Memories of James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, from Driveway to Final Scene

Then there was the time we were having a dart-gun fight and I kicked in the metal door to the room where he was hiding just as he was coming out.

When he came to, I took him to St. Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick to get his forehead stitched up and paid the bill. It was $25, and worth it just to see the scar on his head during all those close-ups on HBO.

 I walked over to Gandolfini when it was all done, told him congratulations and, looking at him, asked, “It wasn’t that bad, was it?” He laughed, looked around nervously and less than a minute later, said to a nearby HBO publicist -- almost like he was having a panic attack -- “Get me out of here. Get me out of here, now.”

And just like that, he was gone, escorted out of the hotel and back into what he clearly hoped would be some kind of obscurity, where he could just do his job. He wanted to act. Not talk about acting or accept awards for it.

Every time I spoke to him between 1998 and 2006 – the last time I had any contact with the man – he seemed like basically the same guy I’d met that first time, but with more money. I took my brother Richard, a big Sopranos fan, to the season six DVD release party. When he saw me, he acted as if he’d never been happier to see anyone. He grabbed me in a headlock and gave me noogies like Bill Murray torturing Gilda Radner on the old Saturday Night Live and crowed, “Hoah! What happened to all your hair?”

“What happened to all your hair?” I shot back lamely, pulling free of his grip.

“Look at this fuckin’ guy, with the banter,” he said to the room at large.

I do recall telling Gandolfini that, as the daughter of a Marine, I appreciated his work with the military (several of the veterans, by the way, were at the HBO party, and the ones I chatted with all spoke highly of Gandolfini and were still in touch with him well after filming had wrapped). I said that, given the level of celebrity he had after the "Sopranos," I was impressed that he had used it for something so worthwhile and thoughtful.

At that, Gandolfini, who had been humble and friendly throughout our short conversation, gave me such a big hug that he lifted me off my feet. I am not a small person, I should add.

Gandolfini was filming a scene in the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco. He was in a foul mood, and, to make matters worse, Bracco was determined to use every means, including a whoopee cushion, to crack him up and destroy the scenes. As he blew take after take, Gandolfini seemed about to launch into a Soprano-level fit. But he kept at it, screaming at himself between takes to bear down, to concentrate. A rare moment on a set when the actor performs not only the role but what is required for it.

We can't know, certainly not yet and maybe not ever, to what extent the strain of work contributed to Gandolfini's death yesterday. The following story—which was already on stands when the news broke—suggests what a struggle it could be for him. The best piece of evidence for his legacy may be that the people for whom his fits and absences made life most difficult were the same people, to a man and woman, who regarded him with the most compassion and admiration. They forgave him and they loved him.

His was an amazingly delicate performance for a big guy. Those eyes. Gandolfini could concentrate all of Tony’s physicality and criminal cunning into them, as those black pellets darted about and he conceived a lie to tell Carmela, or a way out of a business bind. That a man with such a hulking physicality — a presence that was itself essential to the character — could convey so much through such minute gestures was like watching a giant sit and play a virtuosic Goldberg Variations on a toy piano.

One measure of the greatness of Gandolfini’s sustained performance, over 86 long episodes, is that on those rare occasions when Tony’s viewpoint is not the show’s viewpoint—when Melfi is raped, and Tony wants to know what's happened; when Carmela goes to see a psychiatrist, who tells her to leave Tony, and then has to see Tony again; when Meadow runs into Tony at a club and he appears to be on coke—it almost turns into a second show. He pulls those scenes off, in other words, but that is only impressive because most of the show is something like a work of P.O.V. There is just nothing else like it.

It is one thing for an actor to be typecast; it is another for an actor to become synonymous with a character who transforms an entire medium, upending its fealty to tidy character arcs, moral score-setting, and conventional aesthetics.