EDITORIAL ROUTTNG 5-18-9s

TO:

ENTERTAINMENT

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'Scam' artist

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Bracco's latest role was a sweat

By Frank Lovece
You go into an interview with Lorraine Bracco fully expecting a streeta

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wise sounding Brooklyn girl with

aura of refined toughness. Both aspects helped her endure the harried production schedule - two sweltering months in Miami and Jamaica, with only, she swears, a single
day off.

lot of "dese," "dem" and "dose" in her tawk, um, talk. And actually, that's pretty much

what you get.

"Yee-ehh," Bracco says endearingly, with a throaty patois located some-

was a very ambitious script," Bracco says guardedly. "The whole last scene was shot in one day that

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tional-looking models. Bracco, who'd appeared in the pages of magazines such as Seventeen and Teen, now graced the likes of Elle. Thrown into a Cinderella whirlwind, she studied acting, appeared in a couple of movies, produced a TV fashion special on France's Antenne 2, was a DJ for Radio Luxembourg, and met, mar-

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where between Bugs Bunny and Beverly Hills. "I tawked a lot with the
Miami police about tons'a con women like this," she says of Maggie Rohrer, the grifter she plays in the Showtime

ried and divorced a hair stylist and salon-owner with whom she had a daughter, Margeaux Guerard, now
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movie "Scam," premiering May 22 and repeating May 27 on the cable network. "She's a real sorta character. There really are women like that. I didn't get t'tawk t'any of them, but the police showed me all these files with things like the Rolex scam," a con that Maggie pulls involving that expensive brand of watch. "The movie is true-to-life," Bracco avows. "l mean, I don't know if any

'l don't know what it is you got, kid, but I

Iike you.'

The collapse of that three-year

marriage was the low point of a life that had become, Bracco once said,
"a Jackie Collins novel of lies and petshe

tiness." Sometime thereafter,

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started at 4 (in the afternoon) and didn't finish until 9 or so the next
morning. I mean, we're shooting and shooting, and the sun came up, and then it was high in the sky!"
Nor was it exactly a Caribbean won-

met actor Haruey Keitel at a party, and returned to the United States. She and Keitel married in the mid'B0s and separated in 1991; they have

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a 7-year-old daughter, Stella. She's since been dating actor Edward

James Olmos, with whom she starred

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ex-FBI agents ever hook up with

these women," she adds with a laugh,

referring to co-star Christopher

Walken's character, "but there ya go."

derland. "Jamaica was beautiful," Bracco affirms, "but it was hot, and a
worse type of heat there and in Miami than in the Mexico rain forest where we did'Medicine Man,"'her 1992 film with Sean Connery" "In Mexico it hit 117 in shade, but at least the air

in "Talent for the Game" (1991). With two upcoming movies - Gus Van Sant's "Even Cowgirls Get the

Blues" and Bill Forsyth's "Being "Yee-ehh," she says, "we just

Human" Bracco remains a busy ac,5 -a tress. And busy pet-owner as well.

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person than she often is on the

And there she is. With her large, expressive eyes, Bracco is prettier in

bought a couple of rabbits" for her farm in upstate New York. Pets for

screen, where she deliberately downplays her looks to play feisty New York women like mob wife Karen Hill in "GoodFellas" (1990) for which she earned an Oscar nomination - or Ellie Keegan in "Someone to Watch Over Me" (1987) she walloped - where philandering husband Tom Berenger in a scene that women sfiil stop her on the street and commend her for, she
says.

the kids? "And f'me, tool" she declares, with a major chuckle. "What,

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wasn't pollufed, y'know?" And as for

native Jamaican dishes like jerk pork, "It was delicious but not after three
days "
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you kiddin'?"
OI993 NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE ASSN.

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Yet even when she's grousing, there's something likable about

Bracco. "People keep saying that," she nods, launching into an anecdote about Wilhelmina, the late modeling agency head who gave Bracco her professional start at 16. "That very first day in her office, Willie told me, 'I don't know what it is you got, kid, but I like you."' So did Europe, where Wilhelmina sent Bracco three years later, in a

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STAR VIEW

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Bracco, 38, has a bit of that peppery persona herself, having been raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and Westbury, Long Island, the middle child of a Manhattan fish wholesaler and a British war bride combi- a for nation that seems to account her

standard career move for untradi-