Actor Nancy Marchand, star of 'The Sopranos,' dies at 71

©New York Times

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 20, 2000

Nancy Marchand, the distinguished character actor who excelled at playing wise and imperious authority figures, and who achieved perhaps her greatest fame as the domineering mother of a mob boss in the television series The Sopranos, died on Sunday at her home in Stratford, Conn. Monday would have been her 72nd birthday.

According to her daughter Katie Sparer Bowe, no specific cause of death was given, but for several years the actor had been suffering from cancer and chronic pulmonary disease.

Marchand once described her physical presence as "a strange combination of being very imposing and down-to-earth," an accurate assessment of the seemingly contradictory image she projected.

That description could be applied to the overburdened wife she played in the 1980 Broadway revival of Osborn's Morning's at Seven, her patrician publisher on the long-running Lou Grant television series and her portrayal of Livia Soprano. Livia, the monster mother of them all, without a blink of hesitation sets up her son, Tony, to be assassinated because he has moved her to a nursing home.

Except for her indomitability, Livia was in direct contrast to all the "tasteful ladies" Marchand played in her busy career. At 70, after more than 50 years of acting, she discovered a new popularity, and it was for playing a wildly unsympathetic character.

Throughout her career, Marchand gave her roles an unexpected edge. She was an expert at both light and more serious comedy, moving effortlessly from the outrageous antics in the movie spoof, The Naked Gun, to Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Often she acted on stage with her husband, Paul Sparer -- in everything from A Phoenix Too Frequent by Christopher Fry to Edward Albee's Delicate Balance to Gurney's Love Letters.

Sparer died in November of cancer. In addition to her daughter Katie, an actor who lives in Stratford, Marchand is survived by a son, David, Madison, Wis.; another daughter, Rachel Sparer Bersier, an opera singer in New York City; and seven grandchildren.

Offstage, Marchand was the reverse of so many of her strong-willed characters, a woman with a natural sense of insecurity, someone who felt uneasy in social situations. "I'm always very uncomfortable with people," she once explained in an interview in the New York Times. "It's something that I get upset with myself for, but that's the way I am. But I love people. And when I'm on the stage, I can embrace people and still feel safe. There are a lot of different facets to my personality that I don't use all the time in my house, or in everyday life, that I can experience and share when I'm on a stage."

Nancy Marchand was born in Buffalo, N.Y., on June 19, 1928. After studying theater at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, she made her first professional appearance on stage in 1946 in The Late George Apley in Ogunquit, Maine. It was while acting in Shakespeare and Shaw at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass., that she met Sparer. When they moved to New York, she appeared on live television, playing Jo in a dramatization of Little Women, and then playing the female lead opposite Rod Steiger in the original television version of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty.

In 1957, she made her Broadway debut in Miss Isobel, and two years later won an Obie award for her role as Madame Irma in the Off Broadway premiere of Genet's The Balcony. For several years she played leading Shakespearean roles with the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Conn. Marchand worked with equal ease on Broadway, Off Broadway and in regional theater, as well as in movies and on television. In the 1980s she played the title role in Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, among many roles.

Her movie appearances included The Hospital, two films with the team of Merchant Ivory, The Bostonians and Jefferson in Paris, and the remake of Sabrina, in which she played Harrison Ford's mother. For her role as Mrs. Pynchon, the publisher of the Los Angeles Tribune on Lou Grant, she won four Emmy awards.

Marchand played Livia Soprano for two seasons. During the last show of the second season, there was a sudden twist in the narrative. Tony gave his mother airline tickets so that she and his aunt could fly to Arizona. But the tickets were stolen property, and airport security stopped Livia. Frantically, she telephoned her son.