Lorraine Bracco has no problem calling herself one “tough broad.”
Thanks to her career-defining roles in “The Sopranos” and “Goodfellas,” the Bay Ridge-born star, 66, has developed quite the reputation for having a feisty attitude and a distinctively husky voice — two things that carry over into her real life.
“I have a very strong radar personality to know bulls–t,” she told Page Six in a recent interview.
A few years back, Bracco got into a heated discussion in Paris over a cab that she said “some Italian guy wanted to take from me and my granddaughter.” It was only the latest example of her defiant refusal to back down to pesky men who cross her path.
“Were guys a little frisky? Yes. But I always held my own, and you know, I was always ready to throw the first swing,” she said.
“Sometimes I meet some women who are like fairies, you know?” the actress continued. “I don’t know. They [seem to] have wings and they flutter. And I think, like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.'”
Bracco may be a tough cookie, but she’s the first to admit that her Oscar-nominated turn as Karen Hill in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 classic “Goodfellas” was taxing.
“It was really arduous,” she recalled. “It was emotionally difficult. We worked really long hours. We were on location every day. It was not easy. I did feel that we were doing something special and good and interesting but definitely not easy.”
The “Riding in Cars with Boys” star had much more fun on the set of HBO’s seminal series “The Sopranos,” in which she played Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini)’s psychiatrist, Jennifer Melfi.
She remembers Gandolfini, who died of a heart attack in June 2013 at the age of 51, as a “young man [in] the prime of his life, his career, his success.”
Bracco confessed that she has not seen the trailer for the upcoming “Sopranos” prequel film, “The Many Saints of Newark,” which stars Gandolfini’s son, Michael Gandolfini, as a young Tony Soprano. That said, she’s all aboard.
“I adore [show creator] David Chase,” she enthused. “I love Michael Gandolfini. I only wish them great success. Let ‘The Sopranos’ live!”
Bracco loves the crime drama so much, in fact, that she and former co-stars Aida Turturro (Janice Soprano), Kathrine Narducci (Charmaine Bucco), Vincent Curatola (Johnny Sack) and Dominic Chianese (Corrado “Junior” Soprano) are set to appear together at MobMovieCon and SopranosCon at Harrah’s in Atlantic City on July 24 and 25. Celebrities from other mob movies and TV shows will also be there, including Ice-T, Armand Assante, Paul Sorvino and Vivica A. Fox.
It’s the first fan convention that Bracco is taking part in, and she seems a little stunned by it all.
“You know what’s crazy is that I have ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘The Sopranos,’ which seems to really have made a public success,” she marveled. “People love it.”
The Emmy nominee most recently appeared in the HGTV show “My Big Italian Adventure,” which chronicled her journey renovating a 200-year-old dilapidated house in Sambuca di Sicilia that she purchased in 2019 for only 1 euro.
While Bracco has not been back in 18 months because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, she is hoping to go soon.
“Everybody wants to come,” she exclaimed. “There’s not a friend of mine that I know that hasn’t said to me during the pandemic, ‘When can we go to Sicily?'”
