Education and Personal Life
Lea Salonga is the daughter of Feliciano Genuino Salonga and Ligaya Alcantara Imutan and spent the first six years of her childhood in Angeles City before moving to Manila. She is not related to former Senator Jovito Salonga. She has a brother named Gerard Salonga who is an orchestral conductor.
She studied and finished her secondary education in 1988 at the O. B. Montessori Center in Greenhills, San Juan, Metro Manila, where she was a Bergamo 1 Student and an active participant in school productions. She also attended the University of the Philippines College of Music's extension program aimed at training musically talented children in music and stage movement. A college freshman at the Ateneo de Manila University when she auditioned for Miss Saigon, she later took two courses at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus while in between jobs in New York.
On January 10, 2004, Salonga married Robert Charles Chien, a Chinese-Japanese managing director of an entertainment software company in Los Angeles, California, whom she met while doing Flower Drum Song. They have a daughter, Nicole Beverly, who was born on May 16, 2006, named after Salonga's late mother-in-law, Beverly. She is also an avid video game enthusiast, and has mentioned her love for the hobby in several of her print articles.
On October 15, 2010, Lea Salonga was nominated Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
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