Inside ‘Nonnas’ Star Lorraine Bracco’s Complicated Love Life
In Lorraine Bracco‘s new movie, Nonnas, which premiered on Netflix today, the actress, 70, stars alongside Susan Sarandon, Talia Shire, Brenda Vaccaro, and Vince Vaughn as a widow working in the kitchen of an unconventional Staten Island restaurant — one that only employs Italian grandmothers as its chefs. In real life, the Sopranos and Goodfellas is also a grandmother (she recently told AARP that “everybody should have grandchildren“). But her romantic life has been a bit more complex than anything a nonna could cook up.
Daniel Guerard
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Bracco, who grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island, moved to Paris to model in 1974, when she was 20. She had a decade-long career in high fashion, appearing on European runways and fashion magazines, and serving as muse to designer Jean Paul Gaultier. During that time, she also married her first husband, French hair salon owner Daniel Guerard, with whom she had her first daughter, Margeaux Guerard.
As she told ABC News in 2006, when she found out she was pregnant in 1979, “Basically, he said, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, where I come from you get married and you have the child.’ And he very happily said, ‘OK. Let’s do it.'”
She and Guerard were only hitched for three years, however; after tying the knot in 1979, they split up in 1982. “The only thing I got in the divorce was Margaux,” Bracco said in a 2006 interview with The New York Times; after her divorce, she returned to the United States with her daughter.
Harvey Keitel
Lorraine Bracco & Harvey Keitel ♥️♥️ pic.twitter.com/OxzM15oYPM
— ParisTexas (@NastasjaTwinski) June 21, 2024
Bracco met Keitel, a fellow Italian-American cinema icon, at a cafe in Paris in 1983, and soon moved in together; their daughter, Stella Keitel, was born in 1985. The pair co-starred in an off-Broadway play, Goose and Tom-Tom, in 1986, which was soon followed by Bracco’s film breakthrough, 1987’s Someone to Watch Over Me.
But according to a 1998 New York Magazine article on their subsequent court battle for custody of daughter Stella Keitel, Bracco’s improving career prospects, especially after her 1990 Oscar nomination for Goodfellas, began to crater their relationship. Bracco testified in court documents that Keitel was angered by her taking phone calls about film roles; an affair she had in 1990 with Edward James Olmos on the set of their film Talent for the Game further deteriorated things. “He hated me for it. I disgusted him,” Bracco said of Keitel and her affair in a 2006 ABC News interview. “That was the beginning of the end. And I knew that. And maybe it was my way, my very immature un-Dr. Melfi-ish way to end that relationship.”
The two officially split up in 1993.
Edward James Olmos
(c)MGM Television/courtesy Everett Collection
Bracco and Olmos became couple after their affair, and married in 1994; however, when they divorced in 2002, it was after the couple had been separated for five years.
During most of her relationship with Olmos, Bracco was involved in her drawn-out custody battle with Keitel a situation made more complex by allegations against Olmos by an underage girl who was a friend of the family.
Bracco eventually won her court case against Keitel and gained sole custody of their daughter. But by 1999, the legal fees had led her to declare bankruptcy; in a 2006 interview with The New York Times, Bracco revealed that the same year she made her debut as Dr. Malfi on The Sopranos, she was told that her credit was too bad for her to lease a car.
“It was horrifying and embarrassing: getting foreclosure notices; lawyers knocking on your door wanting their money and no work to be found,” she recalled to The Times. “It was basically, who do you pay at the end of the month. You have to pay the mortgage. You have to pay the taxes, food and electricity and lawyers.” Between her custody and bankruptcy cases, she amassed over $2 million in legal fees and $500,000 in back taxes, which it took her more than a half-decade to pay off.
Today, things are notably better for Bracco, who picked up four Emmy nominations for The Sopranos, and continues to work steadily. And as the currently-single Bracco told AARP this past March, “I’m sure someone will arrive … I believe in love.”