Ask any actor, they will always say that theatre is their first love. There is nothing like doing a play in front of a live audience. Seeing Annabella Sciorra on stage Off-Broaway in A Month in the Country alongside Anthony Edwards and Peter Dinklage, reminded us how much we’ve missed this great actress, proud to call herself Italian, from the big screen. Sciorra embraced her Italian heritage since the very beginning, which helped her getting her first movie role.
She played a young Italian-American woman in True Love and then again in Spike Lee’s controversial Jungle Fever. The latter was a milestone in the African-American director’s career; the story of a mix raced couple at a time when interracial relationships weren’t well received by the public’s opinion. The movie was groundbreaking and it had a great impact on culture, as many of Lee’s films did; Sciorra brought her natural charm, a mix of innocence and inbuilt Italian seductiveness, to the role. Annabella was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York in the heart of the Italian community. Her father emigrated from Carunchio, Abruzzo in 1951.
After becoming a veterinarian, he married in New York, had four children and made a living in United States. He talked to his kids about the Old Country all the time and especially about that little town up in the mountains, in the Vastese area, where he came from. Annabella grew very fond of those stories and she never forgot her Abbruzzese roots.
For a good part of her adult life she went back to that little town every year to visit and spend time with her grandmother Filomena. In 1999 the woman celebrated her 100th birthday, with the mayor of Carunchio throwing a giant party for the whole family at the Hotel Vittoria, and Annabella, who was already a well known star across the globe at the time, made sure to be present. She always made time for her grandmother and this was also a chance to take a break from Hollywood and recharge the batteries, as they say.
After studying dance at a young age she started gravitating towards acting as she grew older, eventually enrolling at New York’s prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts. A year after graduation she founded her own theatre company named Brass Ring in the basement of a church on the upper East Side; she was only twenty-one years old. Right off the bat Sciorra made quite an impression and she became more and more a fixture in the nineties, taking part in many movies that are now considered classics of that period of time. In Internal Affairs she was Richard Gere’s dismissive wife; the first time Gere was playing a villain. And of course her biggest role to date, that of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, a thriller so engaging that’s impossible not to re-watch it every time it plays on cable. Once again Sciorra played a good wife opposite the psycho character of Rebecca De Mornay. Funny story: both actresses auditioned for each other’s role, but after a long debate with director Curtis Hanson, De Mornay was deemed fit to play the nanny and Sciorra the object of the nanny’s revenge. A few years later Annabella received high critical praise for her role in Cop Land, which also marked a more dramatic turn for Sylvester Stallone who was eager to step away from the action films he was known for. In the past decade she graced popular TV-series such as Law & Order: Criminal Intent and more importantly The Sopranos, in which she played Gloria Trillo, the most memorable of Tony’s mistresses whose temperamental behavior drew the viewers further into the story. At first people hated her because she was sleeping with Tony, and then they cheered for her when the character stood her ground, an empowering message for all women.
Sciorra earned an Emmy nomination for that performance. She also kept going back to theatre and after working Off-Broadway for so many years with acclaimed companies such as the New Group and Naked Angels, she finally made her debut on Broadway in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play The Motherf***er With the Hat. A dark comedy set in New York in which she played the unhappy wife of an AA sponsor, played by Chris Rock, who’s attracted to her husband’s client, a recent parolee played by Bobby Cannavale. Sciorra’s devotion to her heritage and community of immigrants goes beyond family traditions; she is also willing to be front and center in the fight to protect it. She recently took at heart the fate of Adele Sarno, an 85 years old woman, who’s facing eviction by her landlord, ironically the Italian American Museum in New York City. The woman is the embodiment of a fast disappearing Little Italy and she is becoming the latest victim of greedy commercial development plans. The matter is yet to be resolved, but the popular actress will be by Sarno’s side, fighting for what is morally right.
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