Nancy Marchand

Nancy Lou Marchand (June 19, 1928 – June 18, 2000) was an American actress born in Buffalo, New York, the only child of Dr. Raymond Louis Marchand, a dentist, and Marjorie Freeman, a piano teacher. Her great-grandfather Louis Marchand, a stone cutter, had emigrated from France. Marchand grew up in the adjacent hamlet of Eggertsville, New York, attended Amherst High School, and traveled by two buses to study acting at the Studio Theatre School in Buffalo. She went on to graduate from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949 and continued her training at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York City.

Marchand's professional stage career began in 1946 with a performance in The Late George Apley in Ogunquit, Maine. Her Broadway debut followed in 1951 in The Taming of the Shrew, launching a stage career that extended through 1993. Among her Broadway credits were White Liars, The Octette Bridge Club, Awake and Sing!, and The Plough and the Stars. She received a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play for The White Liars & Black Comedy, and earned four Drama Desk Award nominations, winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance in 1980 for Morning's at Seven. Her off-Broadway work brought additional recognition, including a Distinguished Performance Obie Award for The Balcony and a second Obie for her performance in A. R. Gurney's The Cocktail Hour. She was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Television became a significant part of Marchand's career beginning in 1953, when she made her television debut on The Philco Television Playhouse opposite Rod Steiger in the play Marty. She appeared across numerous early anthology series, including Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One, and Playhouse 90. She originated the role of Vinnie Phillips on the CBS soap opera Love of Life and Theresa Lamonte on the NBC soap opera Another World, and starred as matriarch Edith Cushing on the short-lived soap opera Lovers and Friends. Later television credits included The Law and Mr. Jones, Spenser: For Hire, Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street, Coach, and Night Court.

Marchand achieved her widest television recognition through two landmark roles. As patrician newspaper publisher Margaret Pynchon on Lou Grant, she won four Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actress in a Dramatic Series. Later, her portrayal of Livia Soprano, mother of Tony Soprano, on the HBO series The Sopranos earned her a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series, and two additional Emmy Award nominations. Marchand died between the second and third seasons of The Sopranos before a major storyline involving her character was resolved. Her death was written into the series, and a final scene was constructed using computer-generated imagery combined with outtakes from earlier seasons.

Her feature film work included The Bachelor Party, Ladybug Ladybug, Me Natalie, Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon, The Hospital, The Bostonians, Brain Donors, Reckless, The Naked Gun, From the Hip, Jefferson in Paris, Sabrina, and Dear God.

Marchand was married to actor Paul Sparer, who died of cancer in 1999 at age 75. The couple had three children, Katie, David, and Rachel, and seven grandchildren. A long-time chain smoker, Marchand suffered from lung cancer, emphysema, and COPD. She died on June 18, 2000, in Stratford, Connecticut, one day before her 72nd birthday.