Jamie-Lynn Sigler may have played the quintessential mafia teen daughter in “The Sopranos,” but the actress is really a nice Jewish girl from New York.
In her new book, “And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope,” released this week, Sigler recalls how she got her acting start: at her brother’s bar mitzvah in a chapter oh-so-Jewishly titled “The Evil Eye.”
“Thanks to the enduring popularity of ‘The Sopranos,’ most people think I’m an Italian American from New Jersey. But I don’t have an ounce of Sicilian in my blood. I’m a Cuban, Greek, Romanian Jewish girl, and New York is where my story began,” Sigler writes. Her mother and grandmother were Cuban refugees; her father, a hard-working Jewish accountant from Brooklyn who was “always there when it mattered.”
Sigler says that while her family was loving and supportive, acting and entertainment were not a part of their world. But her oldest brother Adam was “into the magic of cinema,” and he recruited his youngest sister, at age 5, to sing at his Hollywood-themed bar mitzvah.
“After the hora, when everyone took their seats for lunch, I took the stage. My tiny frame, swallowed up by a frilly white dress…” Sigler writes that she belted out Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All.”
“In that moment, little did I know, a seed was planted — a burning need to be seen, heard, felt,” Sigler recalls in the book. She would go on to attend Wendy Taubman’s Stars of Tomorrow, where all aspiring Long Island actors went, and the rest is history. She was schlepped into the city for Broadway auditions, earning her first musical role in the national tour of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Sigler had to work on her homework and her own bat mitzvah haftorah while preparing for the tour. Three years later, she got the role of Meadow, Tony Soprano’s eldest child in “The Sopranos.” It was a role she would play for 10 years, and that she was playing when she got her MS diagnosis at 20.
The actress has played Jewish doctors and madams (Heidi Fleiss, specifically), but the Jewish role that’s perhaps most kvell-worthy for this mother of two is Jewish Princess Rebecca in “Elena of Avalor.” Rebecca gave our kids — and us — beautiful and diverse Jewish representation on the Disney Channel, and she was a way for Sigler to pay homage to both her Cuban heritage as well as to her Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish origins.
How lucky for us that she got her acting start at her brother’s bar mitzvah all those years ago!
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