Lorraine Bracco is getting candid about one of her formative memories as a young girl.
During a new essay for the Wall Street Journal, the Sopranos actress looked back at a comment made about her in sixth grade, which she said has “stuck with” her “for life.”
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Before going on to become a model and Oscar-nominated actress, Bracco was a “tall and gawky” kid in middle school when some of her classmates on the school bus told her “they had voted me the ugliest girl in sixth grade.”
“Can you imagine?” Bracco wrote. “I was in shock. It was horrible and devastating—a deep wound. I went home and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.”
“As for that childhood insult, it stuck with me for a long time,” Bracco, now 70, recalled, while explaining how the kids’ mean words later had an effect on her modeling career.
“Early in my modeling career, when Revlon offered me a campaign, I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this. I was the ugliest girl in sixth grade,'” she wrote.
But Bracco also remembered her father’s reaction to the harsh comment. “He said, ‘I don’t care about them. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world to me.'”
Bracco, who discovered as a young girl that performing was an “expression and an outlet” for her, would go on to have a breakout role in the 1990 film Goodfellas, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She later received a number of nominations at the Emmys and Golden Globes for her performance as psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi on The Sopranos.
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