Just The Facts:

Birthday: December 16

Favorite Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Favorite Impersonation: "Norm MacDonald [Saturday Night Live] doing David Letterman."

On Whether The Heaven’s Gate Suicide Will Be Good or Bad for Black Nike Sneakers: "Bad."

Lozano: "Waiter? Could I get some ketchup? Thank you."
Digest: Did the ketchup make it better?
Lozano: (mouth filled with food) "Mmm."
Digest: Didn’t your mom teach you about ketchup?
Lozano: "What?"
Digest: That you shouldn’t use ketchup, because it covers up the taste of food.
Lozano: "Oh, I’m a real gourmand."

Her love of ketchup aside, Florencia Lozano is having a blast sinking her teeth into her second soap: One Life to Live. You don’t remember her first soap? You had to live in Providence, Rhode Island, to catch it. "I did a lot of local stuff when I was in college," explains Lozano. "We had a spoof soap opera, HOT KEYS. All the characters were extreme. I played a lesbian woman who got involved with a dangerous criminal guy. Just silly, stupid things."

Did these things prepare her for playing Téa Delgado? "Did they ever," she deadpans. "Actually, they did give me the understanding that you have to be open and willing to fly by the seat of your pants. There’s part of you that wants to go, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this, because I’m afraid I’m not going to be as good as I could be.’" Lozano quickly overcame her fear of flying. "It’s the kind of medium where if you stop and think about what you’re doing, you’re dead," she laughs. "If any of us stopped and thought, ‘We have to do this much work today,’ we’d throw ourselves out a window."

Luckily the role of Téa was a comfortable leap. Lozano got a lot of inspiration from her older sisters, Julietta and Paula. Explains Lozano, "My sister, Julietta, is a lawyer - an assistant D.A. in Queens [NY]. She’s got a lot of attitude - the black sheep of the family. In high school, I was the one who was always nice and sunny and friendly. She as the one who had men falling completely in love with her, rejecting them left and right. I’d go around picking up the pieces of these poor guys, saying, ‘I’ll see if I can get her to talk to you.’ "

Still, Téa isn’t all beauty and swagger. "My other sister is a pediatrician - very responsible," continues the actress. "Téa realized that she needed to be very concentrated in order to get out of her circumstances. So what she did was just study. Get all the scholarships, be completely competitive, just always be the best. Paula was very much like that. She got into Harvard at 16 - just completely single-minded about her life."

Lots of the Lozano sisters’ drive to succeed comes from their parents, who emigrated to the United States from Argentina. "Both were born and raised there, married, came over here and were only planning to stay a year," she recounts. "They had very hard beginnings with no money. A real immigrant story, like many others."

A real immigrant story to be sure, but whole her parents’ origins may have been humble, their aspirations were not. "My dad wanted to study architecture at Harvard, and he ended up getting a full scholarship. My mother put him through graduate school as a librarian." Lozano’s mom ended up getting her degree after her husband received his, and she’s now a professor of Spanish at Boston University.

Still, Lozano sees the price that her parents paid to give themselves and their daughters opportunities they wouldn’t have had in Argentina. "I never really saw my parents feeling very at home in this country," she muses. "This is a big part of me and a big part of Téa, probably the biggest part of why I want to play her.

"My parents weren’t completely at home in Argentina, either," she acknowledges. "They were always the most ambitious, the most intellectual, the most artistic and creative. Not to say the rest of my family isn’t, but my mother would complain that her mother would tell her, ‘Don’t stay inside and read books; go outside and play.’

"My father was the best in his architecture class. It can be very frustrating. You can have a degree in architecture in Argentina and never do a day’s work in your life as an architect. The same is true here, but in this country, if you really, really want it, it is there for you somewhere. That’s not true in Argentina. No matter how badly I’d have wanted to act, it wouldn’t have mattered."

Early in life, acting took a backseat to another creative pursuit. "I loved to dance as a kid," Lozano recalls. "I loved ballet a lot, and I’ve loved performing ever since. Being the little kid, I’ve found, is always [playing] the role of the jester, the clown, the one who makes people laugh." After high school in Newton, Massachusetts, Lozano went to Brown University. "I studied comparative literature and did tons of theater," she remembers. "I was drawn to the stage after I decided not to continue dancing."

After graduation, Lozano performed around the country in regional theater. She moved to New York City to work with the Spanish Repertory Theater, and enrolled in the theater program at New York University. Lozano earned a master’s degree and met her boyfriend, fellow actor Christopher Welch. Post - N.Y.U., she landed the role of Téa, and she couldn’t be happier. "I think my parents instilled in me this love of work," she observes. "You need to love what you do, and you need to do it really well." That, she is doing.

Side Article: Love Scenes In the Afternoon
Part of Lozano’s daytime initiation was her first on-camera love scene. Luckily, she was working with Kevin Stapleton (Kevin), one of the nicest guys around. "He’s one of these people who you feel you’re dealing with very up front," she explains. "I felt really safe, like we had a very good friendship on which to do this thing that was a challenge."

Still, even with Stapleton, the steamy scenes were not easy. "When I read the scripts, I was thinking, ‘Now wait a minute, what did I do when I had to do this in theater?’ It’s different when there’s a camera, and it’s on you and it’s very close and you know that it’s going to be property. It’s going to be a thing that’s there. It’s not like theater, where if you weren’t there, it didn’t happen. It’s going to be broadcast to lots of homes! After filming that first day, I went back to my dressing room thinking, ‘Wow, I can’t believe that, I can’t believe I just did that.’ It was very bizarre."