Aida Turturro¶
At a glance¶
- Born
- September 25, 1962, Brooklyn
- Role
- Janice Soprano, 2000–2007
- Emmy nominations
- 2 — no wins
- Family
- Cousin of John Turturro
The Streetcar connection¶
The reason the sibling chemistry is so specific: Turturro and James Gandolfini had known each other since 1992, when they appeared together in the Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire — Gandolfini as Steve, Turturro as Eunice, with Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange in the leads.
By the time they were playing brother and sister, they'd been friends for eight years. The fights land like people with a shared history because that's what they were, and Chase has said the pairing was a large part of why Janice was expanded.
She joined in season two, after the character was mentioned but unseen in season one.
Janice¶
The role is a comic performance with a genuinely nasty core, and Turturro plays both without softening either.
Janice is a professional seeker — communes, gurus, disability claims, a Seattle name — and the show's running joke is that every bit of spiritual vocabulary is a delivery system for exactly Livia's behavior. She is her mother with better rhetoric.
Her best sequence is the season five anger management material: attending classes, performing serenity, reciting the language of the work, and then attacking another parent in a soccer field parking lot. It's the character in ninety seconds.
She's also the one who shoots Richie Aprile at the dinner table — a scene Turturro plays with almost no affect, which is what makes it frightening.
Two Emmy nominations, no wins.
Elsewhere¶
A stage actress first — she was in Jackie Brown, Sleepers, Angie, and Bringing Out the Dead — and she has continued primarily in theatre and character work since, including Blue Bloods and Broadway's Frankie and Johnny.
She has spoken about being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and about doing advocacy work around it.