Happy Birthday Edie Falco

She is a chameleon and a vessel: drop her into any diseased milieu and she’ll absorb it like a sponge, her face manifesting pathologies unique to that broken atmosphere. Whether it be the smothering constant danger of the Oswald Correctional Facility or the banal sleaze and empty suburban malaise of New Jersey, Edie Falco is a crucible of anxieties and pathos. She was the standout actress on HBO's very first series, Oz, a steely female presence that is the antithesis of the women on HBO's second series, Sex & the City.

As Corrections Officer Diane Wittlesey, she lives in a sterile Plexiglas subculture of feral, unpredictably lethal inmates. As Wittlesey, her face is as taut and plain and hard as the stretched top of a water drum, while her eyes, feverishly alert, dart in the stone of her face, the paranoid eyes themselves prisoners of her hard vigilant expression. This actress alone, and this character alone already powerfully conveys the claustrophobic frenzy that is the aura of Oz: Seasons 1 and 2. It is also divulged over the course of the first few seasons that she is a divorcee struggling to outrun poverty and, it is not a surprise, as her weary face does not hide her character’s hardscrabble background. This complete and utter lack of glamor is what makes her perfect to play a female prison guard. As Diane Wittlesey, she seemed perfectly at home as the only white female Corrections Officer in Oswald State Penitentiary, her probing face was hard as granite and completely scrubbed of pretty embellishments. She wasn’t a clichéd ballbuster type, either; she was self-effacing in her toughness, a thoroughly layered character, incapable of being insubstantial. People who have only seen her as Carmela Soprano have no idea how much range this woman has.

A character that couldn’t be more the polar opposite of the hyper-alert, ossified Corrections Officer is Carmela Soprano, a spoiled, unfulfilled New Jersey housewife whose face becomes more slack and vacant as her character becomes more used to her materialism and her moral complacency. She’d like to believe she is the unwitting First Lady of the New Jersey criminal empire, but the authority and the poise with which she holds herself in the presence of her husband’s associates’ wives shows, just so subtly, that she knows quite well that she is the Alpha Bitch.

Her first HBO character is often overlooked because of her astonishing work on The Sopranos, but I'm comforted in the knowledge that Carmela Soprano is as rich and complicated as Diane Wittlesey, very likely moreso because we spent twice as much time with Carmela. When thinking about The Sopranos, I often forget how many terrible attributes Carmela has: she is materialistic and has dubious motives when it comes to her relationship with her husband that verge on flat-out gold-digging, but these are trivial considerations when they are being exhibited by someone with as much humanity as Edie Falco. I always forgive her wrongdoings, no matter how selfish or thoughtless. Falco really broke new ground during her time on HBO, resulting in the first truly complex female dramatic television character. In fact, she is the first actress to ever sweep the top three television awards. In 2000, she received the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, The Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Drama Series, and the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series, all in the same year for her performance as Carmela Soprano.

HBO has introduced me to many great actresses: Molly Parker and Paula Malcolmson in Deadwood, Polly Walker in Rome, Amy Ryan and Sonja Sohn in The Wire, but Edie Falco is the original HBO actress, and just like Carmela among the gangster housewives of New Jersey, she is #1.