Tony Danza

Tony Danza, born Anthony Salvatore Iadanza on April 21, 1951, in Brooklyn, New York, is an American actor and retired professional boxer whose career has spanned television, film, and Broadway. His parents, Anna Mary (née Camisa) and Matthew Anthony Iadanza, raised him in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn until the family relocated to Malverne, New York, on Long Island, when Danza was 14. He graduated from Malverne Senior High School in 1968 and went on to earn a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Dubuque in 1972, where he had enrolled on a wrestling scholarship. His paternal grandparents were from Pietrelcina, in the Campania region of Italy, while his mother had immigrated from Campobello di Mazara in the Sicilian province of Trapani. He has a younger brother, Matty Jr., born in 1954, who owns a restaurant in Los Angeles.

Danza's entry into boxing came in 1975 when friends entered him as a joke in the New York City Golden Gloves Tournament. He knocked out his first six opponents, all in the first round, before being knocked out himself in the finals. He subsequently competed professionally in the middleweight division from 1976 to 1979, finishing with a record of eight wins and three losses, with eight knockouts, six of them in the first round. His transition to acting came shortly after his college graduation, when a producer discovered him at a boxing gymnasium in New York City.

Danza first gained widespread recognition playing cab driver and part-time boxer Tony Banta on the television series Taxi, which ran from 1978 to 1983. He followed that with the role of Tony Micelli, a former baseball player working as a housekeeper and single father, on Who's the Boss?, which aired from 1984 to 1992. His work on Who's the Boss? earned him nominations for an Emmy Award and four Golden Globe Awards. In 1988, Danza received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard in recognition of his contributions to the television industry. He won the People's Choice Award for Favorite Male Performer in a New Television Series in 1998 for the 1997 sitcom The Tony Danza Show, a program distinct from his later daytime variety talk show of the same name, which ran from 2004 to 2006. He was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for a 1998 appearance on The Practice.

His film work includes The Hollywood Knights (1980), Going Ape! (1981), She's Out of Control (1989), Angels in the Outfield (1994), in which he played baseball player Mel Clark, Crash (2004), in which he appeared as a character named Fred, and Don Jon (2013), in which he portrayed Jon Martello Sr. In 2018, he starred as Tony Caruso Sr., a disgraced former NYPD officer, in the Netflix series The Good Cop, which was canceled after one season.

Danza's Broadway career spans from 1997 to 2018. He received critical recognition for his performance in the 1999 Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. He also appeared on Broadway in A View From the Bridge and Celebrity Autobiography. From December 19, 2006, to March 11, 2007, he starred as Max Bialystock in The Producers, later reprising the role at the Paris Las Vegas from August 13, 2007, to February 9, 2008. Danza co-starred in the Broadway musical Honeymoon in Vegas, which began a pre-Broadway run at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse on September 26, 2013, alongside Tony nominee Rob McClure, with Gary Griffin directing. In December 2014, he was inducted into the Ride of Fame, with a double-decker sightseeing bus commemorating his role in that production.

During the 2009–2010 school year, Danza co-instructed a tenth-grade English class at Northeast High School in Philadelphia as part of the A&E reality series Teach: Tony Danza, which premiered on October 1, 2010. He subsequently published a book based on that experience, I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High, released in 2012. In 2008, he and his son Marc co-authored Don't Fill Up on the Antipasto: Tony Danza's Father-Son Cookbook. Danza also founded an organization called The Stars of Tomorrow Project, which introduces young adults to Manhattan and to potential careers in the arts.

Danza's first marriage, to Rhonda Yeoman in 1970, produced a son, Marc Anthony, born in January 1971; the couple divorced in 1974. Marc later appeared with his father in two episodes of Taxi, playing a character named Brian Sims. In 1986, Danza married Tracy Robinson; the couple separated in 2006, filed for divorce on March 10, 2011, and the divorce was finalized on February 6, 2013. They have two daughters, Katie and Emily. At one point, Danza was a partner in Alleva Dairy, located on Grand Street in the Little Italy section of Manhattan and promoted as America's oldest cheese shop.