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Elizabeth Téa Pantaleoni, born
February 25, 1966), better known by her stage name Téa Leoni, is an
American actress. She has starred in a wide range of films including
Jurassic Park III, The Family Man, Deep Impact, Fun with Dick and Jane,
Spanglish, Bad Boys, and most recently Ghost Town.
Leoni was born in New York City, the daughter of Emily (née Patterson), a
dietician and nutritionist, and Anthony Pantaleoni, a corporate lawyer of
the firm Fulbright & Jaworski. Leoni’s mother is a native of Texas, and
her father is of Italian and Polish descent. Leoni’s paternal grandmother,
Helen "Helenka" Tradusa Adamowska (1901 - 1987), was a film and stage
actress who was a sister of Józef and Tymoteusz Adamowski, who with
Józef's wife, Antonina Szumowska-Adamowska, were the Adamowski Trio.
Leoni's paternal great-grandfather was the brother of Italian economist
and politician Maffeo Pantaleoni.
Leoni attended Brearley School and The Putney School. She attended but did
not complete studies at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1988, she was cast as
one of the stars of Angels 89, an updated version of the 1970s show
Charlie's Angels. In May 1988, Life magazine ran a story on the casting of
this new series. After production delays, the show never aired. The
following year, Leoni starred as "Lisa DiNapoli" in the TV daytime drama
Santa Barbara.
She went on to appear in the women's-baseball film A League of Their Own
(1992) and later that year starred with Corey Parker in the single-season
Fox sitcom Flying Blind, playing a beautiful, eccentric,
downtown-Manhattan libertine who falls in love with an ordinary Long
Island college graduate. In February 1995, she appeared in the sitcom
Frasier as the fiance of Sam Malone, portrayed by guest star Ted Danson,
in a crossover from Cheers.
That same year, Leoni landed the lead role in the sitcom The Naked Truth,
playing Nora Wilde, a tabloid news journalist. The show ran through 1998.
A number of film roles came along, including a starring one in Deep
Impact, a big-budget disaster film about a comet menacing Earth. Leoni
also has been seen in films like Jurassic Park III, The Family Man, Bad
Boys and You Kill Me. She starred as a film studio executive in Hollywood
Ending for director Woody Allen, portraying his ex-wife, and in Spanglish
as the emotionally unstable wife of Adam Sandler.
Leoni ranked #79 on the FHM "100 Sexiest Women of 2000" list.
Leoni states in the October 27, 2006, issue of Life magazine that she
became a Goodwill ambassador for UNICEF partially because her paternal
grandmother was the president of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF for 25 years.
Leoni married her first husband, Neil Joseph Tardio, Jr., a television
commercial producer, on June 8, 1991, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in
Hope, New Jersey. The couple divorced in 1995.
She married her second husband, actor David Duchovny, on May 6, 1997,
after a nine-week courtship. Their first child, daughter Madelaine West
Duchovny, was born on April 24, 1999, in Southern California, and their
second, son Kyd Miller Duchovny, on June 15, 2002, in Los Angeles. The
family lives in Malibu, California.
On Wednesday, October 15, 2008, Leoni and Duchovny confirmed that they
have been separated "for several months". The media attributed the
separation to Duchovny's much publicized sexual addiction. The couple have
since publicly reconciled and are seen frequently together as a family. |
