When Edie Falco discusses her relationship with James Gandolfini, with whom she created one of the most complex and moving portraits of marriage ever shown on television, she sometimes admits that the two didn’t know each other very well. She recently told the “Today” show that, during the eight years in which they filmed “The Sopranos,” they never got close.

“I really did not know much about his personal life,” she said. “Just what the rest of the world knew.” On one level, this distance is surprising, but, on another, it makes a kind of emotional sense. Falco’s performance as Carmela Soprano, the sharp, bejewelled wife of the mobster Tony Soprano, had a wholeness and an independence to it; it was never defined by Gandolfini and her other scene partners, however excellent they were.