Socko Bracco

SPOTLIGHT

With a lustrous invincibility part Debra Winger and part Barbara Stanwyck, emerald-eyed Lorraine Bracco usually plays the tough cookie—a Brooklyn schoolteacher in Sing, a hard-boiled waitress in The Dream Team, a salt-of-the-earth cop's wife in Someone to Watch over Me. But next the galvanizing Bracco will get to play flaky, as the emotionally battered Mafia wife in Martin Scorsese's Good Fellas, the movie based on Nick Pileggi's true-life best-seller, Wise Guys. "I took the woman's role in what was very much a man's world," says the former model of her part as the bejeweled and cheated-on moll married to mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta).

Although Bracco is Brooklyn-bom and Long Island-bred, for five years she's been living a New York Stones—style life in lower Manhattan with her actor husband, Harvey Keitel. As part of that brawny downtown drama set (who all seem to own huge Tribeca lofts, hang out at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Grill, and roam between the Actors Studio and the restaurant Columbus), Bracco—a pal of Scorsese's— snagged the role with "no audition, no screen test, no reading." The Good Fellas ensemble sounds like a Bracco-Keitel block party—their upstairs neighbor De Niro plays Jimmy 'The Gent" Burke, and Bracco's two young children play the Hills' kids. ("You expect Harvey to be in there, but he was out doing Two Jakes with Jack [NicholsonJ," she says.)

Bracco's spoofy take on her career ("Did I beg Hawvey to let me into Actors Studio?") and her throwaway approach to the biz ("Doors open—I walk through them") belie the perfectionism of a true pro. And her performance as a desperate moll should finally put her on the same professional level as her heavy-duty friends.

CHRISTA D'SOUZA