Thaao Penghlis, Actor-Author-Greek Historian-Episode #283

Storybeat with Steve Cuden

I had a blast chatting with the great Australian-born actor and world-class raconteur, Thaao Penghlis, about his career and creative process. If you’re a fan of NBC’s long-running soap opera, Days of Our Lives, then you’re also likely to be a fan of Thaao's. He's had a remarkable four-decade, 1500+ episode run on the show playing both the seductively villainous Count Tony DiMera and the Count’s evil look-a-like impersonator Andre DiMera. Thaao has earned 3 Emmy nominations for Outstanding Leading Actor and a Soap Opera Digest Award for Favorite Return.

Thaao’s infamous dual roles are on top of playing a wide-range of characters on various TV series, movies, and plays, including two other daytime series, General Hospital and Santa Barbara, as well as appearances on the 1980’s prime time reboot of Mission Impossible, in which Thaao played master-of-disguise Nicholas Black. Other notable appearances include the films Slow Dancing in the Big City, Ken Russell’s Altered States, The Bell Jar, Sadat, Sidney Sheldon’s Memories of Midnight, Under Siege, Tribe, and as Dame Edna’s lover, Colonel Godowni in the cult classic Les Patterson Saves the World.

A world traveler and celebrated host of Hollywood dinner parties, Thaao has authored his memoir Places: The Journey of My Days, My Lives, and also the cookbook Seducing Celebrities One Meal at a Time.

Thaao, whose family were Greek immigrants to Australia, has poured his passions for all things Greece into a new podcast, The Lost Treasures, a fantastic detective story-style exploration of Greece’s greatest contribution to the world’s literature, the poet Homer. The Lost Treasures explores the Iliad and the Odyssey through the amazing life of German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who changed history when he discovered the real-life locations and treasures in the epic poems.

Written and narrated by Thaao, the podcast draws on his exclusive access to 60,000 pages of long-hidden documents and diaries.