<< back                                       November 27, 2005
NorthJersey.com
Author: Virginia Rohan

For her first big TV project after "Everybody Loves Raymond," Patricia Heaton collaborated with David Hunt, her husband of 15 years. Not only are they executive producers of the TNT movie "The Engagement Ring," but Hunt plays her character's practical businessman fianc¨¦ - and not the passionate chef who throws a monkey wrench into her well-ordered life.

"It had a 'Moonstruck' quality to the comedy - very romantic, huge emotions. I like to think of it as a comic opera," Heaton says of the script. "It just posed this question, what is true love? Is it that sort of ecstatic, over-the-top feeling you get on meeting someone? Or is it about years of commitment and history together? Or is it both? How do you find it, and how do you know? It's a very complicated topic."

We're not about to divulge how her character ultimately defines love, but this is Heaton's own formula: "I think you have to have some kind of chemistry, but I think you do have to have similar values and goals, which will keep you going when the flush of first romance has worn off."

"The Engagement Ring" (8 p.m. Monday), directed by Steven Schachter ("Door to Door"), is about two long-estranged Italian-American wine-making families in Napa Valley, Calif.

Their back story, narrated by an unseen person whose identity is revealed only at the very end, goes like this: Nick Di Cenzo (Tony Lo Bianco) and Alicia Rosa (Lainie Kazan) were playmates as children, then fell in love as teens. While overseas in the Army, Nick mailed Alicia an engagement ring he'd won in a poker game. The ring never reached her, because an earthquake shook the local post office, causing the package to get lodged behind a cabinet.

For 40 years, Nick, a lifelong bachelor, has detested Alicia for never answering his proposal, while she, broken-hearted, has hated him for abandoning her. Ultimately, Alicia married another childhood friend, the good-natured Johnny Anselmi (Chuck Shamata), who'd always adored her.

Cut to the present day: Alicia and Johnny's daughter, Sara (Heaton), and her fianc¨¦, Brian (Hunt), want to negotiate a deal between the feuding families, so they can expand the family's vineyard.

Things get very complicated when the ring resurfaces, and even more so when Nick's funny and handsome nephew Tony (Vincent Spano), a terrific cook and a ladies' man, gets a little too attracted (and attractive) to Sara.

"She's ambitious and she's become very pragmatic, but her roots are in the family vineyard and in family," Heaton says. "She's lost that a little bit, and she's been burned in romance and has taken this kind of no-nonsense approach to everything. Her life gets turned around when romance rears its ugly head. It's confusing to her."

As for the casting of the fiery Tony, Heaton says matter-of-factly that were it not for the character's required ethnic look, she could have seen her blond, British-born husband playing the guy who gets Sara's heart racing.

"He's a very passionate guy," she says of Hunt, a Juilliard graduate, whom she met in New York under fateful circumstances. "I sublet his apartment to be nearer to the guy I was dating. Maybe I should do a movie about that."

On screen, the actors in "Engagement Ring" have a wonderful chemistry, which Heaton attributes to the fact that they were wonderfully simpatico off camera.

"Every time a cast member would join us up in Vancouver, we'd all go out to dinner together," she says. "The movie is so much about food and wine and people coming together. We made sure that we felt we had a history with each other. A lot of wine consumed. Good food."

In 2001, Heaton and Hunt - who played a neighbor named Bill in a few "Raymond" episodes - formed a production company called Four Boys Films (in honor of their four sons). Their other projects include the movie "Amazing Grace," about William Wilberforce, an 18th-century British statesman who tried to end slavery in the empire (currently in development; they're producing), and the documentary "The Bituminous Coal Queens of Pennsylvania," which Hunt wrote and directed (they're now working on getting distribution).

"It's gotten an amazing reception. It's about the 50th anniversary of a little beauty pageant in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania," says Heaton, who has a friend that held that title in 1972. "It's a real homage to small-town America."

Heaton also has a sitcom-development deal with ABC, but she's happy to have a little time off to be a full-time mom as she continues to adjust to life after "Raymond."

"I really feel like we left no stone unturned as far as the show went," Heaton says. "It was easy to leave in that sense. There was no unfinished business. It was a good nine years."