You have to admire an actress who isn't afraid to look terrible for a part, and for her last role Nancy Marchand did just that.
Tall and aristocratic-looking, not a beautiful woman but what used to be called a handsome one, Marchand — who died Sunday, the day before her 72nd birthday — was cast brilliantly against type in HBO's "The Sopranos."
As Livia Soprano, the family's malicious matriarch, she was a horror in a housecoat, a character whose wizened exterior concealed a heart like a prune pit. Badgering her children, dishing out recriminations along with the rigatoni, Livia was the mother of all guilt-inducing mothers, an Italian mom who gave a whole new meaning to the expression "Mama mia!"
Marchand's Golden Globe Award and Emmy nomination for her work in "The Sopranos" last year, when she was already ill with cancer, recognized the distinctive quality of her work. Livia wasn't pretty or soft or ingratiating, but, like many of Marchand's characters, she won you over in spite it.
Perhaps because she wasn't a conventional beauty, Marchand never seemed to play conventional parts.
Her first major TV role, in 1950, was tomboy Jo March in "Little Women." Three years later, she won praise as Clara, the plain but lovable teacher who gets the homely hero of "Marty."
But in a medium where an actress' 40th birthday isn't exactly an occasion for celebration, Marchand played her best-known role well past her 50th. TV hasn't seen many female characters quite like Margaret Pynchon, the patrician newspaper publisher and owner of "Lou Grant."
Though demanding and sometimes even forbidding, Mrs. Pynchon was no dragon lady. Ed Asner's Lou Grant hated to be summoned to her office — something which happened more weeks than not — but, once there, he found a smart, stubborn adversary, not a tyrant. Like Mary Richards before her, she addressed Asner's formidable city editor as "Mr. Grant"; unlike Mary, she was very much his equal.
Marchand played Mrs. Pynchon from 1977 to 1982, winning four Emmys in five years. At a time when TV's most visible heroines were the vixens and vamps of "Dallas," "Dynasty" and "Falcon Crest," she stood out like a dignified oak in a garden of plastic flowers.
Marchand had other stage, movie and TV roles in the years that followed, including a brief but hilarious one as Frasier Crane's queenly mother in "Cheers," but nothing equaled her work in "Lou Grant" until "The Sopranos" came along.
Already diagnosed with cancer when she got the part in 1998, Marchand alternated weeks of work with rounds of treatment. In her second and final season, sadly, she needed less help from the hair, makeup and wardrobe people to impersonate the haggard Livia.
But she kept at the role until last winter, when the season wrapped.
"She comes to work, she does her work, she's great," "Sopranos" creator David Chase told TV critics in January. "Like any of us, she has her good days and her bad days. Her bad days can be worse than ours, but by and large she just does it."
There are worse ways to finish out a career, and a life.
Dist. by Scripps Howard News Service.