The tough cookie we love: now on Broadway, The Sopranos' Edie Falco takes the Fifth about her gay best friend and her lesbian fans. (theater).

To hear Edie Falco tell it, her rapid Sopranos-fueled rise to fame has been just a bit dizzying. When Meryl Streep casually complimented her work in a face-to-face encounter, Falco recalls, "I almost passed out. I was knock-kneed. I didn't think that The Sopranos was going to make it into that conversation." But she has no plans to mop up on the "Italian wives and mother roles" she's routinely offered. Instead, she's heading back to her old turf, the theater--with a star turn on Broadway opposite Stanley Tucci in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, the hardscrabble hetero love story by out playwright Terrence McNally. The limited run wraps up in late December, just in time for Falco to return to playing Mafia wife Carmela for The Sopranos' next season.

McNally is not Falco's only gay admirer: For years one of her best buds has been filmmaker Eric Mendelsohn. "Edie and I went to the same college, State University of New York, Purchase," writes her longtime friend in a charming E-mail interview. "She did some two-person play and I went to see it, and I remember pointing to the stage and saying `Her! That one there! That's the most talented person in this entire school.' Truth be told, I was pointing at the other actress, who, as it turns out, never really amounted to much. Edie was pretty good too, though."

Mendelsohn would later cast Falco as a cluelessly optimistic wanna-be actor in his 1999 Sundance prize-winner, Judy Berlin. Asked if the film's treatment of her character and that of its leading man was in any way based on his real-life friendship with Falco, Mendelsohn demurs: "Not in the least. We're actually more like a couple of 70-year-old Jewish women ... we're always asking about the other's bowels. At night I go to her house and we watch Matlock and sip Hoffman's cream soda."

The two are so close that a cheesy tabloid once made the gaffe of "exposing" Mendelsohn as Falco's secret love, thanks to their weekly coffee-shop breakfasts together. How did Mendelsohn feel about being Falco's tabloid squeeze? "I thought it was great," he responds. "I laughed hysterically for about two days and then called my lawyer."

Meanwhile, on the phone with The Advocate, Falco is taking the Fifth on her friendship with Mendelsohn, loyally refusing to confirm or deny his sexual identity. Maybe it's the fact that the line is tapped, but while she's perfectly pleasant, Falco seems determined to keep the conversation strictly impersonal--until she's told of her loyal lesbian fan base. "Oh, my goodness," she exclaims. "I had no idea."

Indeed, her lesbian fans felt let down by one Sopranos episode in which a lesbian tennis instructor ignored Carmela to make a play for her in-law-to-be Adriana (Drea di Matteo). Falco emits a laugh of surprise: "It's very flattering."

She indulges one gay-tinged Sopranos speculation: Could Carmela ever find herself in the anus of another woman? "There's as much a possibility of that as anything else on that show," Falco says, inscrutable to the last.

Additional reporting by Anne Stockwell. Limsky is a New York-based freelance writer.