James Gandolfini skipped his on-screen daughter, Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s, wedding with “no warning” when she married her first husband in 2003.
The “Sopranos” starlet opens up about Gandolfini’s surprising no-show and her disappointment over his absence in her newly released memoir, “And So It Is…A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope.”
“Jim didn’t show up. No indication, no warning. I can’t say for certain why. He’s not here, so I can’t ask him,” Sigler, 44, writes of the Tony Soprano actor, who died from a heart attack in 2013 at the age of 51.
“The Jim I knew wouldn’t have just skipped my wedding without a word or an excuse,” she continues, per Entertainment Weekly. “Part of me wonders if maybe he didn’t want it for me.”
And while Sigler “expected some smiles” and congratulations when she returned to the “Sopranos” set for her first table read after her wedding, she writes that “instead, the room was completely silent.”
“It was clear: none of them were happy about this for me,” the “Gangster Land” actress pens. “It would take me two long years to understand why.”
Sigler and her first husband, and then-manager Abraxas “AJ” Discala, tied the knot in July 2003 when she was 22 and he was 32.
The pair then separated in September 2005. Sigler called her and Discala’s two-year marriage “really toxic and complicated” during an interview with Us Weekly last month.
The Broadway star ultimately moved on with former MLB infielder Cutter Dykstra. The couple married in 2016 and have since welcomed two sons together.
Elsewhere in “And So It Is,” Sigler celebrates Gandolfini and remembers him as “the sun around which the rest of [the ‘Sopranos’ cast] orbited.”
Sigler played the late actor’s on-screen daughter, Meadow Soprano, in the Emmy-winning HBO crime drama for all six seasons from 1999 to 2007.
The Soprano family also included Edie Falco as Tony’s wife, Carmela Soprano, and Robert Iler as the mob boss’ son, A.J. Soprano.
“He was larger than life,” Sigler, who has since ditched Hollywood for Texas, writes. “His energy filled the room. Sometimes I think he hated that power. But it was just part of him.”
She continues, “He was magnetic – so big, so beautiful. His presence took up space in the most brilliant way. Jim was humble and present. He cared.”
But Sigler’s 2003 wedding wouldn’t have been the first time Gandolfini was notably absent from an important event.
“The Sopranos” creator, David Chase, recently confirmed that the actor kept “going missing” from set while filming the hit show.
“Well, fortunately, I wasn’t the one who dealt with him going missing,” he told the Guardian in March.
“I mean, he asked to meet me a couple of times, once on the banks of the Hudson River when he didn’t want to go to work, and he was so unhappy. This happened three or four times, and we talked and talked and talked, but I was never the one who had to find out where he was.”
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