For over a decade, actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, known for her role in The Sopranos, kept her battle with Multiple Sclerosis a closely guarded secret, sharing it only with her nearest and dearest.
Fearing the potential impact on her career and the disappointment of others, she hid the array of symptoms she experienced—from severe spasms and a noticeable limp to challenges with walking and embarrassing episodes of incontinence—from her colleagues on the acclaimed series.
Now at 44, Sigler acknowledges fellow actress Christina Applegate—who is also living with MS and recently faced hospitalization due to the illness—for inspiring her to embrace authenticity and discard her fears.
“Christina showed me the power of vulnerability and the positive influence it can have,” she revealed in her newly published memoir, And So It Is…
“Her willingness to be open and raw encouraged me to match her level of honesty and share my own story,” Sigler wrote.
In doing so, she has bravely addressed the often unspoken issue of incontinence that plagues many women with MS, recounting moments when she lost control of her bladder or bowels unexpectedly, including a particularly vulnerable incident just before a live television appearance.
‘I literally lost my bowels before appearing on the Today show,’ she wrote, ‘and just cleaned myself up and walked out on set as if nothing traumatic had just occurred minutes earlier.’
Sigler first developed symptoms of the condition age 20, a few weeks before filming the third season of The Sopranos, in which she played Meadow, the spoiled, rebellious daughter of mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini).
‘Christina [Applegate] helped me see the impact I could have by sharing deeply and being vulnerable,’ Sigler wrote in her new memoir
Sigler found fame on The Sopranos, playing Meadow, the spoiled, rebellious daughter of mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and his wife Carmela (Edie Falco)
Her symptoms include anything from numbness to difficulty walking (Sigler pictured in a wheelchair at LAX airport)
The numbness in her legs, leading to paralysis from the waist down, was initially misdiagnosed as Lyme disease. At one point she even feared she might never walk again.
And managing the symptoms while performing a very public job became a constant battle, she said, writing that she ‘buried the diagnosis under layers of denial, pretending it didn’t exist.’
It was only in 2016, with the birth of her son Beau, that she decided to go public.
Five years later, she and Applegate connected when the Dead to Me actress found that she, too, had the life-threatening condition.
The pair even collaborated on a podcast to shed light on MS, called MeSsy.
It was Applegate, said Sigler, who helped her open up about the sometimes deeply shameful reality of MS – including wearing adult diapers, ‘which used to be something I would have rather died than admit.’
In the book, she described the first time she lost control of her bladder – wetting herself while walking the streets of New York.
‘I didn’t understand what was happening to me,’ she wrote, ‘only that one minute I felt like I had to pee and the next second, pee was running down my leg.
‘I felt disgusted with myself. Embarrassed.’
Frantically trying to think about what to do, she sat on a bench and crossed her legs tight to hide the dark stain forming on her blue sweatpants. Then she called her boyfriend at the time.
Sigler and Christina Applegate connected when the Dead to Me actress found that she, too, had the life-threatening condition
The pair even collaborated on a podcast to shed light on MS, called MeSsy
He arrived on the scene with a shirt to wrap around her waist, so she could ‘humbly’ walk back to her apartment building, ‘avoiding eye contact with anyone and going straight up to my bathroom to wash away the awful moment.’
Later, when she was performing as Belle in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway in 2002, she described being terrified she might humiliate herself on stage.
‘About halfway through our run, during one performance, I had the feeling that I might have lost control of my bowels,’ she wrote.
‘Can you imagine? As Belle you don’t ever get a moment to leave the stage, so I was prancing around for almost the entirety of the first act not knowing if I was in the clear or not.
‘Doing those high kicks during Be Our Guest, normally a proud moment, I was consumed with the worry that I was sending noxious fumes into the front row.’
Fortunately, when she went back to her dressing room at intermission, she discovered she had just been paranoid. ‘But it had me reeling,’ she said.
On another occasion, she was at a Yankees game when she suddenly lost control of her bladder.
‘Completely mortified, I didn’t know what to do. I was sitting in the front row of the box, talking to some people I had just met, and had no possible way out.’
Her quick-thinking answer was to text a friend to come over and spill a drink on her – covering the wet stain on her pants.
‘The whole of my twenties was shadowed by this invisible enemy living inside me,’ she wrote, ‘and yet most of my coworkers, directors, friends, agents, and managers, even some family, didn’t suspect a thing, even after I began to limp and my back ached and I found it hard to stand on my own without support.
‘I was an island unto myself. And I had believed that was the way it had to be. I routinely stuffed down the bad stuff. My motto: Move on.’
When she eventually plucked up the courage to tell her Sopranos castmates what was really going on in her life, her on-screen father Gandolfini was among the first to know.
‘I want to tell you something that I’m really afraid to say,’ she told him.
‘Say it,’ he answered.
‘I have MS.’
Her words hung in the air for a moment before she added: ‘I found out a few years ago and I’m so scared and I don’t know what this means. And I’m doing a s***ty job here and I don’t know how to act anymore.’
She wrote: ‘He hugged me and said all he could: “I’m so sorry.”‘
They hugged it out – nothing more needed to be said.
‘This was enough for me. This felt like enough.’
She was able to finish the final Sopranos season on a high, celebrating a special tribute at the 2007 Emmy awards
‘The whole of my twenties was shadowed by this invisible enemy living inside me,’ wrote Sigler
Sigler with her husband, former baseball player Cutter Dykstra
Buoyed by her work family’s support, she was able to finish the final Sopranos season on a high, celebrating a special tribute at the 2007 Emmy awards, during which the cast received a standing ovation.
Sigler recalled that she was wearing high heels that night – something that had become increasingly difficult because of her condition – and that her co-star Robert Iler, who played her on-screen little brother AJ, held her up as they took to the stage in that emotional moment.
‘I’d told Rob about my MS only a few hours earlier that day,’ she wrote. ‘I wanted him to understand why I was the way I was and felt that with the finality of this experience being wrapped in a bow it would be wrong if I didn’t tell him.
‘He was still so young and didn’t know how to receive it, but he did request that I ask him for help whenever I needed it. I promised I would, and standing up there on that stage was his first assignment.’
She now says that, while this is not the life she would ever have chosen for herself, she now wouldn’t change a thing.
‘I was ashamed for so long,’ she wrote. ‘I assumed so much about other people. And in my assumptions, I contorted myself to do what I thought would please others and to escape my own negative thoughts.
‘I’II fantasize sometimes about the what-ifs: Would I have gone on to have a bigger career after The Sopranos? Would I be a better mother?’
But she added: ‘Without these experiences, I would not be me. I wouldn’t have this strength or this clarity or this knowledge or this beautiful messy life.’
And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope by Jamie-Lynn Sigler is published by Harper
