I’m always surprised that people still want to talk about it,” says Lorraine Bracco, with an air of smouldering bemusement. “I go out, I go to dinner and it always, always comes back to Goodfellas and The Sopranos.” There’s good reason for that. As Karen Hill, wife of Ray Liotta’s ascendent mobster in Martin Scorsese’s genre-defining 1990 crime classic, Bracco secured her own small but eternal place in film history. And as Dr Jennifer Melfi, the shrewd, erudite psychiatrist to James Gandolfini’s Tony in The Sopranos, she did the same on TV.
It’s ostensibly neither of these projects that I’m speaking to Bracco about today, over the phone as she sits at home in Bridgehampton, New York. But her two landmark roles can’t help but work their way into our conversation. It’s true what they say, the mafia really does have its fingers in everything.
