Maria Annunciata "Nucci" Gualtieri, portrayed by Frances Esemplare, is Paulie Gualtieri's supposed mother (actually his biological aunt) who resided at Green Grove Retirement Home. Nucci was very overprotective of her "son" and was an innocent and easily swayed old woman, although sometimes, in contrast, she did use her influence over Paulie to make him serve her own ends, in line with the theme in the show with female authority figures exerting power over their children.
Biography[]
Background[]
Maria Annunciata Gualtieri was the sister of Dottie and Mary and the wife of Gennaro Gualtieri (whom Carmine Lupertazzi remembers was run over by a trolley) with whom she had three children: Gerry, Rose and an unnamed third son. During World War II, Nucci's sister Dottie, who was training to become a nun at the time, had an affair with a soldier named "Russ" and got pregnant, so to hide the scandal, Nucci adopted Dottie's son Paulie and passed him as her own. It is said that Nucci would bail Paulie out of prison whenever he got into trouble as a kid.
Season 3[]
Nucci first appears in the season 3 finale, "Army of One". In it, she is moving into Green Grove retirement home and Paulie is helping her financially. It is noticeable how much of a contrast there is between Nucci's opinion of Green Grove and Livia Soprano's, as Livia would almost always be apathetic and distasteful around the place, while Nucci is so happy she begins to tear up over how her son got her into the top-tier retirement community. Green Grove costs a fortune, however, so Paulie arranges a sitdown with Tony and Ralph over a pay dispute he has with the latter that, if resolved, could help to pay for his mother's care. To Paulie's dismay, Tony sides with Ralph and only agrees to offer Paulie $12,000 out of a $50,000 sum. This in turn causes Paulie to start taking into account more of what Johnny Sack has to say.
Season 4[]
In the episode "Mergers and Acquisitions", Paulie is helping his mother get settled in at Green Grove. Nucci is excited when she hears her friends Cookie Cirillo and Minn Matrone are coming to stay as well. However, her friends (especially Cookie) quickly reject her and start making her eat all alone because she's "too emotional" and a "tattletale". She informs Paulie of this in tears and after he visits the social director to no avail, he decides to send Benny Fazio and Little Paulie to assault Cookie's son Chuckie, who is a high school principal. They chase Chuckie through the school and break his arm, and after some convincing by Chuckie's wife, Cookie finally lets Nucci spend time with them.
Ralph Cifaretto calls Nucci Gualtieri in the middle of the night.
In the next episode, after Ralph puts together that it was Paulie who told Johnny Sack about the joke he made on his wife, he decides to take revenge by prank calling his mother. Ralph calls Nucci in the middle of the night pretending to be a Pennsylvania police officer and informs her that her son was found on a men's room in Lafayette Park "sucking a Cub Scout's dick" and that they found a gerbil in his rectal passage. Paulie later angrily states that Nucci had to be put on Xanax just so she could sleep and that she spent an hour and a half in the hospital unit with nervous bowel syndrome. This could further drive home the theory that Paulie was the one to set Pie-O-My's stable on fire as an act of revenge against Ralph.
Later on in the season, Paulie asphyxiates Nucci's friend Minn Matrone to death with a pillow after she caught him stealing money from her during a home invasion so he could pay restitution to Tony.
Season 5[]
In the episode "Where's Johnny?", Paulie has a conflict with Feech La Manna after he physically assaults his aunt Mary's gardener Sal Vitro and tells him the neighborhood now belongs to his nephew E. Gary La Manna. Nucci visits Mary at her house.
Season 6[]
Part I[]
"You're a fraud, and a phony! And she's even worse! She's a whore! My mother's a fuckin' whore!"
In the episode "The Fleshy Part of the Thigh", Paulie learns through his aunt Dottie, who is a nun and is in her deathbed, that he isn't Nucci's son, but in fact her own and that Nucci only adopted him to hide the shame of Dottie sleeping with a soldier. Paulie, enraged and feeling as though his whole life was a lie, confronts his "mother", and angrily tells her that she's a fraud and that Dottie is a whore. He later tells her that he will not be paying for her accommodation at Green Grove anymore, which leaves her devastated. Paulie doesn't attend Dottie's funeral either, and instead tells Tony about the whole scandal, asking him to keep it to himself. Tony, who is recovering in the hospital from Junior shooting him in the stomach, tells him that even though she might not be his real mother, that she did love him like one and he should forgive her. Later in the episode, when Helen Barone asks for Tony not to hurt her son, the parallels he notices with his own life make Paulie cry.
Paulie and Nucci watch TV together.
Later, in the episode "The Ride", Paulie encounters his mother at the Feast of St. Elzéar, where he berates her once more. But after seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary at the Bing, Paulie goes to his mother's room in Green Grove, her accomodation now being paid by her biological son. He quietly sits down next to her as they watch The Lawrence Welk Show together, and they silently reconcile.
Part II[]
Nucci died of a stroke on a chartered bus while returning from a production of Jersey Boys in the episode "Kennedy and Heidi". However, her funeral was poorly attended, as her death coincided with that of Christopher Moltisanti. This enraged Paulie, as he felt like Christopher always outshined him in life, and even managed to do so in death.
Appearances[]
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| Season 4 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Season 6 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |