Biography of Tea LeoniTéa Leoni (born February 25, 1966) is an American actress.
Leoni was born Elizabeth Téa Pantaleoni in New York City to Anthony Pantaleoni, a corporate lawyer, and Emily (Patterson), a dietician. Leoni’s mother is a native of Texas and her father is of Italian and Polish descent.[1] Leoni’s paternal grandmother, Helen "Helenka" Tradusa Adamowska (1901 - 1987), was a film and stage actress who was a member of a family of prominent musicians known as the Adamowski Trio.
Leoni attended Brearley School and The Putney School. She attended but did not complete studies at Sarah Lawrence College. She 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 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.
In 1992, 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 was cancelled in 1998.
In 2001, she starred with Sam Neill and William H. Macy in the blockbuster, Jurassic Park III, the third instalment of the Jurassic Park franchise. The film was a major box office hit and is one of her most notable roles.
She was ranked #79 on the FHM 100 Sexiest Women of 2000.
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.
She married her first husband, Neil Joseph Tardio, Jr., a television 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, was born on June 15, 2002, in Los Angeles, California. During a June 14, 2007, interview on The Tonight Show, she commented on her 10 year anniversary and how 10 years in Hollywood is like "50 years in the real world". She also revealed that she and Duchovny got tattoos on their ring fingers to celebrate their tenth anniversary. Like her husband, she is a vegetarian. The family lives in Malibu, California.
An asteroid, 8299 Téaleoni, has been named after her.
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