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After completing a Jesuit prep school education, Rico Simonini earned a bachelor's degree from New York University, along with the John Parkes History Award. As an actor, he has had the privilege of playing leading roles in numerous productions across New York, Los Angeles, and various cities in between. Despite his passion for the dramatic arts, Rico's primary career path has been in cardiovascular medicine, taking him from his Brooklyn upbringing to Bellevue Hospital in New York, then to San Francisco, Boston, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Chicago, and finally Los Angeles. Like Anton Chekhov, Somerset Maugham, and Arthur Conan Doyle before him, Rico balanced his medical profession with his love of theater, pursuing acting wherever his medical career led him.
After being recruited by one of Los Angeles' most prestigious medical centers, his artistic interests flourished as many of his patients encouraged and supported his involvement in film and theater. This encouragement led him to study acting with various mentors, including the Baron Brown Meisner Studios and the Actors Studio, where he was invited by playwrights to workshop and perform new scripts. Rico has enjoyed leading roles in notable plays such as Ricky Roma in *Glengarry Glen Ross*, R.P. McMurphy in *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest*, Daniel Kaffee in *A Few Good Men*, and Joe Pendleton in *Heaven Can Wait*, as well as originating over a dozen roles in dramas by local playwrights—all while maintaining a cardiology practice as distinguished as some of the productions he has participated in.
In 2014, playwright Willard Manus selected Rico to originate the role of Frank Sinatra in *Frank and Ava*, a two-person play developed at the Actors Studio that explored the iconic romance between two extraordinary individuals facing universal struggles: impossible love and lofty dreams that push us to our limits. Based on true events, the story of Sinatra's redemption and resurgence against all odds in the scrutinizing 1950s inspired Rico to adapt it into a screenplay and produce his first feature film, which premiered in 2018 and saw global release in early 2019.
