Leave it to the people behind Desperate Housewives to make sure that Wisteria Lane is never short of a vixen to stir things up. Producers have been on the lookout for another housewife to join the ABC dramedy for quite some time and now that Nicolette Sheridan’s character Edie is finally out of the picture, it’s time to put a face to Edie’s highly anticipated replacement.

According to Entertainment Weekly’s Michael Ausiello, Emmy-winning Sopranos heroine Drea de Matteo is joining the cast of Desperate Housewives as a series regular next season. Though her character is yet to be named, she’ll be playing the matriarch of a new Italian family. On the other hand, casting is underway for her on-screen landscape designer husband and their 19-year-old tightly wound son, who is likely to strike a spark with one of the neighborhood girls.

Perhaps no one can ever replace Nicolette Sheridan’s Edie but you have to give props to the people behind this brilliant casting choice. Drea de Matteo obviously has that strong Italian vibe going and seeing her blend in with the rest of the residents of Wisteria Lane would be like a fish out of water — unless her character traded the hectic New York City scene for the picket-fenced life on Wisteria Lane for an entirely different agenda.

Apart from playing Adriana La Cerva, fiancée of Tony Soprano’s protegé, Christopher Moltisanti on the mob drama The Sopranos, Drea de Matteo has also played Joey Tribbiani’s sister Gina on the NBC sitcom Joey and graced the big screen as part of films like Lake City, The Good Life and Broken English. At present, she stars as Wendy Case on FX original series Sons of Anarchy and is working on the movie New York, I Love You.

Edie Falco who played the famous Mob wife Carmela Soprano in “The Sopranos” is now starring as a nurse in her own series “Nurse Jackie” which is a darkly funny comedy premiered on Showtime. Falco plays a highly experienced, twisted emergency room nurse in New York’s All Saints hospital. She plays a unique character who is partly Florence Nightingale and partly fugitive, addicted to prescription drugs having a bad past. Jackie can go any length for anything she wants like she can have mid-day sex with a staff pharmacist who in return supplies her pain-killers. She can easily break the law and doesn’t think once before flushing a patient’s ear into the toilet.

The 45-year old Falco is a single mother of two children, a 5-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl. She says that single motherhood complicates her acting career but is very happy. This three time Emmy Award winner’s life has been a whirlpool. She is flooded with projects after The Sopranos who until 1990’s was so poor that she lived in Shacks with thousand other roommates. She did everything from waitressing to playing clown at weddings to earn money. Although she has done some films but she is better remembered as a television actress.

Falco has no problems playing Jackie’s character as she herself is a recovering alcoholic who has been a teetotaller for 17 years. Her Swedish origin was e reason for her getting addicted to alcohol and has experienced the damage it can do. Her memories of her scrounging days and her visits to the ER helped her in preparing for “Nurse Jackie”.

Falco has never married though her romance with her co-star Stanley Tucci became very famous. Falco was attracted to theatre quite early because of her mother work at the community theatre but she could never get that big break. She was confident that some day she would get into acting and this strong belief changed things for her. She got several television roles and finally came “The Sopranos“.

According to Falco, neither getting sober nor her 2004 attack with breast cancer was her greatest nightmare. It was the persistent money problems that she faced in 1980’s and early 1990’s. Falco is very open-ended as an actor. Although she plans not to work this summer but if some good project comes up, she would definitely give it a thought.

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