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The actress, best known for playing Meadow Soprano on The Sopranos, was asked to audition for the role of Belle in Beauty and the Beast a few weeks after her 21st birthday, she recalled in her memoir And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope (out Tuesday, May 5).
At first, she said, there was “no sign of MS, no sign of despair.” However, as Sigler settled into her run at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, “some weird things started happening to my body,” she wrote.
“Sometimes when the Beast would twirl me, I’d feel like I was about to lose my balance, so that I needed to grip his hand a little tighter than normal,” Sigler explained. “Sometimes I clumsily would drop a prop. I even dropped Belle’s famous opening scene book into the front row and a sweet little girl in the audience handed it back to me.”
At the time, Sigler hid her diagnosis with MS — an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system that can affect motor skills — from the public. The people she confided in at the time were few.
Recalling one Beauty and the Beast performance at which she felt “completely checked out” due to what was happening with her body, she opened up to costar Steve Blanchard, who at the time was playing the Beast.
“Every night I had a rare quiet moment onstage when the Beast gifts Belle his library,” Sigler wrote in her memoir. “Steve Blanchard, my Beast, and I would sit on the balcony together with our backs to the audience as Mrs. Potts and Lumiere talked below. Our mics would be shut off, and sometimes Steve and I would shoot the s**t to pass the time.”
That night, Sigler remembered, “as I was still reeling from that traumatic first act, I blurted out, ‘I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable, and I am so sorry to put this on you, but I really just need to say this out loud: I have MS. I have MS, and I’m scared.’”
“I couldn’t believe that I had just dropped that bomb on him, midshow, onstage, like a total asshole,” she said, explaining that she never expected the reaction that came next.
“He turned to me, took a deep breath, and said, ‘If I could hug you right now, I would. Jamie, my mom has MS. She’s okay. You’ll be okay,’” Sigler wrote.
Sigler explained that, in that moment, everything “changed” and she felt “divinely looked after.”
As time went on, the two would talk about how Blanchard’s mother coped with her diagnosis.
“I never told anyone that I had confessed my secret to Steve, and Steve never shared my secret with anyone,” said Sigler, who at the time was married to her former manager AJ Discala.
According to Sigler, her ex-husband — whom she split from after less than two years of marriage — appeared to become jealous of their close bond, once allegedly asking her if she was “in love” with Blanchard.
“Of course not!” Sigler said, adding: “But what I wanted to say was this: I needed that connection so badly. I needed to talk about my MS to an impartial person who just got it. A person who didn’t want to talk about how we hide it, ignore it, overcome it. It was so nice to talk about it so freely and honestly.”
Sigler’s memoir And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope is out now.
