. Donner, for example, says, "I don't think she uses sex, but it's impossible for that not to come through when she's on-screen." The same is true off-camera: Bracco has a natural glamour born of confidence, which is the flip side to the insecurity she says that she always—like most actors with any talent—feels when working. It's a glamour that requires little or no primping, but she isn't above fussing when the occasion requires it. "Lorraine loves to go out wearing no makeup and grandma-type glasses," her sister says. "She thinks it goes with that black Jeep she has. But don't be fooled: she also likes to get dolled up and do the number." The only visitors to the house the day of our interview, in fact, were a hair-and-makeup man and his assistant, who were putting Bracco together for a Helen Hayes-related benefit that night in nearby Nyack. She entered that room, one could be sure, with considerably more poise than was shown by Karen Hill, her character in GoodFellas, whose backdoor jag into the Copa with Ray Liotta was the most breathtakingly kinetic shot in recent movies.If Hill lacks Bracco's sophistication, she certainly has the actress's frank humor. It's probable that Bracco would react as Karen did, in voice-over, to the "hostess party" attendees in GoodFellas: "They had bad skin and wore too much makeup. And the stuff they wore was thrown together and cheap." Such outspokenness is characteristic of Bracco and is perhaps the reason she admires actors who speak out on thorny issues."I congratulate someone like Roseanne Barr. I really do. I think it's, first of all, a very hard thing to... say, I am an incest victim. My parents did this and this and this... That's why she's so talented, having to deal with her sense of humor. She could have become a serial killer. Many people do!"Bracco's mention of incest isn't arbitrary. Such issues are on her mind these days, given the subject matter of Radio Flyer as well as the kinds of causes—child abuse, AIDS babies—with which she's heavily involved. When I ask her to explain her connection to these problems, she replies, "I have two children myself! I tell you, bringing up children is the hardest thing I do. And I don't have half of the stress that other women might have."Bracco is tough on herself as a mother, worrying about whether taking her children on location—or leaving them behind, in school—is good for them. "That's what makes her a great mom," says Adam Baldwin. "She's tough on herself. She doesn't slough her kids off on a nanny." Young puts it another way: "In all facets of her life Lorraine is very real. But it's that attitude, along with her humor, and her ability to be all aglitter one minute and nitty-gritty the next, that makes her so contemporary and appealing."A career lesson that is clearly Keitel's is the importance of taking a modest-size role in order to stretch one's artistic range. That's exactly what Bracco did last fall when she filmed A Touch of Red. In this steamy thriller, which stars Jim Belushi and Tony Goldwyn as police partners in Palm Beach, she plays a wealthy widow who gets mixed up in a murder case the cops are investigating. She also has a wild romantic involvement with both men—the new chapter in her sexual education.The picture was done on-site in Palm Beach, an ordinance-heavy place not known for its history as a Hollywood backdrop. For the first time in years, however, townspeople threw open their shutters for a film crew. Many of the locals loaned more than just real estate: they showed up en masse for a spectacular scene shot at The Breakers, beachfront landmark. There were no fussy Bonfire of the Vanities-type auditions for socialites here. A very open casting call was held for extras, and on the appointed day, 160 regally attired citizens arrived at the location. From all reports, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. A few extras, perhaps looking for immediate ways to invest their forty-five-dollars-a-day pay, even inquired about buying the jewels that Van Cleef & Arpels had loaned Bracco. The actress says she was amused by this behavior and by all the other goings-on she observed in Palm Beach as part of her typically thorough research into a character's milieu.

"I've met a lot of people down here," she told me on the phone one afternoon from the house she'd rented for the duration, "and most of them have been wonderful. And the place is something too. Architecturally, it's magnificent—it's our Monte Carlo." We talked enthusiastically about the town's history, about Claudette Colbert and The Palm Beach Story, about the occasional scandal lacing the sea air. Bracco sounded ready to relocate. "Oh, I wouldn't go that far. I like my life these days."If Bracco pulls off the part of a Palm Beach widow, it will distance her even further from the street-smart slot at Central Casting and reinforce her suave side. Her experience as a blonde might also be counted as prep for Billie Dawn, the Born Yesterday role with which Bracco plans to "fool around" soon at the Actors Studio. For the most part, though, the Palm Beach stint bolsters the studio-days association I've had in mind all along: Myrna Loy, a comparison not as farfetched as you might think. Granted, their tonalities, both vocally and emotionally, are different, and physically they're dissimilar, and they certainly seem to hail from different sides of town (Loy has long lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side). The overlap, however, is large. Personally, both profess allegiance to progressive causes in quiet, non-self-congratulatory ways. In the professional sphere, both women began their careers playing toughs—Loy as Asian villainesses, Bracco with Scott and Scorsese. Each maintains a steady, palpable screen presence without ever taking over a movie, although you always feel that they could or should.Most important, each has suffered from a general misperception about her character range. Loy played as wide a gallery of types—from show girls to sophisticates—as any actress in Hollywood history, but we remember her chiefly as a girlfriend or a wife: as a helpmate. Similarly, Bracco's characters, although they don't hesitate to fight back, are ultimately not a husband's scourge but his support. It's too early to say whether Bracco genuinely has Loy's deceptive range—whether in addition to her Brooklyn-bred guff and continental intelligence she has sufficient softness, shading. Her new movies, however, would suggest at least a provisional answer: yes. —BRENDAN LEMON(photographer: stephen klein)

LA Times

RSVP
INTO THE NIGHTThe Rain's No Pain at 'Medicine Man' BashThe Event: The benefit premiere Wednesday of Disney subsidiary Hollywood Pictures' and Cinergi Productions' "Medicine Man" at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. As if on cue, nature kicked in to complement the film's story about finding a cure for cancer in the endangered rain forest. "Somehow it's appropriate that it rained in L. A. for the opening night," co-star Lorraine Bracco said as a light drizzle fell.The Scene: The audience exited the El Capitan, which was lit like a neon Roman candle, and trod the obligatory red carpet to a Moscow Circus-size tent behind the theater. The 1,000 guests entered through a 20-foot-long tunnel filled with foliage, mist and bird sounds. Inside there was more green on display than on St. Patrick's Day at a a Dublin pub. Party Planners West had draped the tent's massive ceiling with aqua taffeta. The floor was emerald Astroturf, and live shrubbery entwined the tent poles.Entertainment: An eight-piece samba band played and two dozen Brazilian carnival dancers circulated. "Vegas meets the rain forest," one guest pronounced.

Who Was There: The film's stars, Sean Connery and Bracco, and director John McTiernan; guests included Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd; Disney execs Frank Wells and Jeffrey Katzenberg: Cinergi's Andrew Vajna; plus Marvin and Barbara Davis, Alan and Cindy Horn, Mike Ovitz and Edward James Olmos.Dress Mode: Mostly after-work, with a few exceptions. Jackie Collins wore an ankle-length faux leopard-skin coat because she "wanted to blend in with the environment."Quoted: Lorraine Bracco, with her strong New York accent, describing the experience of working for weeks in the jungle: "Yeh, the at-one-with-nature was major."Money Matters: Ticket prices started at $250. With Cinergi covering the party's entire cost, more than than $150,000 was netted for three environmental groups the Rainforest Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Nature Conservancy, whose chairman, Dick Weinstein, said, "If we don't save the rain forest, we don't save ourselves."Chow: A Brazilian-style menu from La Cuisine that included saffron rice with seafood, grilled chicken and cassava vegetable chili. One guest, recalling the film's plot, said he hoped "there's no cure for cancer somewhere in these beans."Observed: A uniformed security guard was stationed at a pay phone near the tent's entrance. When the phone rang, he answered "Amazon rain forest" in a detached, business-like voice.Overheard: Two actors, one in TV, the other in film, discussing the amazing selection of AA meetings they can choose from when they're in Los Angeles. —BILL HIGGINS

Mirabella

A few of Lorraine Bracco's favorite thingsForget raindrops on roses—it's crazy eights and crème brûlée, a perfect white shirt and an old ballet costume. . .the kind of clothes you hang onto forever.LORRAINE BRACCO IS THE ONLY former fashion model I can think of who's a real actor's actor. She appeared with Madonna and Sean Penn in the 1986 Lincoln Center revival of David Rabe's play Goose and Tomtom. She was the betrayed wife in Ridley Scott's movie Someone to Watch Over Me; the mafia wife in Martin Scorscese's GoodFellas; and Ellen Barkin's kinky love interest in Blake Edwards's Switch. This winter, in Richard Donner's Radio Flyer, she's a divorced mother married to an alcoholic who sexually abuses one of her children. And she stars opposite Sean Connery in The Medicine Man as an investigator for the foundation that funds Connery's weird medical experiments in Brazil.Since Lorraine is one of my favorites I asked her about some of her favorites.Lorraine Bracco's favorite city is Paris, or maybe Marrakesh. Her favorite perfume is Bal de Versailles. Her favorite time of day is sunset and her favorite sunsets occur on the ocean. Her favorite season is spring.She doesn't have a favorite newspaper. Her favorite game is cards—Crazy Eights. She speaks French, Italian and Spanish but her favorite language is Italian. Her favorite hair color is white. Her favorite designers are Versace, Alaia, Gaultier and Zoran. Her favorite articles of clothing are anything you don't see. Her favorite curse is "Suck this!"Her favorite astrological sign is Gemini because there are two of them and she thinks we're always two. Her favorite cocktail is margarita, salt, straight up.Her favorite sport is baseball, her favorite team is the Mets and her favorite Met used to be Darryl Strawberry, but now that he's a Dodger, it's probably Dwight Gooden. But maybe her real favorite sport is boxing—having something to do with her roots in Brooklyn.

Lorraine Bracco claims to have four hundred pairs of shoes so she'd rather die than pick her favorite pair. Her favorite dessert is creme brulee, her favorite vegetable is bok choy and her favorite snack is popcorn.Her favorite sleeping position is fetal. Her favorite fashion model is the woman in the Donna Karan ads. Her favorite photographer is Man Ray. (Diplomatic choice for an ex-model.)Her favorite song is "When A Man Loves A Woman." Her favorite fast food chain is Taco Bell. Her favorite jewelry item is long, dangly earrings. Her favorite excuse is "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."Her favorite exercise is aerobics. Her favorite aerobics music is M.C. Hammer. Her favorite time killer is staring off into space. Her favorite vice she won't tell on the grounds that she could be incriminated.Her favorite recipe is for CAA's chocolate chip cookies, which are baked in the agency's own kitchen and are the real secret of Mike Ovitz's power. Her favorite actor is Montgomery Clift. Her favorite historical period is the Depression. Her favorite dead artist is Matisse. Her favorite living artist is Joan Snyder.Lorraine's favorite thing to do on a plane is talk on the phone. Her favorite nursery rhyme is not "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Her favorite playwright is Tennessee Williams. Her favorite coffee is Balducci's Mocha Java. Her favorite oracle is the tarot. Her favorite animal is the panther. Her favorite place to eat is at Toukie Smith's house or going home to Mom.
Lorraine Bracco's favorite quote is "Que será, será." —GLENN O'BRIEN(photographer: stephen klein)

[Note: this is Elé's favourite magazine :) yes i'm talking in the 3rd person. Suck it.]

US

Give a Big Hand to Lorraine Bracco
Why? because with an Oscar nomination for GoodFellas, a happy showbiz marriage to Harvey Keitel and a break-all-the-rules attitude, she deserves itLESS THAN A YEAR AGO, 36-YEAR-OLD Lorraine Bracco would call her agent after an audition, depressed. "They just don't get me," she would complain in her New York accent.But on February 13, it became apparent that they're getting her just fine. That's the day Bracco's manager woke her with an early-morning phone call, screaming the news that she had received an Oscar nomination for her work in Martin Scorsese's gangster drama GoodFellas. "I'm really honored, yeah, honored, that's the word," says Bracco. "I'm touched that the acting community noticed my work, especially in a movie full of guys. I've been giggling a lot."In fact, the recognition from her peers started to come long before the nomination. Of the five films Bracco has done in the last year, she hasn't had to read for one.As Lauren Shuler-Donner, producer of Bracco's latest assignment, Radio Flyer, and wife of director Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon), explains, "We knew we wanted Lorraine right away. She didn't have to audition. She's got the chops.""I'm lucky," Bracco admits, "because the ones who do get me, they're the cream of the crop."Now Bracco has a new lament. "I have no life," she says, flopping down on the sofa in her trailer. Radio Flyer, shot primarily in California, has kept her away from her home in New York City's SoHo district for five months. She's on the set every morning at six and doesn't leave until eight in the evening. Then "I exercise like a dog for an hour and by 9:15, I die."Bracco is who Audrey Hepburn would have been if she'd grown up in Hell's Kitchen. She bears more than a passing facial resemblance to Hepburn and has that same poetic physical grace. It's no surprise to learn that she worked for 10 years in Paris as a fashion model. When she opens her mouth, however, she's pure Noo Yawk, reflecting her Brooklyn birth and Long Island upbringing. She admits to being "lazy with my speech" and has been taking diction lessons. "They want me to become non-regional, and at first I thought [in a letter-perfect British accent], 'How bloody boring.' I'm very urban because of my temperament."The feisty temperament, which plays off perfectly against her physical delicacy, brought her to the critics' attention in Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), a tepid thriller memorable mainly for her performance as Tom Berenger's no-nonsense working-class wife. In GoodFellas, she again played a long-suffering spouse, Karen Hill, wife of real-life-Mafioso-turned-stool-pigeon Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). Both women were essentially written as victims of strong-willed men. But Bracco refused to play them that way because, like Tina Turner, she doesn't do nothing nice and easy.

"I won't play a victim. Lots of actresses do, because it's easier. But I'm not a victim. I'm willing to fight for my life. And I have the strength to do it."Karen Hill agrees. Though the two have never met—Hill is currently in the Federal Witness Protection Program—she has communicated with Bracco through Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wise-guy, the book on which GoodFellas is based. Hill approved of Bracco's approach to her character. "Karen's read articles about me, and she told Nick that I was right, she had no self-esteem when she was married to Henry. But she's finally won."In her most recent release, Talent for the Game, opposite Edward James Olmos, Bracco again fought to make the typical Hollywood "girlfriend role" more complex—fully aware that when male actors push to get what they want, they're considered courageous, but when women do, they're labelled difficult."Difficult?" she says, rolling the word around in her mouth like a thick wad of chewing gum. "I don't think anyone can say that working with me wasn't a joy. What I do doesn't come out of being spoiled. I think I'm the only actress who says, 'Aw, come on, you don't need another closeup of me.' They're in shock when I do that. I only fight for my character. I fought with Marty [Scorsese], with all of them. I never do anything half-assed. You gotta love me for that, you really do."Bracco sees herself as part of an emerging generation of Hollywood actresses who "bring their personal struggle to the screen." She's wedged in between the older Anjelica Huston and the younger Jodie Foster. At the recent Los Angeles Film Critics Awards' luncheon, Bracco, who picked up her Best Supporting Actress trophy for GoodFellas, asked to be introduced to Huston, who was there to pick up her award for The Grifters and The Witches. "I love the girl's work. I was anxious to meet her," Bracco says of Huston. "She gave me a big hug, and I said to her, 'I've never done this before. She said, 'Smile, honey, and get used to it quick.'"Bracco is trying. She is flattered by the L.A. critics award, but as for her Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, she says, "I don't think about it." She will attend the ceremonies, though, because "I love that it's actors voting for actors. That's very special. I preferred just going to the L.A. critics award ceremony to sitting there waiting for them to say, 'And the winner is...'But whaddya gonna do? America's gotta always have a winner. It's just not something I aspire to."Among her aspirations is a juicy role opposite a top female star. She recently squeezed a supporting role (as a drop-dead, sophisticated, lipstick lesbian—with no discernible accent) in Blake Edwards' Switch into her schedule, just to work with another "struggler," Ellen Barkin. "So far I've only worked with men. Opposite other women, I still can't get in the door. They'll cast me against Ellen, but not Geena [Davis] or [Susan] Sarandon or Melanie [Griffith]. I think it's my strength. But hey, it hasn't stopped me from working."Bracco's next performance, as the mother of two abused children who retreat into a fantasy world in Radio Flyer, is her first big-budget role. She'll follow that with her first romantic lead, opposite Sean Connery in the ecological love story The Stand, to be shot in the jungles of Mexico and Brazil—another long, rigorous production. Bracco recently met Connery, whom she says has a good sense of humor, "which I told him he'll need around me. I hope the food and water don't get to me. But hey, it's a movie, so they can fly the food in. Maybe I should have put in my contract that whatever Sean Connery eats, I eat," she jokes. When told that since The Stand is reportedly budgeted at $60 million, good food shouldn't be a problem, her jaw drops. "For that we can get it catered from Chasen's." She shakes her head, bemused. "Sixty million dollars! These people make me laugh."ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK THEY make her laugh. The part in The Stand is one of this year's plum female roles, and names like Pfeiffer, Streep and Roberts were tossed about. Not bad for someone who claims she became an actress only out of "sheer boredom." But then you can't take Bracco's kvetching at face value. It's part of that urban temperament that makes her so appealing. For instance, she is quick to dismiss her decade in Paris as a model as "the most boring part of my life." But by the time she's finished, life in France sounds anything but dull. "Well, it was good and bad and up and down, like everything I've done," she amends.Throughout her 20s, Bracco travelled the world doing commercials; worked for then unknown designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Claude Montana; married a French salon owner and had her first child, Margaux, now 12; divorced; then met her second husband, actor Harvey Keitel, on the streets of Paris. She and Keitel now have a daughter, Stella, who is 5. (Both children played her kids in GoodFellas.)"For years people said to me I should be an actress and I'd say, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you very much. Good-bye." The truth, she admits, is that she was a bit awed and intimidated by Keitel's friends, including Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. She mostly stayed at home and raised her children, occasionally tagging along with Keitel to his classes at the Actors Studio, but only as an observer. The acting bug bit only after she saw Barry Levinson's film Diner. "For the first time, I thought, 'I could do that. I know I could. "With Keitel's encouragement (" 'So make a mistake go ahead,' he told me") she began studying with famed acting coaches Stella Adler and Ernie Martin. It wasn't until playwright David Rabe asked her to appear opposite Keitel, Madonna and Sean Penn in his new play Goose and TomTom that she worked up the confidence to go pro. "I guess it was just my time; it wasn't supposed to happen before or after."Now it's Keitel's turn to stay home with the kids. "He calls me and says, 'I don't get it. All I do is pick up and wipe up. I don't get it.' So adorable. I'm lucky Harvey's been home with them. It's been a tremendous experience for him. He's totally secure in that he's thrilled by the quality of my work. He wishes more actors would struggle to create."Because Keitel recently began work on the new Warren Beatty film Bugsy, Bracco had it written into her contract for The Stand that she be able to take her two daughters on location with her, along with a private tutor. "But after this, that's it for me for a while. I'm emotionally exhausted, I'm dead. With acting, you play with your emotions every day—it's tiresome. I'd love to do a Lethal Weapon movie, you know, the kind where you just go in and you shoot it."Again, you can't take Bracco completely at her word. A few minutes later she's talking about her commitment to her work ("I'm in a great place, and this is just the beginning for me") and about not doing anything the "conventional" way. "That's why I want to make movies," she says. "And the only thing that will determine how far I go is the work I do."—RICHARD NATALE(photographer: e.j. camp)

COSMOPOLITAN

BOLD, BEDAZZLING
LORRAINE BRACCOA critics' darling for her turn as the gutsy wife of a gangster in Good-Fellas, this feisty former model is decked out for movie stardom!FAVORITE LOOK: "Basic black-black skirt, black T-shirt, little flat gym shoes."MOVIE IDOL: "Bette Davis."PREFERRED DIVERSION: " Gardening."HER PHILOSOPHY: "If you worship fame and fortune, you'll never have yourself."BIGGEST CHALLENGE : "Myself!"When Lorraine Bracco's on-screen husband, Tom Berenger, sleeps with the gorgeous woman he's been assigned to guard in Someone to Watch Over Me, Bracco hauls off and slugs him. When Ray Liotta, her gangster hubby in GoodFellas, adds a mistress to his bounty, she pulls a .45 on him. "I'm a fighter," she explains in her bruised, honey voice, "and that's why people relate to me."

Bracco recently finished Talent for the Game, playing Edward James Olmos's obstreperous ladylove, and has completed Richard Donner's Radio Flyer. Add Blake Edwards's Switch to her list of upcoming movies and you realize she's won three important film roles in one year. For a thirty-six-year-old with only a few film credits, it's a heady experience.Yet, sitting at the Polo Lounge in The Beverly Hills Hotel, Bracco states, "I'm lucky to be alive. Life is a struggle—how you deal with it makes you feisty or passive. And boy, let me tell you, my life has been a struggle!"Seeing her swathed in Armani, ravishing with no makeup, you have to wonder: What struggle? At nineteen, she was a Wilhelmina model in Paris, gracing the covers of Elle and Marie Claire. She enjoys a happy marriage to actor Harvey Keitel, with whom she has two daughters (they played her screen kids in GoodFellas). And with three movies in one year, she's become an overnight success.Still, though Bracco's flown first-class in some very glamorous skies, she's rarely felt equipped to soar. "Women identify with me," she says. "I show them where they've been emotionally. I've hit rock bottom. If I hadn't, they wouldn't see it in my work. I'm a survivor," she adds. "I wish I could bottle what makes me survive and give it to every woman who needs it. I'd call it the soul-lifter picker-upper."One of three children, Bracco was raised in New York City. Her Italian father operated a stall in Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market, while her British mother brought up the kids. At sixteen, she started to model, and when she graduated from high school, Wilhelmina asked her to work in Paris. Surprisingly, Bracco refused. " 'I don't want to leave my family, I said. 'I'm very happy here." But when she told her parents. about the offer she'd refused, they had other ideas. "You gotta be kidding! I said. You want me to go?' I was so offended!"As a result, the teenager was pushed out of the nest and into the world's most sophisticated city. "I had led such a sheltered life," she says. "I thought I was Cinderella when I came to Paris. I was freaked out!"The modeling world runs parallel to the acting world, but it would be years before Bracco acquired the confidence to make that leap. "Catherine Deneuve once told me, You should be an actress." Bracco widens her eyes in disbelief. "Catherine Deneuve is telling me? I said, 'No. I can't do it." Nonetheless, her good looks led her to a role in Duos sur Canapé, a French farce. "I knew nothing," she says dramatically. "I just had to look good and remember my lines. I'd listen to the director and think, Man oh man, what the hell am I doing here?"Hoping to learn the language of film, she enrolled in the nearest Paris acting class, taught by John Strasberg, son of Lee Strasberg, the architect of Method acting. Again, Bracco was at the top of the heap but felt she belonged at the bottom. "These were the best theater actors in all of France. This was the meat of it," she says. "I was totally blown away."After her three-year marriage to a French salon owner failed, her fragile foundation collapsed. "I was young and hopeful—I watched my life turn into a Jackie Collins novel of lies and pettiness, she explains. The divorce left her with Margaux, her three-year-old daughter, who gave Bracco a reason to bound back as the heroine. "On New Year's Eve, I said, 'Kid, don't worry. It's me and you, and we'll go down or up together.' Still, getting back on her feet wasn't easy. "It took years to turn myself from one of the wounded into a fighter.Before long, Bracco met Harvey Keitel at a party. A year later, they married and moved back to the States. Although Bracco felt proud of her achievements in Europe, a decade had passed since she'd been in America. "I didn't know anybody, and I was intimidated by all of Harvey's friends," she says. "I mean, Scorsese. De Niro, Minnelli—these people were coming over to the house! I thought, Oh my God—what am I doing with my life?"For lack of anything better to do, she began accompanying Keitel to the Actors Studio. After months of watching actors work, she finally admitted to him, "I can do that. Harvey laughed and said, "I know. Now what are you going to do about it?"What Bracco did about it was read for and win a role in David Rabe's Goose and TomTom at New York's Lincoln Center with Sean Penn, Madonna, and Keitel. That led to attention-grabbing parts in Someone to Watch Over Me, The Dream Team, and GoodFellas, for which she was named Best Supporting Actress by the Los Angeles Film Critics. "I know I'm happening," she says with a delighted giggle. "That's what I tell myself as I exercise an hour and a half a day to keep my head clear." —JAMIE DIAMOND
(photographer: francois duhamel)

Vanity Fair

The actress Lorraine Bracco is a dream girl for realists—for the streetwise and the citified, for those who know that real women don't often drop from whatever heaven produced Michelle Pfeiffer. Real women come from neighborhoods, speak with accents, smile crookedly, chew gum-like the common-sensical creatures Bracco played in Someone to Watch over Me (1987) and The Dream Team (1989). As for her companion here, well, Ray Liotta is a dreamboat for nightmares. In Something Wild (1986), he was the schoolyard hoodlum turned homme fatal. Then, in Field of Dreams (1989), he used the same alley-cat boyishness to create the gleaming baseball hero Shoeless Joe Jackson. Now Liotta and Bracco have found their best roles yet, in Martin Scorsese's exhilarating GoodFellas. "I always wanted to be a gangster," confides Liotta's Henry Hill, the ambitious wise guy who occupies the shifty center of the movie. With his natty suits and his front-row table at the Copa, Henry is a mini-Scarface with a million-dollar grin, and Bracco is the nice Jewish girl he captivates. Funny, harrowing, and thrillingly inventive, GoodFellas is Scorsese's best film since Raging Bull, and it bulges with terrific performances with beautiful ones from Bracco and Paul Sorvino, with unforgettable ones from Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. And with one that will stay in your nightmares, from Ray Liotta. —STEPHEN SCHIFF(photographers: michael conte (ray) & albert watson (lorraine))

Mirabella

LORRAINE BRACCO
The key to Lorraine Bracco's screen presence is the way she sounds. Her voice is throaty and somewhat unmodulated; she speaks a nasal, dental, comfortable New Yorkese that doesn't seem to fit her elegant, rather European beauty—or any conventional image of a movie star. Presumably because of her accent, she's been cast as a Queens, New York housewife, a Brooklyn schoolteacher, a Manhattan waitress / actress and a New York mobster's wife, roles that are hardly glamorous. Yet a star is what she'll surely be, as long as the right scripts can be found.Of the five movies she's made since 1987, three have been for major directors. She had the second female lead in her first film, Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch Over Me, and she has a cameo in a Lina Wertmuller's still untitled new film as a woman in danger of contracting AIDS from her bisexual boyfriend. (Wertmuller had the role written especially for Bracco after seeing her performance in Someone to Watch Over Me.) Finally, Bracco has the female lead in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, coming later this year.Her physical beauty is not the point of that voice and accent say—what's important is her integrity. She doesn't care about escaping the humdrum or glamorizing herself through acting. Instead she's interested, as she puts it, in "allowing myself to be seen." There's a compelling rawness in all her performances, as if the movie were her life and she were groping her way through it; her delicacy, and her visible courage in allowing us to see her this openly makes her terribly sympathetic.In person, too, it's her courage that comes across. Sitting in the neighborhood restaurant she likes to use for business meetings, she's pale, slim and unmade-up, her hair pulled off her face with a rubber band, her emotions easily read in her hazel eyes. She seems to want not much to dazzle as to make herself clear. She doesn't feel the need, for example, to make the usual destined-for-stardom story out of her biography.She's thirty-five ("I think I'm supposed to lie, but I won't). She grew up in Westbury, Long Island, in "a family of very generous people and great story-tellers." Her younger sister, Elizabeth Bracco, has started an acting career with a role in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train. Her father, who prepares and sells filet of sole wholesale at Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market, is "a major actor in his own right. I mean the way he tells a story, or recites poetry, or the way he read us, "Twas the Night Before Christmas."

She went to Paris to model at nineteen, produced and hosted segments of a popular French TV show called Les Enfants du Rock and was a deejay on Radio Luxembourg; she married a Frenchman, had a baby at twenty-four, split up with her husband, stayed in Paris and began to raise her daughter herself.It was after she was in a French movie, and found it boring to simply memorize her lines, that she began studying with John Strasberg, son of Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio. "When that hand came out, I grabbed it," she says as if acting saved her life. "I began to pick apart what an actor needs to do to create. I found out it was okay to express what I was embarrassed about, and it wasn't wrong to be angry, as long as I didn't hurt anyone.She also met Harvey Keitel, the great character actor and regular in Scorsese's films, when a friend recognized him in the street in Paris, and introduced herself. Bracco was dragged into the conversation and she and Keitel ended up getting married in New York City six years ago. They have a four-year-old daughter and live in a loft—where her two girls can ride their bikes—in a lower Manhattan neighborhood full of artists, actors and people with ideas. "A lot of people like to come over to my place and hang out," she says. "There's always food. That's my Italian heritage. The first question I ask is, 'You hungry? I have a joyous house. We're on a good road; I have a nice life, and I'm appreciative towards it. I worked for it."Bracco also worked hard on her career. She studied with Stella Adler and Ernie Martin, and at the Actors Studio, but for a long time, she says, she didn't have the confidence to audition for agents. Keitel encouraged her, so did playwright David Rabe, after what she describes as a panic-stricken performance in a reading of one of his plays at the Actors Studio. So did Scorsese, who auditioned her for After Hours. "He didn't give me the part, but he called me up and said, "You should continue studying. You're a very talented girl and I'd like to work with you.""Now she has worked with him, and she continues to study. "I'm still learning," she says. "When you talk about gritty reality, I possess a lot of that. Because I had a child very young, I became unselfish very young. I know those moments when you feel trapped and you need to escape. I've had hard times that a lot of women can identify with. I'm learning not to be ashamed of that, and to share that."It's this understanding that one's experiences and feelings are not to be denied that gives stature and importance to the ordinary women she plays. She portrayed Ellie, the Queens housewife in Someone to Watch Over Me, as a warm, tough, self-respecting woman. When Ellie finds out that her detective husband (Tom Berenger) is in love with the rich and beautiful murder witness he's assigned to guard (Mimi Rogers), she has the guts to walk out; when she takes him back, it's on her terms. After the movie's release, Bracco says, "I was amazed at how many women came over to me and said, 'I wish I did it like you.If the audience identifies with her characters, it's because she does. Whatever their faults and mistakes she takes their parts, and if she disagrees with them, as in Scorsese's GoodFellas, this seems only to make her involvement more intense. The movie is based on Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, an account of Mafia life as given to Pileggi by the gangster Henry Hill and his wife, Karen. currently members of the federal witness protection program. Ray Liotta, who was so boyishly menacing as Melanie Griffith's estranged husband in Something Wild, plays Henry. Bracco plays Karen, a woman whose apparent lack of nerve brings Bracco to the verge of tears. "She married him for all the wrong reasons, and she stayed with him for all the wrong reasons, because she was weak. And therefore she's not really a victim, but a victim of herself. She just hung in and clung to Henry no matter how he treated her. He was very powerful, Henry, everybody liked Henry, so it was nice to go every place with Henry. He made her feel like something, and without him she was nothing. Ellie was not like that. Ellie was something with and without her husband. And Karen Hill... Lorraine Bracco, because I can't take her out of me, she's there ...took everything Henry threw at her and just went on as if everything would be fine. I used to go home from being Karen Hill and I hated myself. I used to walk around the house at night, haunted."Karen Hill promises to be Bracco's most important role to date, and she says Scorsese met with her about it even before he'd seen Someone to Watch Over Me. "Marty won't go on the superficial things, the physical things that another director might look at, but he'll look at your soul and he'll say, "The soul can give me what that character has. He doesn't care if you're from Mars, and he doesn't care if you've never done it before or if it's your hundredth time." Here she dares to be uncool. "He's definitely one of the world's greatest directors," she says. "And I worked with him, I want you to know." —MAGGIE PALEY

Vanity Fair

Socko BraccoWith a lustrous invincibility part Debra Winger and part Barbara Stanwyck, emerald-eyed Lorraine Bracco usually plays the tough cookie—a Brooklyn schoolteacher in Sing, a hard-boiled waitress in The Dream Team, a salt-of-the-earth cop's wife in Someone to Watch over Me. But next the galvanizing Bracco will get to play flaky, as the emotionally battered Mafia wife in Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas, the movie based on Nick Pileggi's true-life best-seller, Wise Guys. "I took the woman's role in what was very much a man's world," says the former model of her part as the bejewelled and cheated-on moll married to mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta).Although Bracco is Brooklyn-born and Long Island-bred, for five years she's been living a New York Stories—style life in lower Manhattan with her actor husband, Harvey Keitel. As part of that brawny downtown drama set (who all seem to own huge Tribeca lofts, hang out at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Grill, and roam between the Actors Studio and the restaurant Columbus), Bracco—a pal of Scorsese's—snagged the role with "no audition, no screen test, no reading." The GoodFellas ensemble sounds like a Bracco-Keitel block party—their upstairs neighbor De Niro plays Jimmy "The Gent" Burke, and Bracco's two young children play the Hills' kids. ("You expect Harvey to be in there, but he was out doing Two Jakes with Jack [Nicholson]," she says.)Bracco's spoofy take on her career ("Did I beg Hawvey to let me into Actors Studio?") and her throwaway approach to the biz ("Doors open—l walk through them") belie the perfectionism of a true pro. And her performance as a desperate moll should finally put her on the same professional level as her heavy-duty friends. —CHRISTA D'SOUZA(photographer: albert watson)

Interview

I first met Lorraine Bracco on Prince Street in New York a few years ago. She was introduced to me by the actor Harvey Keitel. They presented their new baby, Stella. I happened to have a baby Stella too, but at the time she was calling herself Sha-Sha. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about. By Julian SchnabelSince then their Stella has turned four and Lorraine Bracco the actress has appeared in Someone to Watch Over Me (directed by Ridley Scott), The Dream Team (Howard Zieff), and David Rabe's play Goose and TomTom. Recently she finished shooting two Lina Wertmüller movies and Martin Scorsese's film GoodFellas, which is based on Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family and is due out this this spring.[Looking around at Julian Schnabel's paintings, Bracco starts to talk about Salvador Dali.] I was in Barcelona when Franco died, and the whole city went wild. There were people screaming outside. I had just arrived. I didn't speak a word of Spanish. The first thing that came into my mind was that they must have won the World Cup. It was funny to see them just go mad.On that trip I met Dali. A friend of a friend knew him and took me to his apartment at the Ritz in Barcelona. Then we kept meeting him and having tea with him. He was very amusing. His wife was still alive and very jealous. It was a lot of fun to watch how he connived, and how he loved women. He was doing a picture about the jewelry of Spain, and he had all this gold jewelry. He asked me if I would pose for a photo in his bathtub, with all of it. I was very wary. I wasn't sure what I was getting into.But some of my friends talked me into it. They said, "It's Dali. Go ahead." I said, "What happens if it's naked?" Dali said, "Oh, it's not naked. You will have to wear a dress, and I have to put this jewelry on you." I said, "Great. As long as it's not up my ass, we'll be fine. Anyway, with an entourage of God knows how many people, I'm standing there in this evening dress that he picked out for me, and he is putting lots of very big jewelry on me. And I'm very little, so I looked like a kid putting on her mom's jewelry.I had to lie in the bathtub. His bathtub at the Ritz was big, sunken, '20s, magnificent, tiled. If I'm not mistaken, there was red velvet at the bottom. Then he brought in five hundred escargots. Literally millions and millions of dollars' worth of jewelry, and five hundred escargots. He was an absolute raving maniac. He sent me the photo with the five hundred squirming escargots, a very lovely picture that he autographed. It wasn't a bad experience or any thing like that. It was just funny.JULIAN SCHNABEL: Do you have the photograph?LB: I gave it to my parents.JS: You've been a model, and you're an actress. You've obviously been put in a lot of situations where people want you to act out their will.LB: But the escargots takes the top. I've worked with a lot of photographers, and they never put me through through hell like Dali did.JS: If I was married to an actress who was doing a love scene, I'd say, "I know she's just acting." But I would really believe it while I was watching it. Now, if I believe it, she's got to believe it. What does that do to your personal life?LB: Well, there's a discipline and a distance when you're on a set with ninety people standing around you.JS: But you've got to believe what you're doing.LB: That's the game of it—to throw yourself into it at that moment and say, "O.K., I'm here, and I'm available." It's kind of opening a certain door and allowing someone in for just a couple of seconds, and then closing it.JS: What does that do to you afterward?LB: I'm shaken, because I've allowed someone in—not the way that I let my husband in, but little doors have been opened—and it's embarrassing. It's an intimacy that you've allowed in, whether it's the way you breathe, or smell, or touch. It's very embarrassing to show up in your nightgown on a set in front of someone whom you don't know profoundly.In Scorsese's movie I have this love scene, and I have a nightgown on through the whole thing. I don't think it would be considered one of those sexy, screwing-on-the-table kind of scenes. That's not what it is. I think it's a scene that's much more touching and vulnerable. Not that I'm against other types of love scenes. I happened to love 9½, Weeks. I found it very erotic.JS: There are other aspects of human relationships that I was talking about also. For example, in Marty Scorsese's new film you play Karen Hill, the wife in a twenty-year relationship with Henry Hill, a real-life wise guy, a mobster. How did that life seep into your life?LB: I spoke to Ray Liotta [who plays Henry Hill] just the other day, and I said to him, "What do you think, where did we go, where were we, who were we?"JS: I think Ray Liotta's great. In Something Wild he had 10,000 volts going through him.LB: In our movie, it was almost like we were three animals—Marty, Ray, and me. I was very scared of letting myself go in those rehearsals. Marty would talk to us, and we would listen. He really created an atmosphere of trust. Marty will let you try anything, without judgment. As an actor, I think that is probably the greatest thing a director can give you.JS: No preconceptions of how it should be?LB: He never showed any.JS: So what happened?LB: There were many times when Ray would feed me as an an actor, or I would feed him—by our invention, our sense of humor. It was just like a man and a wife, where the wife would be stronger or the husband would be stronger. You're married, and you're not. I would look at Ray sometimes and wonder, What am I doing?JS: How'd you become Karen Hill?LB: Karen Hill is from Long Island. I went to Long Island. I went to the neighborhood where she was brought up. I wanted to meet women who would I be her age now, today. I wanted them to take me to lunch. I wanted them to talk to me about their children and their lives and this and that, because I feel that Karen Hill was very much a mother involved with her children. She married Henry Hill at nineteen, a girl with a middle-class upbringing. She knew she wanted him, married him, had their two children. She fought for him and stuck by him through hell. I think Karen Hill had low self-esteem, and Henry made her feel special. When Henry walked into the Copacabana... At the time, Henry was a king, and because she was on his arm, she was someone. I'm sure today she would realize what all of that was about. But Henry made her feel like a million dollars.
Karen Hill's like a million women. The truth is, you're alone in life and you make your own way, and you make your own things. Some famous guy or some famous girl will not give it to you. Karen followed Henry into the witness-protection program. I believe Karen was a lovely girl who fell for the wrong guy. She's divorcing him now, from what I understand. I never met Karen. I never met Henry. I worked from what I could find out about them and from what my gut feeling was. I took certain movie liberties and used the book as a guideline.The truth is, Henry bought her off. Every time he did something wrong, he handed her a bracelet, diamonds, packs of cash, to keep her quiet. I believe that he loved her. But once he got involved with drugs, that was the downfall of Henry.JS: How did you get the part?LB: I met Marty, then he gave me the script, then I went back to talk to him. A couple of days later he said, "The part's yours." No audition. Which is probably the coolest thing that has ever happened to me. It was a blessing, because auditions are really the worst. If you're someone who cares about your work, you don't want to go in and say, "Well, I read it once. I'll give you the best I can." I'm not like that. And I could never do that to a role that I really feel I could do well. But I do auditions, because I am not at the stage where they are just calling me up and saying, "Here you go."JS: How did your kids get in the movie?LB: I needed them. I knew that there were going to be children—in fact, I needed four sets of children.JS: Because the film spans a twenty-year period in the marriage?LB: Yes. I asked Marty if I could have my children and my friends children. Stella plays the role of a two-to-three-year-old, then Margaux [Bracco's other daughter, now ten] takes over for Stella. If you know the children you can be more real with them. You are very intimate with them. On the set you do things with them that you wouldn't do to other children. I'll yell at my kids. You can say, "Behave yourself, otherwise I'm going to spank you all over this set," to your own kids. You can't say that to kids you just met. And my kids are their crazy selves. And I wanted that. I didn't want to have to deal with kids that I never saw before. I didn't want to ask, "What's your name again?" Now, Ray doesn't have children, so of course it's different for him. He would have had to relate to anyone the way he related to Margaux and Stella, and little Ruby and Violet, who were another set of kids.JS: You visited a prison to prepare for your part?LB: In one of the scenes, we go to Lewisburg federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. Karen Hill takes her kids every week to keep the family unit together. I think she fought for that family unit tremendously. This is about a woman who wakes up her children at four o'clock in the morning to be at the prison door at nine o'clock every Sunday, or every other Sunday, whenever her time was with Henry. Henry was dealing drugs, and she brought drugs down for him, because that's she dealing drugs, because that's how he was surviving in prison. She would hide all this grass, dope, cocaine, and pills in the salamis and the bread and his favorite pickles and his favorite peppers. That's how he made money for Karen. From what I understand he was considered one of the biggest dealers on the East Coast after he got out of prison. Anyway, I thought, Lewisburg! What the hell do I know about Lewisburg? I'm a nice girl from Brooklyn. I went to Paris to live for ten years! I said to Marty, "Do we know anybody in prison?" I'm walking around, saying to to anybody, "Do you have a friend in prison I can go visit?" I ended up going down to Lewisburg with the help of Warner Bros. When I went, it was a rainy, horrible day. They make you wait, they check you out, you go through four or five checkpoints.JS: It must have taken an immense amount of courage for her to carry all those drugs in.LB: Absolutely. I said to myself, "How could she possibly have done this?" Anyway, to get to a nicer note, I bring the kids to the prison, and Ray and I get into this screaming fight in the visiting room. Meanwhile Stella is looking at me like: What's going on? I just said that I was mad at him. I didn't give her too much, because I didn't think that she could understand. I grab Stella and the little one... You know how with kids, when you're mad and you're walking so fast and you're holding their hands and they're not even touching the floor... At one moment in this scene Stella turns around and looks at Ray and says, "If you yell at my mommy, we won't come here and visit you anymore!" Ray's shouting "Karen! Karen! Karen!" Then Stella looks at him very nicely and says, "My mother's isn't Karen!" God knows how Marty will edit this scene. We had to prove to the kids that we were acting, that it was make-believe. So we would kiss and hug after every take and then all of a sudden Marty would say "Action" and all hell would break loose.JS: So are you still in one piece?LB: It's hard being an actress-mother-wife. It's very hard. I would hate to have to do job after job after job. When I finish a movie, I'm drained, I'm exhausted. It takes a lot out of me physically. I don't know if it's like that with everyone. I think it depends on what kind of actor you are, what kind of human being you are, how much you're allowing someone to see. I have scenes in Marty's movie where I'm petrified to allow those emotions to come out. I used to yell at him: "Why do you make me do this? I don't want to go back into this. I finally got out of it! Why do I have to go back?" I was mad at him. Who wants to go back to a self-loathing, desperate woman? Those times are over for me.JS: I can't imagine you ever being that way.LB: You're wrong. That's why I am who I am now.JS: I love being wrong. One thing I'm right about is that Marty Scorsese's Raging Bull one of the greatest movies ever made.LB: When I saw Raging Bull I was in France. I went by myself and bought my eight-franc ticket. And I said to myself. If this guy ever meets me, he's going to know me. I also said that about Truffaut, except that the only time I saw him I was walking in the snow in Paris, bringing my laundry to the laundromat—and he walked into a pole because he was looking at me, which was definitely adorable. I didn't know it was him until weeks later when I saw him on a talk show and said, "That's the guy who walked into the pole!"JS: How old were you when you went to Paris?LB: Eighteen.JS: Why'd you go?LB: I was modeling. I never expected to spend ten years in France. It's so funny, because when I went there, I knew I belonged there. The strangest thing is that in Paris I get two things all the time: arthritis in my pinky and déjà vu. One time—I couldn't have been there more than a year—my soul came out and flew around the room for a while, then came back in.JS: Were you on drugs?LB: Absolutely not. I'd had a couple of cafés au lait. When I first got to France, I used to have six croissants every morning. That's how much I loved them. I put on twenty pounds. No drugs, just café au lait and croissants.JS: So when you moved back to New York, what was your first entry to Parnassus?LB: I was a gofer on the movie Falling in Love, with Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro. It taught me that the production side was not for me, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. That's when Harvey suggested that I come down to the Actors Studio. He saw that I was lost and felt that bringing me to the studio would help me discover what I wanted to do. About two years later David Rabe was having a reading for his play Goose and TomTom to cast it for a summer workshop at Lincoln Center. The final cast had Madonna, Sean Penn, Barry Miller, and Harvey, and they needed another girl. If I had run out of the room at the reading, that would have been a step in the right direction, I did so badly. I humiliated Harvey, I humiliated myself. I couldn't read. I was nervous. "What's my cue? Where do I come in here?" I just made up lines, words were jumping off the page. Harvey said, "Put your glasses on, honey. Maybe that will help." But David was very kind and realized that I just panicked. I got the part of Lulu. David Rabe gave me my first real chance.JS: Good thing you didn't have to audition for GoodFellas.LB: Playing Karen Hill in Marty's film was a gift from heaven.JS: I imagine in acting—where you have to depend so much on others to be able to accomplish your work—it's everything to work with people like that.LB: I love the brave people the visionaries. Eisenstein, Renoir, Rossellini, Bertrand Tavernier, Ridley Scott, David Lynch, Lina Wertmüller. When Lina said she was going to write in a little part for me, I asked, "Where and when do you need me?" —JULIAN SCHNABEL(photographer: sante d'orazio)

Playboy

Lorraine Bracco, 34, is a striking exception to the rule that gorgeous models in movies usually become either leading ladies or living statues but rarely make it as respected character actresses. Bracco accomplished the switch with the same panache that got her started modeling as a teenager, when she showed up unannounced at Manhattan's ultrachic Wilhelmina Agency. "I had no portfolio, no experience. Wilhelmina eyed me and said, 'I don't know what you've got, kid, but you've got something.'"While working in Paris, she met actor Harvey Keitel. Before long, the two were married and she abandoned the world of haute couture for that of showbiz. A couple of bit roles led to a part in a David Rabe play at New York's Lincoln Center along with Keitel, Madonna and Sean Penn ("I was terrified... but whatever you may hear, they're both kind, giving people").The play brought her to the attention of an agent, who got her screen-tested for her breakthrough role as Tom Berenger's betrayed wife in Someone to Watch over Me. Her Queens-housewife angst stole the movie, and Bracco was on her way.She has subsequently been cast "a mugged music teacher" in Sing, as the addled former love of Michael Keaton in The Dream Team, as Al pacino's ex-wife in the upcoming Sea of Love—and has just finished "a little gem" of a role in a film by Italy's Lina Wertmüller."I love being a chameleon, breaking the notions people have about former models who act. It's a real charge to see yourself on the cover of a fashion magazine, but films are a more soul-searching experience, something you've lived."

Self

LORRAINE BRACCO. . .Michael Keaton's The Dream Team cohort. . .in a reality tested day/night outfit: sheer bodystocking, small skirt, tailored jacket and gauzy shawl. Jacket with Indian beading, Bob Mackie Collection II, $1,120; at Saks Fifth Avenue, NYC.
Stretchy satin skirt, Andre Van Pier, about $290, at Andre Van Pier on Madison Avenue NYC and Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Fred Hayman, Beverly Hills. Isabel Canovas earrings, shawl; pumps, Manolo Blahnik.(photographer: andrea blanch)

Premier

C A M E O S
Actress
LORRAINE BRACCOEven Critics who weren't crazy about Someone to Watch Over Me found a bright spot in Lorraine Bracco's performance as the spunky, straight-talking wife of police detective Tom Berenger. All the more impressive was the fact that Bracco, at 34, was making her American film debut in a role that demanded a broad emotional range."It was a part that a lot of women could relate to," Bracco says, "and yet I was shocked at the response when I saw the movie." When Berenger's character admits he's been having an affair with the heiress played by Mimi Rogers, Bracco slugs him and then throws him out, prompting spontaneous cheers from female moviegoers.It's easy to imagine the feisty Bracco initiating a similar scene if her husband, actor Harvey Keitel, ever dared to stray. Though she modelled in Paris for ten years and arrives for lunch looking every inch the sophisticated New Yorker, she's still a working-class Brooklynite at heart, with an accent untamed by twice-a-week classes at the Actors Studio."If I found a script I loved, I could work on my accent and play Middle America," she says with a shrug. "I've just been very lazy."

Ask Bracco how she came to be cast opposite Michael Keaton in The Dream Team, one of three movies she's made since Someone premiered, and her response begins with a stare, "You've gotta be kidding me," she says. "I auditioned, like 500,000 other women. Whaddaya think, they knock down my door like they do for Meryl Streep? You're outta your bird."Instead of studying voice, the actress had to learn how to dance for her starring role in Sing, a musical reuniting the Footloose team of producer Craig Zadan and screenwriter-lyricist Dean Pitchford. Bracco plays an Italian schoolteacher in Brooklyn who tries everything to reach a troubled student and eventually joins him in a dance production number designed to express their mutual frustration.In the upcoming Sea of Love, Bracco plays a cop's wife again; she took the small role for the chance to work with Al Pacino and director Harold Becker (The Onion Field, Taps). Of Becker and Scott, she says, "A good director has no ego—he's willing to be your mirror and create an environment that allows you to make mistakes."Sensing her nervousness during the filming of Someone, Scott shot Bracco's scenes with two cameras, master and close-up, so she wouldn't have to repeat her emotional outbursts too many times. Co-star Berenger taught her to sit on her hands to avoid the impossible task of matching her movements each take. After a particularly wrenching scene, Bracco made her stormy exit, in character, then had to be reminded that Berenger still had his half of the scene to do.Acting wasn't Bracco's lifelong goal. At nineteen, after finishing high school, she was discovered by the Wilhelmina agency and went to Paris to become a model. While in France she worked as a disc jockey for Radio Luxembourg, produced a television special on fashion and music, and acted in a movie called Duos sur canapé.Bracco and Keitel, who met at a party in Paris, found that they share a Brooklyn background—his parents ran a luncheonette in Brighton Beach, and Bracco's father commuted to lower Manhattan to run a stall at the Fulton Fish Market. After marrying Keitel, Bracco began tagging along to his acting classes. "I sat in on the Actors Studio for about a year, just watching, then I sat in on Stella Adler's class, and little by little I said to myself, 'I think I can do this.' "Bracco's first stage performance was in the highly publicized 1989 Lincoln Center workshop production of David Rabe's Goose and Tomtom, costarring Keitel, Madonna, and Sean Penn. Buoyed by her husband's encouragement and the response of the high-powered invited audiences, she found the confidence to begin auditioning and soon met Ridley Scott.If all goes well, Bracco will debut as a film producer this spring, with a love story set in Louisiana called Catfish Tango. A friend from France, Jerome Lapperrousaz, will direct from a script by Mark Peploe.In Bracco's view, getting a relatively late start as an actor has been an advantage. "I'm not a young girl trying to fulfil a need in my life," she says. "I can hold my ground with anyone, and I'm not going to be influenced by the bullshit. I have a family [daughters Margaux, ten, and Stella, three] and lots of things interest me. Fame will not make my life better. I like where I am. I'm very much in control." —KATHY HENDERSON

Mademoiselle

Lorraine Bracco
Tries a Little Tenderness
Fancy clothes? Forget about it!
A Rolls? Who needs it!
Swanky digs? No way!
This star keeps things simpleWhen Lorraine Bracco walks into the restaurant, she looks like a person you'd choose to sit next to on a crowded bus: slim (room for both of you on the seat), hardly threatening, and pretty in a nondescript kind of way. She's wearing jeans, a beret, a down jacket with a heart-shaped patch that must be keeping a rip in check. "I've learned to dress down because I attract all the weirdos in the world," she explains. "If I put on my glasses and wear no makeup, I don't get a second glance."

But even though she's got that face-in-a-crowd look down pat, you'd better believe she's getting plenty of attention in the movie world these days. Bracco's won major roles in three big films due out this year: the current Sing (with Louise Lasser and Patti LaBelle), Dream Team (with Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd and Peter Boyle) and the upcoming Sea of Love (with Ellen Barkin and Al Pacino).If you caught the 1987 thriller Someone to Watch Over Me, you'll understand how Bracco broke into the big time in such a big way. She played cop Tom Berenger's wife, Ellie, a tough-but-tender Queens cookie who gets to slug her cheating husband and blow away the bad guy in the end. The critics loved her performance—generally considered the only memorable thing about an otherwise forgettable flick.Bracco's pretty riveting in person, too. For starters, there's the quirky charm of her quintessentially New York accent—Get outta heah, she might say. (Some might assume she perfected it to play the character of Ellie, but get this—it's the real thing.) Then there's the fact that she lays into her lunch so enthusiastically, actually hooting with excitement when the homemade Italian bread, herbed and olive-oiled, arrives at the table. This is a woman you'd love to hang out with, eating raw cookie dough and dishing about guys late into the night.Don't misunderstand—up close, Bracco is beautiful: big green eyes, great skin, cheekbones to die for. Not surprisingly, she used to model. "I liked doing it because I got to travel," she says. "But once I'd been to Morocco and Tunisia and Rio and Italy and the South of France, modeling was no longer exciting."

After she gave that up, Bracco lived in Paris, working as a TV producer, then a radio talk-show host—even acting in a minor film—all this despite the fact that she didn't speak much French. During this period, she also met her husband of the past five years, fellow actor and New York native Harvey Keitel. "It was great," Bracco remembers. "Harvey calls his mother from Paris and says. "I've met the woman I'm going to marry. and she's from Brooklyn!" "Talk about kismet.Now Bracco is outlining the trip she is making to L.A. later this week to meet movie producers. Ah, you think. Hollywood. Glitzy parties. Stretch limos. Big hair, plunging necklines. "Not me, babe," she says, running a hand through her own cropped do. "I got nothing to hold those dresses up." She laughs heartily. You begin to realize that Bracco enjoys a good joke, even when it's at her own expense. And she probably wouldn't care if she laughed so hard that it made her mascara run (that is, if she were wearing any)."Figure this out," she says. "These big producers are flying me out to have a meeting, except it's gonna be lunch. We chat. The coffee comes and it's real full. So it's like"—she fakes a slurp—" "Hi, I'm Lorraine. I want to star in your movie.' Table manners-plus, right?"Right. But somehow, you know she's got no reason to worry—if the big boys notice her slurping coffee, they'll probably like her better for it. —JULIA CLAIBORNE JOHNSON(photographer: andrea blanch)

Interview

"I didn't have the confidence to think I'd ever act in the theatre or movies."BRACCO'S BRASSActress Lorraine Bracco adds a high polish to some new roles. Robert Walsh found her in SoHo.BUNDLED UP AGAINST THE ZERO-DEGREE cold, and with a shopping bag full of flowers in tow as she scrambles up the front steps of a SoHo restaurant, Lorraine Bracco doesn't carry herself like the veteran fashion model or much-in-demand fledgling actress that she is. She looks pretty much like the character she played so convincingly in her first American film—Tom Berenger's ex-cop wife in Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch Over Me.Bracco has driven to Manhattan with her family—husband Harvey Keitel and daughters Margaux, age nine, and Stella, three—from their weekend retreat, an old farm in upstate New York. Her manner is casual and ingenuous, and the combined accents of her Brooklyn childhood, Long Island adolescence, and many years in France suffuse her husky voice."I grew up in Bay Ridge—my father still works at the Fulton Fish Market—and then my family moved out to Westbury when I was Margaux's age," she says. "People were baby-booming all over then; we had 3,000 kids in our Hicksville senior class. Billy Joel came out of my school, and Jeffrey Kurland, who does costume designs for Woody Allen. I enjoyed being involved in school plays, but they didn't really allow for any imagination, and I didn't have the confidence to think that I'd ever act in the theater or movies. I knew I was going to get out of there; I just didn't know how."

Bracco has prominent roles in three up coming films, but things haven't always been so rosy. "I had a goddamned tough time in that school; one year I was voted ugliest girl. That's partly why I wanted to be in Sing." In this new movie musical created by Footloose alumni, Bracco stars with Patti LaBelle as a high school teacher who returns to Brooklyn after a long absence. "There were several teenage suicides in the news just before I was signed for the part," she explains. "It's hard when you're 14 or 15 and you've been protected all your life—and suddenly there are all these grown-up problems that are going to be yours soon. In the picture, I deal with a kid who is basically a little criminal on his way to becoming a major criminal.

I have to prove myself to him in a storytelling production number, a kind of tough love challenge dance—it took me months to learn the moves. I think it's important that kids are taught that there's always hope and that sometimes things just take a turn for the better. I had fits with a few members of the Sing cast who were old enough to vote in the last election but didn't bother. I told them: 'Better wake up! The joke's going to be on you in a couple of years. Being silent is deadly.'"Despite having been singled out as the ugliest girl in her class, Bracco was convinced by one of her high school teachers to try her hand at modeling in New York. She was snapped up instantly by Wilhelmina and was soon seen in Mademoiselle, Seventeen, and other magazines. "Wilhelmina used to call me 'Kid,'" she remembers fondly. "'Come here, Kid.' It was cute." Once her career began to take off, Bracco went to Europe for what she expected would be only a few months. Instead, she lived in Paris for the next ten years—"in about 20,000 different apartments.""I'm the kind of person who's hardly ever intimidated," she says with a grin, "and I had a sense of humor about being there. I have a pretty good ear and picked up French quickly, so I was never lonely. I'd visit my mom's family in England, and there were plenty of Americans around. It was a time of growing up and becoming independent."Bracco appeared in three European films, but she considers them forgettable: "All I had to do was learn my lines and show up on time. There were some charming things in them, and some stupid things, and one of them was quite successful. But they only wanted me for my look or my personality—nobody taught me that there could be more to a character. I didn't know that there was creative work an actor does that the director can't give you. So I was absolutely miserable when I was acting, but I didn't know why. If I hadn't seen an ad for a theater seminar in Paris with Lee Strasberg's son John, I never would have made another movie. When I went to his class that first day, it was like the curtain being pulled back in The Wizard of Oz. I realized that I just didn't know what I was doing. It was the most important thing that ever happened to me."Shortly after meeting her future husband, Harvey Keitel, Bracco returned to New York in 1983. She says that she still "devours acting classes," and she has recently become a member of the Actors Studio. "The first theater I did was David Rabe's workshop production of Goose and TomTom at Lincoln Center in 1986. I was very lucky because he cast me in a small part... but I was thrown in with Harvey, Madonna, and Sean Penn. It's awful the way the press harasses Sean until he can't take it anymore. He was riveting in Hurlyburly in Los Angeles; he should be very proud of himself as an actor."Bracco has played more than her share of "exes" and "formers" in the past year: the teacher in Sing; Al Pacino's ex-wife in Sea of Love, with Ellen Barkin; and Michael Keaton's ex-girlfriend in The Dream Team, which stars Keaton, Christopher Lloyd, and Peter Boyle as asylum inmates on a disastrous field trip to Yankee Stadium. Bracco smiles. "My biggest fear before we started was that Michael would walk out as Beetle Juice, Christopher as the professor in Back to the Future, and Peter as the monster in Young Frankenstein. What a nightmare!"After shooting three features consecutively in 1988, commuting between New York and Toronto, Bracco took the fall off to be with her husband, children, and extended family. It's a family that's increasingly difficult to separate from her profession. "God knows we've had our battles," she says, shaking her head, "but I'm very close to my parents, which is rare these days. My family's turning into a real group theater: there's Harvey; me; my sister, Elizabeth, is married to Aidan Quinn and just finished a part in the new Jim Jarmusch film. I tell you, I can't wait to get my father into the movies!" —ROBERT WALSH(photographer: brigitte lacombe)

Vogue France

Translation: Passing through Lorraine
Passing through Paris, Lorraine Bracco became an actress. Returning to New York for a real role, she's back on French screens as a star at the end of the month in Someone to Watch Over MeLorraine Bracco appeared with Michel Galabru in Duo sur canapé playing herself, an American-Parisian model. In Someone to Watch Over Me, Ridley Scott took her by surprise. And launched her career.Lorraine Bracco is a woman (full) of contradictions: an iron will, sexy, vibrant, capable when she wants to speak her mind and will drop everything for friends or family, yet surprisingly shy in the presence of strangers; a doting mother, a former Parisian model, and an actress whose career took off with her role in Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch Over Me. She looks as comfortable and relaxed on screen as she does in front of a camera or on the catwalk, but her true happiness is settling down on her sofa and reading to her two daughters, Stella and Margaux.This is a career that truly began in Paris when Lorraine was 18. She was a protégée of Wilhelmina's, who had convinced her to leave New York for France. Her modeling career was a success from the start, with covers for Cosmopolitan and 20 Ans, runway appearances during ready-to-wear shows, and a groundbreaking collection with Jean-Paul Gaultier (little known at the time). She appeared alongside Michel Galabru in Duo sur canapé, playing an American model living in Paris.

There was just one problem: she couldn't read a word of French, so she had to take crash courses at Berlitz. She produced a few programs for Radio Luxembourg as well as a show about fashion and music on Les enfants du Rock on Antenne 2.She was happy in Paris and wasn't thinking of leaving, when love swept her off her feet in the form of actor Harvey Keitel (Mean Streets, Fingers). Within three months, she was back in New York to be with him.Ridley Scott cast her in an unexpected role for his thriller Someone to Watch Over Me. Alongside Mimi Rogers and Tom Berringer, she forms part of a love triangle involving a happy couple and the exotic woman who comes between them. Claire (Mimi Rogers) is everything Ellie (Lorraine Bracco) isn't: very classy, wealthy, and reserved. Ellie realises her husband is falling for this woman before he does himself; her fighting spirit and determination to protect her family are truly the heart of the film.Lorraine has just started her first musical movie, Sing, with Patti La Belle. Her character is brought in to teach dance to urban kids, to inspire them and broaden their horizons.It's a role Lorraine seemed destined for, this warm, talented woman with a wonderful ability to convince those around her to embrace life. —MARTHA FRANKEL(photographer: andrea blanch)

Vogue

Not since Tyne Daly started police work has reality looked this good: LORRAINE BRACCO, left, who quietly stole Someone To Watch Over Me, her first American film.Bracco cut through Ridley Scott's perfumed atmosphere with a portrait of the ultimate provincial New Yorker. She had only a K Mart wardrobe and her own intense energy to work with; she talked with her whole body, down to the last soulful like, geez. Bracco's accent, it turns out, is real—she's a Brooklyn native. Ten years in Paris as a fashion model polished a personal style as cocky as her dialect ("I like my Chanel with sneakers"). Home is New York City's TriBeCa, the cradle of hip, where she lives with her husband, actor Harvey Keitel, and two children. Her next co-star: Patti LaBelle in Craig Zadan's Sing. "A total chameleon," Lorraine calls herself. A total natural, too.—S.D.(photographer: andrea blanch)

Details

Sweet Lorraine

A typical saturday night at Lorraine Bracco's: While Lorraine shows off the upstate house to her childhood friend, costume designer Jeff Kurland, sister Lizzie and Lizzie's husband-to-be Aidan Quinn pack up and say their good-byes. Husband Harvey Keitel shares jokes with a long-time pal Vic Argo, who sits in the corner reading a script. Lorraine's eighteen-month-old daughter Stella waddles up to each person, smiling and happy, dressed in a rabbit costume. Lorraine's parents Sheila and Sal tell stories about the old neighborhood while a second daughter, nine-year-old Margaux, vamps around in pyjamas and a scarf, singing every song Madonna ever sang. Most of the men are smoking cigars. Lorraine boils the one cup of water for my tea in a ten-quart sauce pan. ("Lorraine's versatile," Harvey deadpans. "You get tea, or you get pasta for ten.") No lifestyles of the rich and famous here: Rather, a welcoming, hamisher home, sort of You Can't Take It With You with Lucy at the helm.Later on, with the rabbit asleep on Lorraine's lap and a fire roaring in the fireplace, the talk turns to movies. "My career is definitely secondary to my family," Lorraine said to me one day. And sitting here, watching her bask in this simple domestic scene, it certainly seems plausible. At sixteen, she became a Wilhelmina model, living with Wilhelmina herself until Lorraine finished high school. A French agent then convinced her to go model in Paris, where she had great success. When modeling got boring, she quit. Soon after she had Margaux.

Next came producing some films and TV, and some small parts playing ditsy American women, which got old quick. Then, when she decided to say permanently in Paris, she met Harvey "across a crowded room." Three months later, she and Margaux moved back to America.After knocking around a while, she was invited to read for David Rabe, who was directing his Goose and Tomtom as a work in progress at Lincoln Center. The reading was a disaster, but Rabe saw something in her. She got the part. The rest of the cast was Barry Miller, Keitel, Sean Penn and Madonna. "Quite an experience," she says. "I love the stage. Everyone involved was creative, generous and supportive. It was an actor's dream."A few months later she got the script for Ridley Scott's new movie, Someone to Watch Over Me. Her portrayal of Ellie, a cop's wife, the daughter of a cop, and an ex-cop herself, is a mixture of exuberance, vulnerability and strength, very much like Lorraine herself. "But no self-pity," she says. "I fought very hard to make sure she wasn't a wimp." Not to worry. When Ellie finds out that her husband (Tom Berenger) is having an affair, she punches him in the jaw.What's next? For now she's reading for other directors and looking at lots of scripts. She's not too concerned, though. As she told me one day, "I am living proof that dreams come true." —MARTHA FRANKEL(photographer: michael tighe)

Interview Brazil

[source: https://www.instagram.com/pelitogalvez.photo]

Note: rough translation, I don't speak Portuguese, sorryLORRAINE BRACCO
An American actress, who has lived in Paris for five years.She speaks French practically without an accent. She made a film in France with Marc Camoletti, and another is in preparation, to be released in December.Lorraine is taking regular courses in Dramatic Arts at the Théâtre de Paris with John Strasberg (son of Lee): this course is the most important thing for her.Mother of a little girl named Margaux, she loves Italian cuisine. Would you like to try it?(photographer: oscar pelito galvez)

COSMOPOLITAN

[note: this is currently with my good friend in France (since French magazines often have to be shipped within France), Lorraine is on another page. Proper scans are due once she can mail it to me]

Translation:Lorraine is photographed by Hervé Nabon.Makeup: Edith Rémy for Lancôme.Foundation: amber Maquisatin, Maqui Finish transparent powder.On the cheeks: toffee brown and pale pink blush.On the lips: Peach lipstick.On the eyes: Faithful Cloud and Peach shadow, and on the lashes: Black Immencils.Haircut by Daniel Harlow: Zig et Puce
Honeycomb cotton shirt (112 F Lacoste).
Gold chain (450 F Agatha).
3:44(photographer: hervé nabon)

TEEN

[source: https://www.alicecooperechive.com]

LORRAINE’S BEAUTY TIPS- “A liquid cleanser works best for me. My undereye circles are hereditary. A light liquid foundation helps.”
- “I never use hairspray, but a good conditioner is a must.”
- “Vaseline Petroleum Jelly makes a great lip gloss.”1. —On-camera moves must be fast, but look natural and graceful.
2. —Auditioning for a TV commercial means understanding it. Bill Yankus, account supervisor at BBDO advertising agency, explains a Breck Shampoo storyboard (picture plus copy) to Lorraine.
3. —Fast lunch between appointments– a hotdog on Third Avenue.
4. —”Bicycling is a great way to exercise.”
5. —At the agency Wilhelmina studies Lorraine’s newest pictures.
6. —”Using baby oil under makeup and before bedtime keeps my skin soft.”

NEW YORK
Lorraine Bracco:
17-year-old from Long Island, N. Y.
5’7½": 105 lbs.; size 5-7
Wilhelmina Modeling Agency, N .Y.Professional modeling plus high school? It CAN be done! These two teen models prove it. Paint their schedules super energetic.Effervescent, dark-eyed Lorraine wants that Top Model title. And she’s on the right track. It all began in the eighth grade. “This teacher kept telling me I should model,” says Lorraine. “I thought he was crazy. I mean, I’m tall and all that. But modeling? I don’t even like wearing makeup. Anyway, he set up an appointment for me to meet Willy (Wilhelmina, once a top model, now the owner of a top modeling agency). And she gave me a four year contract.”She’s busy too, seeing photographers, magazine editors, casting directors and learning more about makeup. Now she carries all the essentials in her prop bag: foundation, cover stick, mascara and eyeshadow, blusher, lipstick and gloss. The natural look is still her first choice off camera though. “When I get home, I feel so grimy. I can’t wait to wash.”Lorraine may not experiment much with makeup, but she spends a lot of time studying her pictures to see how she looks. “If there’s something wrong with my hair or eyes, I figure out a way to correct it– different shadow, a new haircut, whatever.”Her typical day begins with a hearty breakfast, because she never knows whether there’ll be time for lunch. Right after school (at noon) she takes a 45-minute train ride into Manhattan for a booking and / or interviews for future jobs. “If a model is smart, she’ll go to every interview she can,” Lorraine comments “Even if she doesn’t get that job, she can leave her composite (picture brochure) so the client will remember her.“Sometimes interviewing is a drag, though. Every model knows about ‘cattle calls,’ when about 50 models of your description come to see the same client at the same time. Waiting around for an hour to show your portfolio, smile and say good-bye can be demoralizing if you let it. I try not to.”On weekends, Lorraine unwinds. But by 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, Lorraine’s at home and asleep. It’s the only way she can get ready for that whirlwind week to come.—CATHIE MANN

FAQ & Contact

Why? Don't get it twisted—I'm just doing this for Lorraine's award-winning biscotti recipe.Do you take donations? I've been asked this one a lot, and while I appreciate it, I'm not looking to take monetary donations. If you want to support the project, you can email me with archival items (or tips on where to find them). Apart from that, it would mean the world to me if you supported Lorraine by purchasing her works through official retailers and streaming platforms or by donating to one of her listed charity organisations.Can you translate x French film? Non, sorry—translating and subtitling takes me a long time. I'm not looking to translate anything outside of Lorraine's projects.Will the video archives have everything? Nope. I am only providing works that aren't commercially available, plus interviews and public appearances that I have personally archived. I'm constantly chipping away at my massive master list and finding new things. That said, if you know of something that’s missing or you’re having trouble accessing a project due to regional restrictions, send me a message below!Will the paper archives have everything? Again, no. While my collection is pretty extensive, there are many vintage publications on my master list that I haven't tracked down yet. Tracking down those items will require a lot more time, money, and effort, but the goal is to make the publication section as comprehensive as possible. I also omit some things at my discretion and will not be providing full scans of her books. Please buy her books via the official retailers linked over on the career page!What's your favourite Lorraine project? Haha, The Sopranos Duh! As for movies, my absolute favourite is Radio Flyer, but additionally I have a huge soft spot for both of her 1996 movies, Someone to Watch Over Me for Ellie, and everything from her "baby French" era. Conceptually, The Graduate would be my favourite project of hers, but since I never had the chance to see her on stage myself, I can't definitively claim it to be my favourite. I know that's more than one answer... deal with it! :P

If you have any other questions, please message me using the form below or contact me via my socials @braccobelle
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