Nancy Marchand¶

At a glance¶

Born: June 19, 1928, Buffalo, NY
Died: June 18, 2000, aged 71 — lung cancer
Role: Livia Soprano, 1999–2000
Golden Globe: Supporting Actress, 2000
Prior Emmys: 4, for Lou Grant

Cast against everything¶

Marchand was a distinguished stage actress with decades of classical work and four Emmys for playing Mrs. Pynchon on Lou Grant — a wealthy, formidable, patrician newspaper publisher.

That was her register: upper-class, imposing, articulate. She had spent a career playing women with money and bearing.

Casting her as a bitter, working-class Newark widow in a housecoat, delivering passive-aggressive cruelty in a Jersey accent, was against everything she'd built. It's a large part of why Livia works — there is an intelligence and a precision under the character that a more obvious piece of casting wouldn't have supplied.

Livia¶

She had four Emmy nominations for the role and won the Golden Globe for Supporting Actress in 2000.

The performance's discipline is that she never plays for sympathy and never plays for villainy. Livia is simply, comprehensively negative — a person who has decided the world is cruel and would rather be proved right than be comfortable — and Marchand plays that as a settled fact rather than a wound.

Her signature construction, "poor you," is delivered flatly enough that you can hear seventy years of practice in it.

Illness and death¶

She was already ill with lung cancer when the series began, and had also had emphysema. Her frailty is visible across seasons one and two, and the production worked around it — shorter days, more sitting, scenes reblocked.

She died on June 18, 2000, one day short of her 72^nd birthday, and roughly two months after the season two finale aired.

Writing her out¶

Season three had to remove Livia in its second episode. "Proshai, Livushka" (S3E28) kills her off-screen and spends the hour on the wake, where nobody can produce a true or kind sentence about her.

One brief scene uses digitally composited footage of Marchand from previous episodes. It was controversial at the time, it does not look right, and the show never attempted it again.

Her death changed the series. Livia had been the external explanation for Tony — the reason he was the way he was. Once she's gone, the show has to locate the problem inside him, and every subsequent season is harder on him for it.

She never really leaves. Tony's mistresses are all structurally her, and Melfi eventually says so out loud.