Background and career
Teresa Heinz (born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira; October 5, 1938), also known as Teresa Heinz Kerry, is a Portuguese-American businesswoman and philanthropist. Heinz is the widow of former U.S. Senator John Heinz and the current wife of former U.S. Secretary of State, longtime U.S. Senator, and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Heinz has served as chair of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies.
Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira was born in the city of Lourenço Marques (later renamed Maputo) in the east African colony of Portuguese Mozambique, which later became the nation of Mozambique. Her parents were José Simões-Ferreira Jr., a Portuguese-born oncologist and tropical disease specialist, and Irene Thierstein, a Portuguese and British national. Irene Thierstein's father was the scion of a Swiss-German family living in Malta, and her mother was the half-French, half-Italian daughter of an Alexandrian shipowner who traded with Russia during the Crimean War; both emigrated to Portuguese East Africa. Simões-Ferreira was raised Roman Catholic. In 1960, Simões-Ferreira earned a Bachelor of Arts in Romance Languages and Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1963, she graduated from the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Geneva; after her graduation, she moved to the United States to be an interpreter at the United Nations.
In addition to Portuguese (her native language), Heinz speaks English, Spanish, French, and Italian. She is Roman Catholic.
On February 5, 1966, at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's gothic Heinz Chapel on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, Simões-Ferreira married future U.S. Senator John Heinz, an heir to the H. J. Heinz Company. The couple had three sons, including André and Christopher. In 1971, Teresa Heinz became a naturalized United States citizen. John Heinz died in a plane crash on April 4, 1991. Teresa Heinz inherited a fortune from her husband upon his death.
In 1990, Teresa Heinz met Senator John Kerry at an Earth Day rally. This was the only reported time the two met before John Heinz's death. In 1992, Teresa Heinz met Kerry again, this time at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Heinz was a member of a State Department delegation appointed by then-President George H. W. Bush. Heinz and Kerry were married May 26, 1995, in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Following her marriage to Kerry, Heinz retained the name Teresa Heinz. In May 2004, she said: My legal name is still Teresa Heinz. Teresa Heinz Kerry is my name... for politics. Just so people don't ask me questions about so and so is so and so's wife or this and that. Teresa Heinz is what I've been all my growing-up life, adult life, more than any other name. And it's the name of my boys, you know ?... So, that's my legal name and that's my office name, my Pittsburgh name.
