Nancy Marchand

Marchand was born in 1928 in Buffalo, New York, the only child of Dr. Raymond Louis Marchand, a dentist, and his wife, Marjorie Freeman, a piano teacher. Her great-grandfather Louis Marchand, a stone cutter, emigrated from France. She grew up in the adjacent hamlet of Eggertsville, New York. She graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949 and studied theater at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York City. ==Career==

Marchand made her first professional stage appearance in 1946 in The Late George Apley in Ogunquit, Maine. She made her Broadway debut in The Taming of the Shrew in 1951. She won a Distinguished Performance Obie Award for The Balcony, and she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play for The White Liars & Black Comedy. She was nominated four times for the Drama Desk Award, winning for ''Morning's at Seven''. She won a second Obie for her performance in A. R. Gurney's The Cocktail Hour. In 1953, she made her television debut starring opposite Rod Steiger on The Philco Television Playhouse in the television play Marty. Marchand originated the roles of Vinnie Phillips on the CBS soap opera Love of Life and Theresa Lamonte on the NBC soap opera Another World. She also starred as matriarch Edith Cushing on Lovers and Friends, a short-lived soap opera. Marchand was renowned for her roles as patrician newspaper publisher Margaret Pynchon on Lou Grant, winning four Emmy Awards as Best Supporting Actress in a Dramatic Series, and as matriarch Livia Soprano, mother of Tony Soprano on the HBO series The Sopranos, which earned her a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series, as well as two Emmy Award nominations. ==Personal life==

Marchand was married to actor Paul Sparer. He died in 1999 from cancer at age 75. The couple had three children: Katie, David, and Rachel, and seven grandchildren. A long time chain smoker, Marchand suffered from lung cancer, emphysema, and COPD. She died on June 18, 2000 in Stratford, Connecticut, the day before her 72nd birthday. She was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. ==Filmography==

Film Television Theatre ==Awards and nominations==