PAPER HEARTS
From headline-grabbing romance to magical moments, the Star played a role in matters of the heart
The Star first brought them together. Years later, they’re still in love,
Dion Duporte and Tammy Fitzgerald-Duporte
They had already looked at rings, so it wasn’t exactly front-page news that Dion Duporte was planning to propose to his girlfriend, Tammy Fitzgerald.
But then, through a twist of fate and a chance encoun- ter, it suddenly became Page-1-worthy — on Valentine’s Day in 2003.
Dion and Tammy met two years earlier, playing cops and robbers during a shooting of the TV show “Doc” in Toronto. Onscreen, Tammy played the cop who cap- tured Dion’s make-believe culprit, but off-screen, she captured his heart.
“It’s always been about the two of us,” Tammy says. After hanging out on various film sets for two years and then dating for six months, both Tammy and Dion knew they had found their person. Dion began taking Tammy to jewelry shops to suss out the perfect ring.
One day, when Dion went to put a deposit down on a ring, the jewelry shop clerk took Dion aside and told him a Toronto Star reporter was looking for a Valen- tine’s Day story. A plan was hatched in which Dion would pop the question to Tammy on the front page of newspaper.
The plan was to go out for brunch and make sure Tammy remained oblivious. “When we went out for brunch, we’d usually throw on some jeans,” Dion says. “I had to coax her to dress up and threw in a couple of other lies.”
The couple made their way to the restaurant where a Star reporter and photographer were lying in wait. Dion made a beeline to a Star newspaper box that had been set up outside the restaurant.
“I said, ‘Hey, look at this crazy guy on the news,’ and Tammy came near and I went down on one knee — the reporter and the photographer jumped out of the bushes and started clicking and everyone started honking around us,” Dion recalls.
“I remember being so shocked as my mouth is hang- ing open here,” Tammy says, pointing to the photo taken on Valentine’s Day, 2003. “The reporter was like, ‘Well, what do you say?’ ”
The couple’s beaming faces were featured in the next day’s paper with the headline: “Stop the presses: she said yes.”
Dion and Tammy got married on Aug. 14, 2003, at Casa Loma during another headline-making event, the blackout that plunged Ontario into darkness.
“I remember being concerned for the world … about the big picture,” Tammy says. Dion points out this was post-9/11, so there was some worry about the cause of the blackout.
Tammy remembers the management at Casa Loma saying, “The minister is here, your groom is here … whether there’s 30 people or a hundred people, you will be getting married today.”
Dion, now 43, smiles shyly as Tammy, 51, calls him a “fantastic husband” and an “amazing father” after 18 years of marriage.
Raven, their six-year old daughter, sits in the middle, taking a break from sipping her orange juice, looking thoroughly grossed out hearing her parent’s love story. She whispers, ever so slightly, into her father’s ear, “Why are you both smiling so much, you’re going to get sick.”
Dion and Tammy are still acting and so is Raven, a star in the making, appearing on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Workin’ Moms” and with her family on “Kim’s Con- venience.”
The family was featured in a Subaru commercial, where they got to re-enact the blackout of their wed- ding. The commercial played in movie theatres across the country at the beginning of screenings of “Black Panther,” something, as a mixed-race family, that made them especially proud.
“We’re a team,” Dion adds, looking lovingly at his wife and daughter.