Livia Soprano¶

At a glance¶

Played by: Nancy Marchand
Also: Vera Farmiga in The Many Saints of Newark
Spouse: Giovanni "Johnny Boy" Soprano (d. 1986)
Children: Janice, Tony, Barbara
Died: 2000 — stroke, off-screen, "Proshai, Livushka" (S3E28)
Golden Globe: Supporting Actress, 2000

Oh, poor you.

The show's original antagonist, based directly on David Chase's own mother, and one of the great monsters in American fiction — who never once says anything you could hold against her in a court.

The method¶

Livia's weapon is deniability. She does not issue orders, make threats, or state positions. She sighs. She mentions things. She raises a concern about someone else's behavior and lets it sit.

The masterpiece is season one. She feeds Junior a steady diet of observations — that Tony is seeing a psychiatrist, that people who see psychiatrists talk, that Tony has been disrespectful — none of which is a request. Junior orders the hit. Livia has technically done nothing.

When Tony finally understands, in "I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano," he goes to the nursing home to smother her with a pillow — and finds her being wheeled out on a gurney, apparently having had a stroke, smiling at him as she passes.

She wins. She always wins, because she has arranged her entire personality so there is nothing to push against.

"Poor you"¶

Her signature construction, and the most efficient piece of characterization in the series.

Any expression of difficulty — from anyone — is met with a flat, bitter poor you. Any offer of help is an insult. Any kindness is evidence of a plot. She would rather be right about the world's cruelty than be comfortable, and she has spent seventy years collecting evidence.

Her worldview, delivered to her grandson at a funeral, is the show's bleakest sentence: that it's all a big nothing, and in the end you die in your own arms.

A.J. remembers it. It's the first thing that breaks him, and the pessimism that runs through his whole arc is traceable directly to his grandmother in one scene.

David Chase's mother¶

Chase has been open to the point of discomfort about the source. Livia is based on Norma Chase, whom he has described as a passive-aggressive drama queen, and much of her dialogue is reportedly verbatim.

Chase has said the original conception of the show was a mob boss in therapy dealing with his mother — the mother was the premise, not the mob. Which means the whole series is a man attempting to describe his mother to a professional and being told it explains him.

Nancy Marchand¶

Marchand was a distinguished stage actress and a four-time Emmy winner for Lou Grant — best known, before this, for playing patrician, formidable, upper-class women. Casting her as a bitter working-class Newark widow was against everything she'd done.

She was already ill with lung cancer when the series began, and visibly frailer through seasons two and three. She won the Golden Globe for Supporting Actress in 2000.

She died on June 18, 2000, aged 71 — one day before her 72^nd birthday, and two months after the season two finale aired.

Writing her out¶

Season three had to remove her, and did it in the second episode. "Proshai, Livushka" kills her off-screen and spends the hour on the aftermath: a wake at which nobody can produce a true or kind sentence about her, and Tony's grief presenting as fury at anyone who tries.

There is one brief scene using digitally composited footage of Marchand from previous material. It was controversial, it looks wrong, and the show never attempted it again.

Losing Livia changed the series permanently. She had been the external explanation for Tony — the reason he was like this. Without her, the show has to locate the problem inside him, and every subsequent season is harder on him because there's no longer anyone else to blame.

Her presence never really leaves. Tony's mistresses are all, structurally, her: Gloria Trillo in season three most explicitly, which Melfi names out loud.