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Téa Leoni (born Elizabeth Téa
Pantaleoni on February 25, 1966 in New York City) is an
American actress.
Career: A graduate of Brearley School, The Putney
School and Sarah Lawrence College (Anthropology,
Psychology), Leoni went on to star in a number of TV
series and movies, starting as "Lisa DiNapoli"
on Santa Barbara in 1989. She starred in the 1995
box-office hit Bad Boys, along with Will Smith and
Martin Lawrence.
Her most commercially successful movie
was Deep Impact, in which her character, "Jenny
Lerner," breaks the story of a comet that is going
to hit Earth. She also starred in Woody Allen's movie
Hollywood Ending, with Allen and Mark Rydell. In 2004,
she starred in Spanglish with Adam Sandler, Cloris
Leachman, and Paz Vega (a Spanish actress with whom she
spoke Italian off-set).
In 1993, she landed the starring role in Fox's Flying
Blind, a short-lived sitcom. In 1995, Leoni landed the
lead role in the television sitcom The Naked Truth,
playing Nora Wilde, a tabloid news journalist. The show
was a minor hit and lasted until 1998. She was ranked
#79 on the FHM 100 Sexiest Women of 2000. An asteroid,
8299 Téaleoni, has been named after her.
First earning fame as a witty, agile comic actress on
TV, smart, leggy beauty Téa Leoni was poised for
Hollywood movie stardom by the late '90s. Born Elizabeth
Téa Pantaleoni and raised in New York City, Leoni
graduated from boarding school in Vermont and headed to
Sarah Lawrence College to study psychology.
After dropping out to travel for several months, Leoni
intended to finish college at Harvard. Though she had
never planned on acting, Leoni auditioned on a dare for
a planned TV remake of Charlie's Angels and was cast.
Though the 1988 writer's strike killed the series, Leoni
opted to stay in Hollywood. After several years of
modeling and TV commercials, Leoni made her film debut
as the "Dream Girl" in Blake Edwards' farce
Switch (1991).
A small part in A League of Their Own (1992) and
starring roles in the short-lived Fox sitcom Flying
Blind (1992) and the TV movie The Counterfeit Contessa
(1994) brought Leoni more attention. While she
co-starred as the obligatory female witness in peril in
the blockbuster actioner Bad Boys (1995), Leoni's gift
for acid wit and goofy physical comedy turned her into a
TV star that same year in the sitcom The Naked Truth.
Despite a network change, The Naked Truth lasted three
seasons; Leoni further bolstered her comic reputation
with her performance as a high-strung psychology student
in David O. Russell's excellent screwball comedy
Flirting With Disaster (1996).
While The Naked Truth mined TV laughs out of tabloids,
Leoni's own personal life became paparazzi fodder when
she married X-Files heartthrob David Duchovny in 1997.
After taking a turn for the serious as a reporter in the
first 1998 asteroid blockbuster Deep Impact, Leoni took
a break from acting to have a daughter with Duchovny in
1999. Leoni returned to movies in 2000 with a charming
performance as Nicolas Cage's beloved in the syrupy
dramedy The Family Man.
Personal life: Leoni was born in New York City to
Anthony Pantaleoni, a corporate lawyer, and Emily
Patterson, a dietician. Leoni's paternal grandfather,
Guido Pantaleoni, had an Italian father and an American
mother; her paternal grandmother, Helenka Tradusa
Adamowska, was a film and stage actress who was born in
the U.S. to Polish parents. Leoni states in the October
27, 2006 Life magazine that she became a goodwill
ambassador for UNICEF partially because her grandmother
Helenka was the president of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF
for 25 years.
Leoni's mother was born in Texas, as
were her maternal grandparents, Virgil Pearson Patterson
and Florry Roberts. Leoni married actor David Duchovny
on May 6, 1997. Their first child, daughter Madelaine
West Duchovny, was born on April 24, 1999, and their
second, son Kyd Miller Duchovny, was born on June 15,
2002. |
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