Excellence, From ‘Marty’ to the Mafia

Viewers know her best as Tony Soprano’s wretched hag of a mother.

On a Saturday evening in 1953, though, Nancy Marchand is in the arms of Rod Steiger at one of those seedy, second-floor New York City ballrooms that serve as lonely hearts clubs where singles came to dance and drink Coca Cola.

A pathetic, defeated figure tailored for spinsterhood, she is tall and plain in her black cocktail dress, hair pulled back into a thick brown knob under a net, nose too large for her narrow face, dark eyes gazing vacantly.

She is not quite 25, a perfect Clara for Steiger’s chunky Italian American butcher who is resigned to another gloomy night of heartache when encountering this fellow reject in Goodyear Television Playhouse’s live production of “Marty,” the Paddy Chayefsky play on NBC that two years later will become an Oscar-winning movie.

Marty comes to her out of his own desperation, having been rebuffed by another woman, and out of pity, having refused a crass stranger’s offer of five bucks to take this “dog” of a blind date named Clara off of his hands. How low has she sunk? When Marty does ask her to dance after she’s been abandoned, she accepts his mercy, buries her head in his shoulder and weeps out of humiliation.

As the shy, gawky wallflower and self-described “fat, ugly little guy” slowly go cheek-to-cheek to canned music, something sweet and magical happens. She pours out her hurts, and he tells her he can recognize pain a mile off.

Then, the epiphany. “We ain’t such dogs as we think we are,” he says. Her eyes hint recognition. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps they have a future together, despite the misogyny of his ever-adolescent cronies whose jokes about homely females make them feel manly.

He promises to phone her tomorrow, she promises to wait for his call. Redemption looms.

It’s this wounded Clara--not the accomplished Marchand’s more famous TV role as tough, aristocratic newspaper publisher Margaret Pynchon in the CBS drama series “Lou Grant”--who competes most vividly in my mind with the memory of her as Livia Soprano on HBO.

Compete with Livia, a witch for the ages?

I’ve watched my “Marty” tape at least a dozen times through the years, ever impressed by Marchand and Steiger together, how moving they are absent of cheap emotion, and how persuasive despite the rudimentary production quality of the time. The pain in their characters is palpable under director Delbert Mann, the glints of hope renewing.

Although 47 years now separate Clara and Livia, they unite in the actress who played them. How different the characters are, one a vulnerable young schoolteacher eroded by repeated rejection, the other an aging, self-pitying crab who diminishes herself as she diminishes others. One pursuing joy, the other incapable of it.

The irony is that Livia was originally supposed to die at the end of the first season of “The Sopranos,” but was kept alive in part because Marchand, in signature work, made her hatefulness so indelible.

And now Marchand herself has died, just shy of her 72nd birthday, losing her battle with lung cancer Sunday not long after completing her second season as an ailing Mafia matriarch with a glacial heart.

If a performance were a gleaming epitaph, Marchand’s on “The Sopranos” was it. She won Emmys as Mrs. Pynchon at a time when TV drama was not nearly as good as it is today, and meaty roles for women were rare. But she was even more deserving of the Emmy she was nominated for in 1999 but didn’t get.

The eyes that melted poignantly for Marty as Clara were ice as ruthless Livia, who in the show’s first season appeared to join her bitter brother-in-law, Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), in plotting the murder of her Mafia boss son, Tony (James Gandolfini).

Her own son. Did she really want Tony dead or was she confused or even demented? That loose end unknotted, Livia spent much of the second season despised by Tony while recovering from a stroke, just as Marchand was limited by her cancer.

In this season’s next to last episode, however, it was her intensity, steeped in the script’s dark absurdity, that drove the hour toward bizarre closure. After Livia’s daughter, Janice (Aida Turturro) had shot dead her brutal mobster husband-to-be on the first floor of the house, and Tony had ordered the body fileted and disposed of, here came Livia, descending the stairs ever so slowly in her whirring motorized chair, stringy hair askew, ready for her close-up.

The ensuing clash was memorable, with Livia peering over her glasses as Tony jawed at her for being a cruel mother to Janice, then rising from her chair and defending herself as if she were a sacrificing Stella Dallas:

“I wasn’t always perfect. But I always tried to do the best I could. . . . And I know you, any of you, didn’t like it when I tried to tell you what to do. Babies are like animals. They’re no different than dogs. You have to teach ‘em right from wrong. But I was your mother. Who else was gonna do it? If you ask me, I did a pretty damn good job.”

Hearing that, Tony glared incredulously at the mother who had raised two killers--himself and Janice--as she dabbed at her nose with a limp handkerchief and remarked, curiously: “I suppose now you’re not gonna kiss me.”

An old lady’s madness exposed.

Television “may well be the basic theater of our century,” Chayefsky said in 1953. And Marchand may well have been one of its best character actresses, from ballroom reject when TV was very young, to gnarled, scheming shrew after she and the medium had aged together.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at calendar.letters@latimes.com.