"All I ever wanted to do was act. And pay my bills," the actress Edie Falco told Robin Finn for the New York Times (April 24, 2001). The order in which she listed those desires is perhaps telling; a look at her 15-year career in television, film, and theater makes it clear that Falco has long placed artistic integrity ahead of financial reward. It was not until she landed the part of Carmela Soprano on the highly successful HBO cable-TV series The Sopranos, which debuted in 1999, that Falco could claim both. A seasoned New York theater actress whose work included parts in Off-Broadway plays and television police dramas, Falco spent over a dozen years working day jobs to support herself before finding success with The Sopranos, whose sixth season is scheduled to begin on March 12, 2006. (Frequently mentioned in interviews is that immediately prior to the show's debut, Falco--who was in her mid-30s--could not afford cable television.) By the start of the show's second season, in 2000, she had become the first actress ever to win all of television's major awards: an Emmy, for outstanding lead actress in a dramatic series; a Golden Globe, for best performance by an actress in a dramatic television series; and a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award, for outstanding performance by a female actor in a drama.

    Falco's role on the show, as the put-upon wife of the fictional New Jersey Mafia boss Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini), has been acclaimed for its subtlety and lack of pretense. Mark Morris commented in the London Observer (September 24, 2000), "Falco is effortless in the role, utterly real: despairing, loyal, tough, able to hold her own at unexpected moments. The Mafia wife who flirts with the priest, who makes the cannelloni, who seems so ordinary and decent and yet is an expert at stashing the cash when the Feds come calling. The fact that she's not flashy or obvious but you still notice her is what makes her performance special." Falco's theater work has also been commended. Her notable stage appearances have included a 2001 run of the Vagina Monologues at London's Ambassador Theater, as well as a performance of that show in New York as part of the events of V-Day, which sought to raise awareness about violence toward women. She also starred in the 2002 revival of Terence McNally's 1987 play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, which broke four box-office records at New York's Belasco Theater and was the most successful Broadway show of its season. In 2004 she played a suicidal daughter in Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother, at the Royale Theater on Broadway. Describing that performance, Jesse Green wrote for the New York Times (November 7, 2004) "Critics and colleagues reach for words like 'transparency' and 'vulnerability' to describe her work because the work itself is almost invisible. Her characters come across directly, without the semaphore of actorly style."

    Edith Falco was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 5, 1963, the second of four children. When she was four, her family relocated to Long Island, where the actress spent the remainder of her childhood, moving among neighboring towns. Green, paraphrasing Falco, described the actress's family as "nutty and bohemian"; both of her parents were involved in the arts--Edie's father, Frank Falco, as a graphic artist and jazz drummer, and her mother, Judith Anderson, as an amateur actress. Her parents divorced when she was 14. Falco told Bruce Fretts for Entertainment Weekly (January 15, 1999), "I grew up as a tomboy. I was always barefoot, running races with the guys on the block, climbing trees, and beating kids up." As a young girl she performed plays in a wooden theater her mother constructed in their backyard. She also accompanied her mother to community theater performances, which inspired Falco to take a more serious interest in drama. She joined Northport High School's theater and choral groups, and she also auditioned (unsuccessfully) for a part in the Broadway production of Dreamgirls.

    In 1982 Falco enrolled at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase, studying drama at the school's Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film. The conservatory's reputation for producing famous actors had led its alumni to be nicknamed "The Purchase Mafia." Falco found the environment intimidating and was unhappy with the parts she received. "I spent four years with blacked-out teeth and a Cockney accent. It broke my heart," she told Michael A. Lipton and Ken Baker for People (March 13, 2000). She was often cast in the parts of aging women, overlooked for starring roles because she lacked the conventional looks of a lead actress. "I had problems with my weight, being heavy, and some people were not very nice about that. I spent a lot of time crying. . . . At that point it had been drilled into me that the pretty, confident girls would get the work," she told Green. After a professor warned her that she "would never work in television or film because of the way I talk--I have a slight sibilance," Falco took speech therapy and, upon graduating, in 1986, set out to be a professional actress in New York City.

    Over the next five years, Falco acted in Off-Broadway plays and got small parts in soap operas, working as a waitress to earn additional income. She also appeared in independent films by SUNY Purchase graduates, such as Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth (1989), in which she had her first professional film role; Hartley's Trust (1990); and Nick Gomez's Laws of Gravity (1992). In addition to waitressing, Falco trained as both a legal proofreader and a graphic artist. She also worked for a company that hired her out as an entertainer at parties and other functions. She told Morris, "I had to dress up as Betsy Ross once, sit on the centrepiece of a table while people ate their dinner. Guys got drunk and started looking under my skirt, it was a . . . nightmare. Other times, we had to dress up in outfits and pull people on to the dancefloor. At weddings, I'm the one in the chair praying that no one comes near me. And there I was, having to put on Cookie Monster with this giant head." During that period Falco struggled with substance addiction and experienced anxiety attacks. She told Jeff Giles for Newsweek (September 16, 2002), "You go to college and you go off and do plays and then when the dust clears, you are left alone in your crazy apartment at 4 in the afternoon with no job, no prospects and a waitressing shift to go to. And real, heavy-duty darkness can set in." One day Falco walked off her job at a hardware store and boarded a train to Long Island, where she rested at her mother's home. Asked if her mother advised her at that point to give up acting, Falco told Giles, "No, she just talked me through it. Anxiety attacks have been in my family for years. We are sort of a high-strung bunch."

    In the early 1990s, after overcoming her addiction through a variety of methods, Falco was cast in more visible, recurring television roles: as an attorney on Law and Order and as a police officer's wife on Homicide: Life on the Street. She also landed small parts in feature-length films, including Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway (1994); Cop Land (1997), starring Sylvester Stallone; and the Howard Stern vehicle Private Parts (1997). As she had during college, Falco often felt typecast--either as "The Diane Keaton type, sort of fumbling around" or as the no-nonsense "district attorney type," as she told Kamau High for the Financial Times (October 30, 2004). But as a writer for Celebrity Biographies (2005) noted, she approached even those limited parts with ingenuity, bringing "increased dimensionality to the stereotypical hardened woman." For two years beginning in 1997, she played one such part--that of a corrections officer--on the HBO series Oz.

    It was her work on Oz (a show created by Tom Fontana, who had previously directed Falco in Homicide: Life on the Street) that caught the attention of The Sopranos' creator, David Chase, who asked Falco to audition for the part of Carmela. Chase said to Lipton and Baker about the role, "Without a real strong, shrewd wife like Carmela, what you'd have is just another conventional Mob show with a bunch of wiseguys sitting around b.s.-ing and smoking in bars." Once she got the part, Falco initially doubted her ability to portray her character adequately. Falco, who had no children when The Sopranos began filming, told Jane Pauley on NBC's program Dateline (January 18, 2002, on-line), "When I was first cast in the part, . . . my biggest fear was being able to pull off being the mother of two teenagers." Her fear subsided, though, as she spent more time on the set. "Something very organic happens when you're around two young kids, and you're behaving as their mother, something bigger than me starts to take place, and I start to think, 'I think I could do this.' Not only could I, but I think I'd like to," she said to Pauley. (Indeed, in 2004 Falco adopted a son, whom she named Anderson--her mother's maiden name.) Discussing her preparation for playing Carmela, Falco told Pauley, "I get on the set, truly it is a Pavlovian experience. There's the house, there's Tony, me and my kids and there's my fingernails and my jewelry and the hair and the outfit. And I am suddenly a different person."

    Falco had to adjust to a newfound celebrity she had not expected. Of her sudden fame, she told Robin Finn, "I'm very happy for it, but it also makes you kind of quizzical about the world; you know, they see you on a television show and suddenly you're more worthy than you were five years ago, which is malarkey, frankly." In 2003 Falco was diagnosed with breast cancer. She continued to work on The Sopranos while receiving treatment; to protect her privacy, she kept her condition concealed from the media until her treatment was completed.

    Falco's heightened profile also created new expectations on the part of celebrity watchers. At the 1999 Emmy Awards ceremony, at which she won the honor for outstanding lead actress in a dramatic series, Falco was also named "worst dressed" by E! Television's fashion critics Joan and Melissa Rivers. "I grew up a tomboy," Falco said to Morris. "Here I was, thrust into this world where I feel so out of place. I'm trying to do my best, to show up for these things. The truth is that it goes against my nature." She also told Morris, "It felt like the popular girl at junior high had put gum on my back."

    Falco reportedly feels fulfilled by her work. "I'm the happiest person I know," she told Green. Asked what she plans to do after The Sopranos concludes, Falco told Pauley, "Some place or other, I will be acting after this is done, because it is what I love to do. It is the only time I really feel sure that I know why I am alive. . . . It doesn't matter if . . . I remain in the public eye or, you know, the level at which, you know, I'll be recognized . . . nobody can stop me from doing it." In the past half-dozen years, Falco has been featured in a number of mainstream films. In 1999 she played a supporting role in the Sydney Pollack drama Random Hearts (1999), starring Harrison Ford. In 2002, in a role written specifically for her, she appeared as the divorcee and motel manager Marly Temple in John Sayles's Sunshine State (2002). She has a role in the film Freedomland, starring Samuel Jackson, which opened in theaters in February 2006.