Actress mature, content
LOS ANGELES — For Edie Falco, the stigma surrounding older actresses is nothing more than Hollywood folklore.
In fact, the 50-year-old said, life has never been sweeter.
“It continues to get better and more rewarding and fuller and more confident and all these things that I kind of never realized how much I had longed for until I had them,” she said in a recent interview.
“I feel like it’s an ideal time to, I don’t know, to be me.”
After six seasons as mob wife Carmela on the HBO hit The Sopranos, Falco took on the role of Jackie Peyton, an emergency-room nurse addicted to prescription drugs, on Nurse Jackie.
Jackie has been battling a relapse on the sixth season of the Showtime series, shown at 9 p.m. Sundays.
“I was as heartbroken as everybody else that she took that pill at the end of the (last) season,” Falco said. “I’m also grateful that we’re portraying it (addiction) the way it really is, which is irrational and so often disappointing.”
Jackie’s downward spiral has aided her real-life recovery, said Falco, a recovering alcoholic with 20 years of sobriety.
“If it’s anything, it’s therapeutic,” she said. “Rather than making me want to (relapse), it makes me even more solidly planted and also just reminds me: Thank God, I’m not there.”
Falco, a winner of four Emmys and two Golden Globes, said her main focus these days is her children: Anderson, 9; and Macy, 6.
And with age and motherhood, she said, comes a sense of confidence that was missing during the heyday of The Sopranos.
“What I’m sure is that, if I don’t work forever, I’ll be fine either way,” she said. “I’ve kind of my whole life hoped to one day feel the way I do right now — which is that everything is going to be fine.”