Biography
Hunky Australian-born Italian actor Marco Leonardi made a splash in the 1990s with major roles in two of Hollywood's biggest foreign language film hits--"Cinema Paradiso" and "Like Water for Chocolate"--and kept winning roles well into the 2000s in several notable films. Having moved to Italy at the age of four, Leonardi began to work in films as a teenager, memorably portraying Salvatore "Totò" Di Vita in Giuseppe Tornatore's cinematic memoir, "Cinema Paradiso." Four years later he won the lead part of the lovelorn young Pedro Muzquiz in the Mexican romance "Like Water for Chocolate." Plenty of feature work followed in Italian cinema throughout the 1990s, and, though his face was recognizable to many in the United States, he didn't make his American film debut until he starred in the 1998 Italian-American family drama "My Brother Jack." The following year Leonardi had a double-whammy, starring in the Canadian film "The Five Senses," which wove together five interconnected stories, and the horror/Western sequel "From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter," where he again had top billing. His performance caught the eye of the series originator, Robert Rodriguez, who cast Leonardi in 2003 as a bandito alongside mega-stars Antonio Banderas and Johnny Depp in his action-crime-comedy "Once Upon a Time in Mexico." The following year Leonardi joined Juliet Binoche and an all-star cast in Abel Ferrara's religious-themed thriller "Mary," and since then he has divided his time between Los Angeles and Rome, working in both film capitols.
