Edie Falco

Born: 1963
Where: Brooklyn, New York

Most of us first noticed this rare gem of an actress when she stepped out as Carmella Soprano on HBO's multi award winning mafia drama.

But success didn't come overnight for this Brooklyn girl.

"It's a little nerve-racking to be getting all this mail and everybody thinking I'm this overnight sensation.

With an open expressive face, Edie has a penchant for taking roles that might prove too much of a challenge for a performer with more vanity and less integrity.

With lead actor talent and character actor versatility, she has captured many enviable roles on stage, screen and television.

Often cast as the tough female in many male-dominated projects, Falco brought increased dimensionality to the stereotypical hardened woman in several TV shows Oz, New York Undercover, Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street.

In 1999, she began her award-winning portrayal of a cautious Mafia wife on The Sopranos. Falco brought a multifaceted spin to her portrayal of Carmela Soprano, a woman determined to keep her family together and to keep her husband's criminal activities from her children.

Her body of film work has grown steadily. She did memorable work in Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, displaying a fluency with Hartley's dialogue that would make her a sought after independent film presence.

In 1992, she co-starred in Nick Gomez's Brooklyn-set gritty crime drama Laws of Gravity and subsequently appeared in Abel Ferrara's striking if uneven vampire film The Addiction.

Her compelling performance in Gomez's Cost of Living earned a Best Actress Award from Los Angeles' AFI Film Festival and she offered strong performances that same year in Cop Land, Hurricane Streets and Trouble on the Corner.

Falco also managed to carve out a significant stage career despite her many film and television commitments. In 1996, she originated the role of the alcoholic, mentally unstable wife of a jazz musician in Warren Leight's semi-autobiographical Side Man. In 2000, she took "Side Man" to the London stage, starring opposite Jason Priestly.

In 2002 she returned to the New York stage opposite Stanley Tucci in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune - the two became offstage partners soon after...

Now a household name thanks to the overwhelming popularity of The Sopranos, a success due in no small part part to Falco's note-perfect performance, she returned to feature film with a co-starring role in the John Sayles drama Sunshine State, where she excelled as a downtrodden Floridian who suddenly awakens to romance.