I ask Lorraine Bracco if she remembers the first time she saw Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese’s dazzling portrait of life in the mob. “Absolutely,” she says. “It was last year.” Which is strange, given the film came out in 1990, and Bracco was one of the stars. She is laughing as she speaks, a husky giggle, her accent doorstop-thick New York. “Well, I went to the premiere, but I missed the start doing interviews, and then they pulled me out before the end, and then I had another job on a film with Sean Connery in the fucking jungle. And by the time I came home it wasn’t playing. And I never wanted to see it on TV. So, yeah, I didn’t see it until – Mo, when was the 25th anniversary?”
Mo is her assistant, a friendly woman in a Wu-Tang Clan T-shirt, doing emails out of sight behind a partition. “2015,” she calls out. “Right,” Bracco says. “So in New York in 2015 there’s an anniversary thing but again I don’t actually get to see it. And finally I see it last summer, outdoors in LA …” “Hollywood Forever cemetery,” Mo says. “Beautiful,” Bracco says. “4,000 people, a full moon. And me.”
So what did she think? “Oh,” she says. “It’s funny. I mean, laugh out loud. I never realised.”
Bracco is in London for a one-off screening of the film in which she starred as Karen Hill, real-life wife of mobster Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta. She looks like the glam sister of her other best known role, psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi in The Sopranos, the show partly responsible for the modern rise of long-form TV. Dressed in black, stories find her jumping to her feet to deliver the punchline.
She never auditioned for Goodfellas, she says. Five years before, she had tried out for Scorsese’s skittish black comedy After Hours. She didn’t get it, but he said he thought she was great. “Like the date who says he’ll call you, right?” Until, to her surprise, he did, telling her there was a movie to discuss, inviting her to his apartment. “And I get there, Ray is there already, and the three of us have a nice drink. That was my audition.” The casting proved inspired. Bracco was a marvel as the good Jewish girl seduced into a mafia marriage.
“Here’s the thing,” she says. “My father was Italian-American and my mother was a war bride. English, from Oxford [she pronounces this in flawless cockney]. And I was born in Brooklyn but we moved to a Jewish neighbourhood on Long Island. So I knew the Italian world and the Jewish world. That helped.” She stretches out her arms: “I am a true immigrant, Mr Trump!”
By the time of the film she was 36, having spent more than a decade as a model in France. There had been movies before, but nothing like this. “Scorsese called me and Ray ‘the kids’. I was the mother of two girls! But as an actress, I was very raw.”
Her nerves weren’t helped by being the only woman on set. “I was lucky, I knew Robert [De Niro], so I had a friend. And Ray was always delicious. Marty I didn’t know so well, but what I learned was not to be afraid of my ideas, and that he was open to them. Unconditionally! That was a big thing. The boys were always like, ‘Let me try this.’ So by the third day, it was, ‘Well, if they’re doing it, I’m doing it, too.’”
When, early in the movie, Karen confronts Henry after he has stood her up, the glorious crackle on screen was all Bracco. So was half her line: “Who do you think you are? Frankie Valli?”
“Who was it originally, Mo?” she asks. “Rock Hudson,” Mo says. “Yes! I was not a Rock Hudson girl. I was Frankie Valli. So I changed it. And although Marty was open, I still had to fight for it. And it’s no fun to fight Scorsese. But I had done my research. And the more we shot, the bolder I got.”
Bracco has spent the last few years on a TV cop show, Rizzoli & Isles. But acting is now one thing among others; she recently published a self-help book – To the Fullest: The Clean Up Your Act Plan to Lose Weight, Rejuvenate and Be the Best You Can Be. It was written after both her parents died in 2011.
Growing up, her father – “over-protective, a little crazy” – worked at Manhattan’s Fulton fish market. Her mother was “very English. Sweet. Beautiful. People stared.” Her parents loved the movies. When Goodfellas won her an Oscar nomination, they came to the ceremony. “My father thought he was at the racetrack. When I lost he screamed out ‘Jesus Christ!’ and Dustin Hoffman spun round in shock. I wanted to beat him stupid!”
A modelling contract at 16 led, three years later, to Paris. She stayed for the whole of her 20s. Photographers told her she should act, which she found ridiculous. “‘Nah,’ I said. Then I was at this big dinner, I told a story, and Catherine Deneuve said, ‘Lorraine, you’re an actress.’ I was like, ‘Thanks, Catherine. Gotta go!’ But on the way home, I thought, ‘Maybe.’”
The famous fill Bracco’s conversation. Somehow, though, it feels less like namedropping than her just being one of those people for whom life ended up like an ongoing cheese dream, random faces drifting by. Madonna turns up here, Christopher Walken there. “It’s like I told Damien Chazelle last week,” she says.
Still in France, she would “stumble into” a couple of movies. Making one, Camorra, she met the actor Harvey Keitel. They began a long relationship. Bracco returned to America and studied drama under the fabled Stella Adler. Eventually, there was Goodfellas.
But, while the 90s were bookended by Scorsese and The Sopranos, the years between were rough. When Goodfellas came out, she was shooting a romance called Medicine Man in the Mexican rainforest, miscast as a chilly biochemist opposite Sean Connery. “They took the wrong girl! It was torture. I thought maybe I don’t want to do this again.” Life came undone off-screen, too. Her relationship with Keitel ended, dissolving into a battle for custody of their daughter.
“It was hard. I lost sight of what I wanted from life.” The custody fight bankrupted her: $2m was owed to lawyers, $500,000 more in taxes. Dogged by depression, she went into therapy. Piecing things back together, she was unenthused when her agent told her about a new TV mafia drama, and the offer of a role as mob wife Carmella Soprano. “Mob wife. Nooooo. It was all I ever heard.” She had to be coaxed into even reading the script. Then, she says, she understood. The catch was she wanted to play Dr Melfi – not married to James Gandolfini’s Tony but treating him. “I told [show creator] David Chase I was a different woman than I had been on Goodfellas. I wanted to make Melfi the first educated Italian-American girl people ever saw.” Getting the therapy right was another condition. “Therapy helped me. I didn’t want it to be kooky.”
Still, she worried it had been the wrong call. “Every scene, the same chair. I thought, ‘Lorraine, you may have been a schmuck.’ But my instincts were right.” Yet even as the show took off, her salary was spoken for. “The first couple of seasons, most of every cheque went on the debts.” She misses Gandolfini, she says (he died in 2013), and the mood on set when a new script arrived. “The teamsters driving the trucks would stop to read them. David’s writing was so beautiful. And he liked to write about women.”
We end up back with Trump. “Oh, I’ve met him in New York. Never my kind of guy. Always very arrogant.” The last year, she says, has left her stunned. “But it doesn’t feel like a different America yet, because we’re still protesting.”
She half grins, not sure she should say what she’s thinking out loud. “You know what it is? It’s white American men, middle-class but not as successful as they think they should be. They look at him and say, ‘My God, I wanna be like him. I want my own TV show. My own plane. My wife that never talks!’” Did it shock her that women voted for him, too? “Yes! But they never met him.”
There’s a pause. “Hey, Mo. You think I’m going to get in trouble now?” “Sure,” Mo calls back. “You definitely are.” And then they both roar with laughter.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion