Fighting Glad

From : People
Date : 20/05/2002

The Guardian’s Wendy Moniz loves mixing up with her costars and her hunsband.

As legal-aid lawyer Louisa “Lulu” Archer on CBS’s hit drama The Guardian, Wendy Monze wages war with her co-league Nick Fallin (Played by series star Simon Baker) both in and out-side the courtroom. Lulu chastises Nick for backsliding into booze. Nick yells at her for agreeing to marry a rich doctor he doesn’t believe she loves. Romantic rension ? Definitely “Lulu” says Moniz “is very intense.”

Something never change. In her last big TV role combustible diva Dinah Marler Thorpe in daytime’s Guiding Light from 1995 to 1999－she had affair with her stepson, lied about the parternity of her unborn baby and, in her final scene on the soap, accidentatlly shot her latest lover to death in a fit of fury. “ I was trying to shoot some else.” The 33-year-old Moniz explain with the laugh “Frank(Grillo, the actor who played her unintended target, oil tycoon Hart Jessup) jumps in the way and takes the bullet. And I ride off into the sunset.”

That’s not exactly how worked out in real life. After departing Guiding Light, Moniz and Grillo, 36, wed into in 2000. Grillo, a former fitness instructor, admits that his wife does have a volatile streak. “ When I manipulate her into saying what I want her to say, it’s drive her crazy,” he says with a laugh. “She’s been know to throw a jar of lip gloss at my head and says a few choice words.”

Her colleagues on The Guardian usually see her gentler side. “Wendy loves to giggle, and it has a welcome effect on the cast.” Says costar Alan Rensenberg. “She has a real uninbibited laughter.” Actually, quips Baker, “ I work like a dog, but she seems to be very easygoing about everyting.”

Not always, Growing up, Moniz was obsessed with sports. The younger of two daughters of Bob, a shoe designer, and Billie, a school-teacher, both 52, who divoced when she was 8, she starred in track and field hockey at Durfee High School in the Fall River, Mass. It was Billie, an amateur actress, who encouraged her and sister Dawn, now 36 and a hospital technician, to try community theater. After graduating in 1991 with a B.A. in English from New York’s Siena College, Moniz wed classmate David Birsner, a business major. They settled in Jersey City and Moniz soon landed in a string of more than 50 TV commercials. “ I had a face that sold soap,” she says－not to mention roothpaste, cereal, pain reliever and deodorant.

She and Birsner 35, divorced in 1996, the same year Grillo joined her in the Guiiding Light cast. “He was like this angel who dropped into my life,” she says.” On a Friday the actor who play I late before Frank was abruptly fired. Frank had the role on Monday.”

Friends at first, they moved in together in 1998 and left GL a year late to try their luck in L.A. “We love to work together, but it was time to go,” says Moniz. “ There’s an advenduerous side to me, and I wanted to do different things.”

Today the nest in a tree-bed-room house in the Hollywood Hills where, ”I like to reorganizing drawers,” says Moniz, “Where Frank loves box.” And between Moniz’s series work and Gillo’s movie projects－he played Cameron Ciaz’s ex-beau in The Sweetest Thing and turns up next month as a cop in Minority Report－ the couple often commute back to Manhattan, where the keep an apartment to be closer to Remy, 5, Grillo’s son from previous marriage. “She is a phenomenal mother figure to Remy,” says his dad, inspired, Moniz says, “We’re definitely having children.” Grillo thinks she’ll be a calming influence on them.

“Wendy doesn’t wear her emotions on her sleeve like Lulu does. She is more reserved. Unless,” he says mindful of that flaying lip gloss,” I really tick her off.”