"I went to Our Lady of Mount Carmel and I said, 'Show me the way. I want to travel, meet nice people,' " she recalled earlier this month as she sat at her kitchen table, an HBO handler at one elbow, a reporter at the other.
Not that HBO needs to eavesdrop on Donato's conversations. Nowhere is omerta - the code of silence - observed more closely than in the Donato household, where neither Marie nor her retired husband, John, will breathe a hint of what Donato or anyone else might be doing this season in "The Sopranos."
What could she say about her character - who gets just two lines in the second of two episodes that will air Sunday - but who may be back?
"Nothing," she said flatly.
What does she think of Tony Soprano, mob boss, middle-class father - and killer?
"I can't judge him. I'm going to be judged," she said, laughing.
"We don't know what goes on. What's Mafia to me? What's wiseguy? I don't know wiseguys. I know nice guys."
So what does she have to say to those Italian-Americans who worry that shows like "The Sopranos" reinforce the stereotype that Italians are all connected to the Mafia?
"It depends on what you say Mafia" is, she replied. "People call it Mafia. I call it family."
Family means a lot to Donato, who lost her father to cancer several years ago and is still caring for her 82-year-old mother, hospitalized since just after Thanksgiving with a broken hip.
Her three daughters have so far given her four grandchildren, and there's a fifth on the way, but she's nostalgic for those big family gatherings that still occur on "The Sopranos" between the beatings and the shootings, those moments where "they go back in time, like when Tony remembered when he played ball," she said.
In real life, "it's not like it was years ago, where a family was all connected," she said wistfully.
