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Rise to Fame
She walked into The Sopranos audition thinking she'd need to actually sing soprano. She didn't. At 17, she got cast as Meadow, Tony's daughter, and HBO nearly replaced her after the pilot run with a blonde. They didn't, because reshooting four episodes cost too much. Sometimes the career you build is the one nobody bothered to cancel.
In the Spotlight
She was diagnosed with MS at 20, during The Sopranos run, and kept it secret for 15 years. Her doctor at the time told her not to tell anyone and declined to put it in her medical records. She went public in 2016, citing her toddler son as the reason. Since then: a podcast called MeSsy with Christina Applegate, a guest arc on Grey's Anatomy playing a doctor with MS, and a memoir called And So It Is about acceptance. The diagnosis she hid became her primary story.
Side Notes
She was doing stage productions of Annie and Gypsy from age 7, which is roughly the opposite of Italian mob royalty, and yet she spent the most formative decade of her career playing exactly that. Her podcast Not Today Pal is with Robert Iler, who played A.J. Soprano, her TV little brother. Her background is part Cuban, part Greek-Jewish, and part Romanian-Jewish. Hollywood cast someone with zero Italian heritage as one of the most Italian families on television, and nobody blinked.