L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, AUGUST 28, 2014 www.italoamericano.com L'Italo-Americano 7 Téa Leoni. Walking tall against the rain There's a new political drama coming to television, people who live in Los Angeles might have seen the posters plastered all over town. It's called Madam Secretary and focuses on what life is like for a female Secretary of State, who deals with prickly situations and often travels over- seas, where rights for women aren't always what we are accustomed to in the United States. It's easy to imagine how the Hillary Clinton's Benghazi hearings served as inspiration in penning the show. Playing the titular character is classy actress Téa Leoni, who most people remember as having been mar- ried to the star of The X-files, David Duchovny. Leoni has actually made quite a career for herself with great many roles in Bad Boys, Deep Impact, The Family Man and most recently Spanglish. She surely will bring charm and elegancy to a strong female CIA analyst who gets appointed to Secretary of State by the President himself. Téa Leoni was actually born Elizabeth Téa Pantaleoni, she went by her middle name as a tradition in her family to use the middle names as a first name. Her Italian heritage has roots in the Italian politics of the nine- teen-twenties. While her father, Anthony Pantaleoni, was a cor- porate lawyer of the firm Fulbright & Jaworski, her grandfather was a nephew of Italian economist and politician Maffeo Pantaleoni. Maffeo was Minister of Finance in the Carnaro government of Gabriele D'Annunzio at Fiume and he's known to have been a major contributor to the Italian school of economics named Scienza delle Finanze (which later influ- enced the study of tax inci- dence). He was also elected to the Italian Senate during the late years of his life. Téa was brought up in an upper class New York family and attended some very élite private schools. While her grandmother was a famous stage actress, acting was still far away on Téa's horizon. She studied anthropology and psychology for two years but dropped out to travel around the world, spending time in Tokyo first and later in Italy to connect with her roots. It was the late Aaron Spelling, producer of some of the most influential shows on American television, who sug- gested Téa should shorten her family name Pantaleoni into just Leoni. She had recently come back home and was auditioning MICHAel tRAVeRsA on a dare for Angels '88, a show that was meant to be a modern re-imagination of Spelling's Charlie's Angels. She booked the part but, as people who are familiar with pilots and how tv programming works would guess, the show never made it on the air. She quickly bounced back landing a job in the then popular soap opera Santa Barbara. As she was at the beginning of her career she played on her strengths and took on the role of a smart Italian secretary at a law firm, named Lisa DiNapoli, replacing Tawny Kitaen, who had taken a leave of absence. Television at the time wasn't as brainy and cre- ative as it is today; Leoni found herself struggling with that landscape. She was obviously craving for more and finally got her first big exposure in the Will Smith's actioner Bad Boys. Her no non-sense attitude didn't always gain her favors in Hollywood, which is probably the reason why she hasn't worked as much as she could have. She never really gave too much importance to fame or having her picture in magazines, rather preferring to focus on the work. That not-wanting-to-play- by-the-rules approach did get her to work with Woody Allen though, who saw her as a per- fect fit for the sharp-witted stu- dio executive in Hollywood Ending. With her magnetic blue eyes and athletic physique is easy to see how fellow actor Duchovny fell in love with her at first sight. There's a funny story, when her now ex-husband Duchovny was on the charitable edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, he came across a question pertinent to Téa's Italian culture, so he chose the option of phoning a friend and called her up. The question was Which Italian city is home to the cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, or the Duomo? As Téa recalls, when she heard the word Duomo her mind went straight to Milan and she didn't pay too much attention to the rest of the question; as the game is on a time constraint. When the Lombardy city didn't appear as part of the four choices, she gasped "Oh, my gosh, honey, you're so screwed!" "But you speak Italian!" he cried. The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore is also known as Duomo di Firenze, and luckily Duchovny guessed it right but he jokingly promised of never calling her again. Italian art is something she actually knows quite well, but I guess her nerves had the best of her. Actress, Producer & Unicef Ambassador Téa Leoni

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