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Born Jamie-Lynn Sigler, on May 15, 1981, in Jericho, New York, USA.
It's easy to get angry about The Sopranos.
Chances are you've heard some of the reasons: HBO's surprise hit series is too violent; it portrays Italian-Americans in a negative light; it glamorizes the mafia; it dares to preach family values through the mouths of mobsters.
Ridiculous criticisms all. After all, the show's about gangsters trying to balance the bullet-in-the-face brutality of their jobs with the grocery-shopping domesticity of their home lives, and to dramatize that balance there’s obviously going to have to be some violence in the show. To say that it portrays Italian-Americans in negative stereotypes ignores the fact that nearly everyone on the show is Italian, including the FBI agents, Tony Soprano’s shrink, his neighbors, and most of the neighborhood. As for the family values bit and glamorizing the mob, many of the younger gangster recruits on the show are indeed motivated by the glamour of the Godfather series, Goodfellas, and Scarface, and some toy with the idea of parleying their mob connections into acting careers, but one of the points of the show is that the mafia of The Sopranos is not the mafia of the movies or even the real mafia of 20 years ago, but a post-Gotti mafia that’s lost a lot of its panache and is generally in decline on account of its having lost the “family values” of its golden age.
No, the more legitimate reasons to be angry with The Sopranos come from the people who love the show.
It’s the feeling of many Soprano fans that the series — like the mob it portrays — is in a state of decline. They may agree that the show is still the best thing on the air, but many argue that some of what was so compellingly appealing about the first season has been lost or diluted in the seasons that followed. The loss of the bizarre (but very popular) relationship between Tony and his quietly sociopathic mother (due to the death of actress Nancy Marchand) and the ghoulish — and wholly unnecessary — attempt to bring her back for a CGI cameo are obvious gripes. The dependence on over-the-top mobster villains (“Richie Aprile” and the wildly out-of-control “Ralph Cifaretto”) for our mobster heroes to struggle against is another. Then there's the contrived nature of Tony’s Freudian dream prophecies. And the contrived nature of the show’s Freudian themes in general. The disappointing “The Sopranos Go to Italy” episode. The nearly Soprano-free first episode of the third season. And so on, from reasonable-sounding criticisms to the over-analyzing nitpicking normally associated with Trekkies.
So despite — or perhaps because of — the runaway popularity of The Sopranos, everyone with access to cable or satellite TV has become an expert of what’s good and bad on the show, and everyone has his private complaints. Me included.
But say what I might about the withering or continuing merits of HBO’s most famous series, one thing that’s definitely changed for the better, surprisingly enough, is actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, the show’s bitchy, moody mafia princess, who finally came of age in the show’s third season. (Granted, she also put on a few extra pounds since the previous two seasons, but nothing that can’t be worked off by season 4 — and in any event, sveltness apparently doesn’t run deep in the mafia gene pool, so in the context of the rest of the cast, “Meadow” can still be one of the hot non-stripper chicks.)
However, according to one source, the name “Jamie-Lynn Sigler” came very close to being stricken from The Sopranos and known only to Broadway musical fans. (Most of Jamie’s career so far is in music and dance.) It seems that as much as her surly attitude impressed Sopranos-creator David Chase, by the fourth episode someone, for reasons unknown, decided to replace Jamie with another, blonder actress, and only the cost of re-shooting the first four episodes prevented this from happening.
Not to worry — if anything should happen to her Sopranos gig, Jamie still has her music, and at the time of this writing is planning to launch a pop career modeled after pre-breakdown Mariah Carey.
(Hey, roll your eyes if you like, but it happened for Kevin Bacon and his band — witness the globe-girdling success of The Bacon Brothers...)
For Jamie’s sake, and for the sake of fans of the show, let’s all hope The Sopranos never, ever ends.
Also sprach Golem.
(More recent commentary below)
Is Recanting the New Self-Promotion?
Thursday, May 10, 2007
In the spirit of Hillary Clinton’s proposal to hit the do-over button on her vote for the Iraq war, soon-to-be-unemployed Jamie-Lynn Sigler denounced her own album Here to Heaven in this month’s issue of Vegas magazine ... six years after the fact.... Read more
Too Little, Too Late
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
According to an item from Contact Music, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who had vowed never to appear nude on camera, now says she’s open to the idea. Maybe. If it’s important and necessary for the film. And if she’s drunk enough.... Read more
Meet Miss Mrs. Ms. Sigler DiScala Sigler
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Hard to believe that anyone would make the cliché mistake of marrying one’s agent in this day and age, but after two years of this ill-starred union, Jamie-Lynn and husband/agent A.J. DiScala have finally called the quits.... Read more
Jamie’s New Album Already Debuted ... On TV
Monday, October 15, 2001
On the eve of the release of Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s new album, I’ve just learned that most of us have in fact already heard a sample of Jamie’s vocal prowess — it seems that she does the vocals for the singing belly buttons on those obnoxious Levis commercials.... Read more
JAMIE-LYNN SIGLER’S FILMOGRAPHY
* Titles in red feature Jamie-Lynn in the raw *
Film
- Homie Spumoni (2007) .... Ally
- New York City Serenade (2007) .... Lynn
- Blinders (2006) .... Alexa
- Dark Ride (2006) .... Cathy
- Lovewrecked (2005) .... Alexis Manetti
- Extreme Dating (2003) .... Amy Baker
- Campfire Stories (2001) .... Natalie
- A Brooklyn State of Mind (1997) .... Little Angie
Cable
- The Sopranos (1999) .... Meadow Soprano
Made for Television Movies/Specials
- Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss (2004) .... Heidi Fleiss [nudity by body double, and only on DVD]
- Broadway's Best (Mar 2002; Bravo) .... Herself
Television
- The 51st Annual Primetime Emmy Awards (1999) .... Meadow Soprano
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