Vera & Taissa Farmiga
Sisters with a scary bond
From the Barrymores to the Baldwins, Hollywood is littered with siblings, spouses, parents, and children. It’s really not all that special. But Vera Farmiga’s sister, Taissa, came out of nowhere. Probably because unlike the Afflecks, Evanses, or Maras, when the older sibling got her start, the younger one had only just been born.
The child of Ukranian immigrants, Vera grew up in Irvington, New Jersey where she didn’t learn English until the age of six. Acting came to her relatively late as well. It wasn’t until her junior year in high school, following a benching by her soccer coach, that Vera tried out for the school play. She caught the bug and went on to study performing arts at Syracuse University.
In 1994, a year before Vera’s college graduation, Taissa was born. In fact, Taissa’s birth, 21-years after her Vera’s, nicely coincides with her older sister’s development as an actor. While Taissa learned to crawl, walk, talk, Vera finished up her studies as an actor. While Taissa was in preschool, Vera sustained herself with small theater and television roles. But it wasn’t until 2002, when Taissa was firmly entrenched in elementary school, that Vera started to make some noise.
Following her first leading role opposite Steve Buscemi, in Love in the Time of Money, Vera booked a slew of movie roles high up on the call sheet until 2004, when she booked a supporting part in the Denzel driven Manchurian Candidate. The film did well both critically and financially and set Vera up for her breakout role in 2005–with Taissa entering adolescence–in Scorcese’s The Departed. She was off and running.
Despite their vast age difference, it seemed only right that Taissa’s breakout as an actress occurred at the same time as Vera’s directorial debut in the critically acclaimed Higher Ground (2011) where the 16-year-old Taissa, now the spitting image of her sister, played the younger version of Vera’s character. Since then, Taissa has gone on to cement herself as a small-screen scream queen with a number of roles in American Horror Story. Ironically enough, Vera soon followed her sister into the horror genre with starring roles in The Conjuring series and as the not-yet-dead Norma Bates, mother of Hitchcock’s Norman Bates. And with Taissa guest starring in last year’s AHS, and the final season of Bates Motel premiering this month, the pair have dominated TV horror, proving they can both provide the screams and cause them in equal measure.
