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Téa Leoni has precisely three notable credits on her resume. Three. One is her short-lived and very forgettable sitcom, The Naked Truth. One is her supporting role in the comedy Flirting with Disaster. And one is a lead in Deep Impact, a falling-rock movie that wasn't even the best falling-rock movie of the year in which it came out. (Yes, Armageddon is better. Rule 286 of making action movies: if you are making a falling-rock movie, better to make a loud, stupid falling-rock movie than a pretentious, confused falling-rock movie.)
Before we go any further, let's get something straight: we like Téa Leoni. We wish her well. She was very good in Flirting with Disaster, and pretty good in Deep Impact, and as for The Naked Truth, well, lots of good, talented actors get stuck in bad, lifeless sitcoms. (We're assuming it wasn't Leoni's idea to name her character "Nora" -- a tack obviously meant to evoke fond memories of the screwball comedies of the '30s and '40s, but which only served to remind viewers how so very inferior that show was to the screwball comedies of the '30s and '40s.) But we are not here to judge Ms Leoni's talent -- only her fame. Which, considering she is probably one of the 20 best known actresses in Hollywood, is way out of proportion with her actual creative output. Okay, she's also married to David Duchovny, which has boosted her fame quotient considerably, but which has also, sadly, put her career--and, by extension, her future fame prospects -- in grave, grave danger.
If we were a ghost, we would visit Ms Leoni in the night, and take her by the hand and fly her out over Hollywood to the home of Kate Capshaw, and say, "Look, Kate Capshaw once had an all right career going, and then she married Steven Spielberg, and now she's nowhere." And before Ms Leoni could answer, we'd take her by the hand and fly her to Patricia Arquette's house, and say "She had a pretty great career going, with many more notable credits than three, and then she married Nicolas Cage, and now she's..." And Ms Leoni would mouth the word "nowhere," because she will have seen her own future; if she's not careful, that is.
It's all well and good to get married and ditch your career -- we'd all be better off if more people in Hollywood did just that -- and it's not unlikely that Patricia Arquette may some day rise again. (Sorry, Kate Capshaw.) But Téa Leoni was having enough trouble getting good parts before she went into celebrity marriage dry dock, mainly because she is cursed with the seemingly lucky but actually unlucky combination of good looks and comic talent. (When ABC was putting a huge push on The Naked Truth -- another reason for Leoni's out-of-whack fame quotient -- they marketed her as "Lucille Ball in Sharon Stone's body," which probably seemed like a crowd-pleasing package. Except that it's nearly impossible to name even one conventionally beautiful, very successful comedian, man or woman. If you think of one, email me.) All is not lost, however: good roles, for which she is singularly suited, are out there, somewhere, as Flirting with Disaster proved.
But as of right now, Ms Leoni owes about 90% of her fame to a big but failed publicity push, a lead in a heavily promoted but very bad movie, and being married to David Duchovny. And so we must pull back on the reins and say: Whoa, Téa. Whoa.
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